Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Old Magic, Old Story Style

Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories by Diana Wynne Jones

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One of the things I always find fascinating about reading short story collections by authors who’ve had a very long career is to see the growth and change of their style over time. Unexpected Magic by Diana Wynne Jones is no exception. The collection has stories published from throughout her career, from as early as the 1960s to the early 2000s. Not in any particular order, the stories range from speculative tales of authors so lost in their work it becomes real to cats telling their […]

Saints! Soldiers! Sorcery! Swords! Swooning!

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

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It’s time for me to FINNALY go all-in on some good old fashioned FAN TA SY. Normally, these are the sort of books that I pick up in the bookstore, give a “hmm” at the cover, and keep walking. I’ve never been great at immersing myself in fantasy worlds outside of the big-names; I just don’t have a memory for the complex lore and histories of most fantasy epics. When I open up a book and it starts with breakdowns of family names and maps […]

A Sugar-Coated World I’d Like to Live In

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

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At first, I thought this book was trying to be Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children with an isolated orphanage housing magical children. But as I joined Linus, the case worker from the bureaucratic Department in Charge of Magical Youth, on a special “level 4” mission to investigate the most unusual of the unusual, I discovered a charming same-sex love story (!). Arthur, the headmaster of the “orphanage” (a euphemism since none of the inhuman children are ever adopted) is a soft-spoken gentleman who cares […]

Alternative to What?

Alternative War by Debora Godfrey and Bob Brown, Editors

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This collection of short stories focuses on a war theme, but they aren’t all about battles. They also cover the alternatives to war—peace and those striving for peace. I don’t review the poetry (I don’t understand it well enough to judge) or the one-pagers. I also skipped my story in this collection. With “The Gelding” by Jim Wright, the anthology starts with a bang. In the far distant future, machines have destroyed Earth and almost all but the three hundred humans in cryo-sleep in a […]

Some of Tolkien’s lesser known works.

Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien

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I have owned a copy of this book since before I was on Goodreads, and it’s been on my “TBR” even longer than that. (I no longer remember how I used to keep track of books I wanted to read before Goodreads.) It was also one of the first books I pulled out of my TBR Jar for 2022, and really, it was about time. And it was fun! A little weird, a little nonsensical (and whimsical), but fun. There are two short stories in […]

Goose Girl Redux

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen

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“I think there are lives that make it easy to be good. Or what most people call good. When you have wealth, status, family, it’s easy to be a saint, it costs you nothing. I can’t say if you’re a good person or not. But the more I know of you, the more I understand that the world keeps making you choose between survival and martyrdom. No one should fault you for wanting to live.” Vanya is the goddaughter of Death and Fortune, but that […]



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