Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Witches and Demons missing a little magic

Witch King by Martha Wells

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I wanted to like Witch King so much more than I did. It’s got some good characters (maybe a few too many though), good premise, but the pacing and sense of time are so off. Demon prince and witch pal awake to find a mage trying to syphon the demon’s magic (doesn’t go well for the mage) and then go on a quest to 1) find out how/why they were trapped (and for how long), and 2) find the witch’s spouse. Demons, including Kai, are […]

Are you ready to think about tomorrow?” he asked.

The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond

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I do love a heist, and Gwenda Bond’s The Frame-Up is a good story wrapped around a heist. I think it’s a standalone, but I would not say no to more of this crew doing their version of a heist with magic in the future. Dani Poissant has been working solo in the decade since she turned her art thief mother in to the FBI. She’s a Robin Hood style grifter – targeting bad people, taking their money, and giving a big chunk of it to […]

The Whispering Dark Has an Interesting Concept, but Poor Execution

The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew

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How many times can a girl refer to herself as glass? How many times can a young man be compared to a blade of some kind? How many SAT words can you use when standard vocabulary would normally suffice? The Whispering Dark has a neat idea behind it – a Deaf girl can hear the dead – but the execution misses the mark, and badly. Delaney Meyers-Petrov (and you know her full name because various characters repeat it over and over throughout the course of […]

New Old Beginnings

The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie

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Hmmm. I dunno about this one. I mean, it’s as well-written as anything else Abercrombie has done. It moves well, the plotting’s good. But as it is the finale of a second trilogy so closely tied to the first, it leads me to have to consider everything in bulk. The problem I have with the Age of Madness trilogy was realized about halfway through this one: I don’t care about most of these characters. Oreo and Savine are fun, I guess. Vick is somewhat interesting. […]

Gotta let it burn

So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole

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With Cait Corrain back in the news, figured it was really time for me to write this review already! For those less terminally online, our story didn’t start in December but that is when it become a scandal and Booktwitter found out that a debut author scheduled for a 2024 release with some decent positive buzz had been review bombing fellow 2024 YA debuts with fake Goodreads accounts while giving her own book positive reviews (which is one of the reasons it caught the attention […]

Cute, charming, harmless fun

Cosplay and Confrontation by Sarah Zane

Reindeer Games (Ace's Wild Book 6) by N.R. Walker

A Doctor’s Touch: An Erotic Queer Novella (Ram Skin Book 1) by A.A. Fairview

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Cosplay and Confrontation By Sarah Zane Gwen has screwed up everything. She is supposed to be one of the headliners at the Portland’s biggest LARP/cosplay convention. However, after breaking up with her boyfriend Artie and running away to San Francisco to live with her new “boyfriend,” none of her former friends will even speak to her. She desperately wants to explain what happened, but that would mean admitting the reason why she broke up with Artie. Lanie cannot believe she trusted Gwen. The three of […]



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