Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About stegolily

CBR17 Participant
CBR18 Participant
CBR18 Levels

Stego Lily is a mom, educator, and sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast. When she isn't reading, she enjoys playing the piano, gardening, and chasing after her two chaos gremlins.

stegolily's Reviews:

KKK Demon Hunters

Ring Shout by P. Djeli Clark

by 1 Comment

Ring Shout is set in 1915 Georgia, where Maryse Boudreaux and her friends Chef and Sadie work as bootleggers by day, and demon hunters by night. But unlike their K-pop counterparts, this trio of demon hunters is after Ku Kluxes: terrifying, pointy-headed monsters that fill the ranks of the KKK alongside regular (also monstrous) Klansmen. Ku Kluxes feed on hate, and in Jim Crow-era Georgia, there is plenty of that to go around.  But with Chef’s explosives expertise, Sadie’s sharpshooting abilities, and Maryse’s magical sword, […]

“He who learns must suffer.”

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

by Leave a Comment

Ordinary Grace is a coming-of-age-novel about a thirteen year-old boy named Frank living in a small town in Minnesota in 1961. It covers the events of a summer marked by tragedy, in the form of accidents, suicide, and (possibly) murder. Frank’s father is the local minister, so he gets a front row seat to all of the heartbreak and pain in the community. Throughout the book, Frank comes face-to-face with the realities of life and death, and that terrible understanding that maybe the adults in his […]

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches.”

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

by Leave a Comment

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work has been hit-or-miss for me in the past. I liked Gods of Jade and Shadow, loved Mexican Gothic, but didn’t much care for The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. I’m happy to report though, that I very much enjoyed The Bewitching. This is a gothic horror novel, following three young women across three different timelines. The main storyline follows Minerva, a graduate student in the 1990s, who is writing a graduate thesis about obscure horror novelist Beatrice Tremblay. The second timeline follows Minerva’s great-grandmother Alba as a young […]

Mid-April Review roundup

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

by 1 Comment

It’s time for another mega-post reviewing a bunch of books that have nothing in common with each other! Lousie Erdrich’s The Mighty Red was so achingly beautiful that when I finished it, I got genuinely worried that I would never find a book this good again. Set in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, it follows two farming families during the 2008 financial crisis. There’s a local tragedy, a love triangle, and a scandalous crime, but the centerpiece of the book is Erdrich’s prose. She […]

“Hell is a campus.”

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

by 2 Comments

What do you do when your graduate advisor dies, but you still need a letter of recommendation? Apparently, you travel to Hell to retrieve his soul and his recommendation along with it. Rivals Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are Cambridge graduate students studying Magick. When a spell gone awry kills their advisor, Professor Grimes, they decide they have no choice but to journey to the underworld to save their academic careers. What follows reads like an homage to Dante’s Inferno, if Dante had been a […]

Catching up with three very different books

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party by Edward Dolnick

Pony Confidential by Christina Lynch

by 6 Comments

I have fallen behind on my reviews over the last few weeks, so I’m cramming the last three books I read into one review in order to catch up. These books are about as tonally different from each other as it is possible to be, so expect some whiplash. Martyr tells the story of Cyrus, an Iranian-American poet and recovering addict. Decades ago, his mother died when the plane she was on was mistakenly shot down by the United States Army. Trying to find meaning […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo