Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Adding politics to fairy tales makes everything more depressing

Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

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This is a grim take on Cinderella.  In this society, all girls (of a certain class, actual servants and peasants need not apply) must present themselves at the Royal Ball to hopefully be selected as a bride, as Cinderella was 200 years before. But this is not a happy fairy tale.  Women are treated as second class citizens, or worse, and are completely controlled by their husbands.  Women have no choice in their husbands – they are “claimed” at the ball by whoever wants them.  […]

“you can play as a dog, a boot, or a trebuchet”

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

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Man, I really wish Monopoly (oh wait- World Domination) had a trebuchet. I’m usually the shoe, but I would LOVE to be a trebuchet. It has been perpetually gray here in New Hampshire for the last…oh jeez, three weeks? I needed something familiar to hunker down with while waiting for the sun to return, and while shuffling around my house I remembered LittlePlat‘s recent Nimona review. A great review about a great book? Just the spark I needed! Thank you, LittlePlat, and thank you to […]

Not as enjoyable as I hoped

The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness Book 2) by Joe Abercrombie

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I bought my first book by Joe Abercrombie by mistake. I did not mean to click the ‘buy it now’ button, but I did, and I eventually read and thoroughly enjoyed The Blade Itself – Book one of the First Law Trilogy. I went on to devour the other two books of that trilogy, then consumed the whole Shattered Sea Trilogy in a month. I was excited to learn that Abercrombie was returning to the First Law world with another trilogy – The Age of Madness. The first book of […]

What’s the plural of apocalypse?

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

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So insanely readable that I devoured it in a day, The Fifth Season is the fantastic opener to a really  interesting trilogy that’s a dystopian mix of sci fi and fantasy – I am ridiculously excited to get my hands on the next part. In a world where the apocalypse has already happened – quite a few times, actually – and is littered the ruins of the dead civilisations that came before them, those that remain know that each geological incident could preface the next […]

“The whole place had the look of a picked-at-body. But damn! What a beautiful corpse.”

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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This book has received so much hype and lived up to every bit of praise it has received!  Thank you, Cannonballers for putting this on my radar and keeping it there.  I’m almost at a loss to review Gideon the Ninth since so many of y’all have done so already.  Here is a list of things that I enjoyed immensely, in no particular order: 1 – Muir’s word choices.  It’s delightful to be confronted with an unfamiliar word and Muir did it more in this […]

Darling it’s better down where it’s wetter.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

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  I listened to this book via the podcast Phoebe Reads a Mystery which is voiced by Phoebe Judge of the famed Criminal Podcast. She reads one to two chapters a day of a classic mystery (though I’m not sure if this most recent selection qualifies). This book follows a reluctant passenger aboard the Nautilus, a submarine which must have seemed truly fantastical the time of the book’s 1869 publication, and it’s secretive Captain Nemo. French oceanographer Pierre Aronnax has, along with his faithful servant […]



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