Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When Fan-Fic Sticks the Ending Better then the Original

Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

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Bingo Just Because: Reader’s Choice Even though I’ve already posted the review to fill in my bingo card, I still wanted to do this out of stubbornness, and because I have another book finished that would have probably ended up in this square anyways. So, Any Way the Wind Blows is the finale of the Simon Snow trilogy, the Harry Potter fan-fic originally created for the stand-alone novel Fangirl, which was actually my introduction to the author Rainbow Rowell. I have to admit, in spite […]

Please read this book.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

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CBR Bingo: They/She/He (author and one of the main characters are trans) A book like this makes me thankful for CBR because I get to talk about something that made me so happy. Cemetery Boys is a delight. Yadriel is a teenager in a family of brujx. They want him to follow in their footsteps, but the problem is they’re having some trouble accepting that Yadriel is a boy who wants to become a brujo (rather than a girl who should become a bruja). Determined to prove […]

A Deadly Education- I reread this to prep for the sequel coming out and OMG it totally holds up

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novak

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Lesson One of the Scholomance: Learning has never been this deadly. A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets. There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate… or die! The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And […]

“The three of them sat there – a Ministry agent, a half-djinn, and a cat (likely), staring out past the balcony to the sleeping city they somehow had to find a way to save.”

A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn, #3) by P. Djèlí Clark

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Another book in this world, please! I continue to have a really good time with these audiobooks. I loved Suehyla El-Attar’s narration—even though she mispronounces some words, which would normally make me lose it, but that’s how much I love her voice—it’s so melodious it squashes my inner pedant. We’re back with Fatma el-Sha’arawi—agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities—in this first full novel (the first two were novellas) in this alternate-history, fantastical version of 1912 Cairo. Decades previously, a man named […]

This really wasn’t as bad as I’d heard it would be!

Magic Bites (Kate Daniels, #1) by Ilona Andrews

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I liked this, but it was the least well put together of the books I’ve read from these authors yet. I would have continued on anyway, but I’m glad for the heads up everyone has given me that this series improves. Mostly, I’m fed up with the alpha dick measuring that Curran and his pack have going on. I find it very irritating and I hope he knocks it off. So this is the first book in the much beloved Kate Daniels urban fantasy series, […]

Not a great collection of stories, in my opinion.

A Universe of Wishes by ed. Dhonielle Clayton

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This was a pretty disappointing collection. I only enjoyed a handful of stories. I think the thing that frustrates me the most about YA fantasy and sf recently is that these are the genres of the imagination, and yet so many authors keep telling the same old stories, even, as it turns out, when those stories are populated by a diverse cast of characters, featuring characters of many races, genders, and sexualities. Some of these stories were dull and uninspired, some I thought were just […]



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