Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I wrote the review ages ago, but left the wording in present tense

This Is How I Say I Love You: Little Bunny’s Bedtime Story Told in English and Chinese by Dayong Gan

The Most Beautiful Painting: Discover the Mystery of Chinese Script (English and Mandarin Chinese Edition) by Yajuan Lu and Jian Li

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As a kid I remember checking out several folktale books from the school library. As an adult I learned to appreciate them in a way I never could have as a kid. One thing was how similar stories can pop up in different cultures, or how stories can be adapted for another setting. The other is you can learn about a country as well. And while I am not sure if the two books in this review will fit any of the above categories, or […]

“Writing gives you the power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much”

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

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Dark Corner Selection: March 2026 In a different version of 16th-century Spain, young Luzia Cortado works grudgingly as a scullery maid for the miserable and petty Doña Valentina. Luzia can use what she calls “small magics” to make her life easier. She can mend seams, multiply the groceries, unburn bread or reassemble broken things. She performs these little spells, learned from generations of her Jewish ancestors, by singing quietly. Luzia is a convert; she dutifully goes to Mass and hides any traces of her Jewish […]

a novella I wish were a novel, but then again when don’t I

The Black God's Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

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This is quite a short novella and therefore there’s quite a bit of rushing to get to the plot that there is. But if the worst that I have to complain about is some deus ex machina nuns, I think we’re overall pretty fine. Did not realize that there was more fiction in this vein by Clark, I’ve read some of his pretty awesome punk sci-fi (?). There are too many authors to keep track of everyone’s new work– the tech people should stop trying […]

“She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.”

The Magician's Daughter by H. G. Parry

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Biddy lives on a small, magically isolated island off the coast of Ireland with her guardian/foster father, Rowan, and his familiar, the rabbit Hutchincroft. No one who doesn’t know that it’s there can find it. While Biddy has no magic of her own, she has grown up with it all around her. Yet magic is fading in the outside world, and far too often, Rowan has to leave Biddy to go to the mainland in bird form to find some small reserves of it. She […]

I agree; The Tempest is a horrible play to perform on an ocean voyage.

A Sea Change: A Shadowhunters Novella by Cassandra Clare

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Most people on their travels are looking for something; either to run towards, or as an option to go run from their troubles to. But not Shadowhunter (bisexual, recovering alcoholic, and general mess) Matthew Fairchild and his loyal (and here mostly when the plot requires him) golden retriever, Oscar Wilde. No. Matthew is searching for himself aboard the Majestic, a grand 19th century ocean liner sailing from Greece to Constantinople, where he’s meeting his parabatai James Herondale, and James’s wife Cordelia.  (Luckily it’s the Black […]

“Except, in this fairy tale, the maiden has blood on her hands.”

One Dark Window: Book One of the Shepherd King by Rachel Gillig

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“There once was a girl clever and good, who tarried in shadow in the depths of the wood. There also was a king – a shepherd by his crook, who reigned over magic and wrote the old book. The two were together, so the two were the same…The girl, the King…and the monster they became.” Elspeth Spindle, a young, fiery-tempered, average height for a Romantasy heroine, striking beauty with a complicated familial history, lives in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunders (no, I don’t understand […]



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