Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


About stegolily

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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:

“Hell is a campus.”

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

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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

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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 […]

Charming, but incomplete

The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, Vol.1 by Beth Brower

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This was a book club read that I probably wouldn’t have read on my own, if only because it’s part of a series with 8 books in it, and that is too large a commitment for me. However, it was charming and witty, and I’m glad I read it. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion is written in the form of fictional diary entries by the titular characters. Set in London at some time in the 19th century, it tells the story of twenty-year-old […]

“The greatest lie that humans ever told is that the earth is ours, and at our disposal.”

Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures by Katherine Rundell

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“We live in a world of such marvels. We should wake up in the morning and as we put on our trousers, we should remember the seahorse, and we should scream with awe and not stop screaming until we fall asleep, and the same the next day and the next. Each single seahorse contains enough wonder to knock the whole of humanity off its feet, if we would but pay attention.” Did you know that Greenland sharks can live for five hundred years? Or that […]

“What is kingship? Unfair power used against other men.”

The Pretender by Jo Harkin

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John Collan’s world has just been turned upside down. The nine year-old has just learned that he is not actually a peasant boy, son of a dairy farmer. Rather, he is told that he is in fact Edward, Earl of Warwick, and that he is expected to overthrow Henry VII, the new Tudor King, and assume the throne. John is whisked away to Oxford, where he assumes the name Lambert Simnel and begins his aristocratic education. The ensuing years take him to Burgundy and then […]

Who is this Jesus guy, anyway?

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time by Marcus J. Borg

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In “Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time,” Marcus J. Borg starts out by talking about how the images Christians have of Jesus influence the way they live their faith. Unfortunately, according to Borg, many of the images our culture has accumulated of Jesus are not authentic to who he really was. Drawing on research from the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars dedicated to determining the historicity of events and statements in the gospel, Borg attempts to create a picture of Jesus that more […]



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