Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Whichever story you believe, my mother, Chang’e, became immortal. As did I.”

Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan

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A child of the Moon Goddess, and an immortal herself,  Xingyin grows up on the moon, with just her mother & their family servant/long time companion. For the most part, the three of them are happy, if isolated. Xingyin senses a grief in her mother that she can’t quite explain, and within herself she feels a growing sense to reach out … for something more. She can’t label it, and her mother has warned her against reaching for it, but the pull towards that other […]

Cool cover, meh book

Luminous by Mara Rutherford

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Stories about teens learning to love their magic always are one of my favorite YA fantasy tropes, and that cover is so pretty. Unfortunately, the rest of the book didn’t quite live up to it. “Magic—especially the kind people wielded deliberately—was as much of a mystery to me as the world outside Sylvan.” Liora has spent most of her life in hiding in her quiet village. After a tragedy when she was a child, she started displaying signs of magic: her skin glows, especially when […]

I’m so, so glad I got back into Robin Hobb’s books. Totally worth it.

Fool's Errand (The Tawny Man, #1) by Robin Hobb

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It’s been a few weeks now* and I’m still trying to wrap my head around how much this book ensorcelled me, and how weird that felt after my (mostly) negative experience with the first Fitz trilogy a handful of years back. I suppose I should have seen this coming, though, with how much I loved The Liveship Traders, but a lot of things I didn’t like about the first Fitz trilogy were actually addressed here, and I’m sure there’s a bit of me in this […]

Who Wears the Black Hat could be a Good Mystery to Solve

Jack Flash and the Faerie Case Files, volume 3 by Yu Godai, Mako Oikawa, Kore Yamazaki

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Now that we’re firmly in original story territory, Jack Flash and the Faerie Case Files volume 3 spends a lot of time setting up what could be a really interesting suspenseful adventure. There is a mysterious man in a black hat who seems to be involved in pushing a drug allowing humans to temporarily see magic and its users might be trying to herd or lure Jack and Larry into tracking him through a series of crimes connected by this drug. While the man himself […]

Hard to explain this book but I have tried to recommend it!

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

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I will admit that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has been a bit of white whale for me for a while–it’s just hard for me to get into the book, even though I want to read it and I want to like it! Plus it was gifted to me by a friend, which means I feel bad for not reading it? (side bar: giving books as gifts is so fraught) So you can imagine my trepidation to try another of Clarke’s works, even though this […]

Two books I Did Not Like

Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

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Better Than the Movies One star because the main character has a genuinely touching conflict she’s trying to resolve. One star because the main romance is cute if visible from a billion billion miles away. Minus all the other ones for the multiple toxic tropes that we have to wade through which make literally zero sense in the context of the book. Iron Widow UGH felt so bad but this book just didn’t do it for me at all. It started out promising–Zhao’s writing style […]



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