Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

She Grows On You

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

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More comfort reads! More comfort reads! Nimona is a real favourite of mine. Before Noelle Stevenson saw success with the She-Ra series, she was writing Nimona—an absolutely glorious webcomic-turned actual-comic. The setting of Nimona isn’t actually too far divorced from what we see in She-Ra: rather high fantasy on the surface, with a lot of nerdy science and magi-tech elements scattered throughout. We have heroic and villainous knights in shining armour with jousting sticks but said knights also have high-tech research labs where they develop […]

Steampunk Cairo!

A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djeli Clark

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I only recently became aware of award-winning author P. Djeli Clark, although he has been writing sci-fi/fantasy novellas and novels for at least 5 years. Novels that involve djinn are especially interesting to me, and when a couple of different folks (including our own Emmalita) mentioned Clark within days of each other, I decided to check him out and I downloaded EVERYTHING!! These first two offerings feature not just djinn and magical entities but also Cairene investigators whose backstories and interactions will, I hope, be […]

Please read me into this book

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

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Twelve-year-old Meggie’s dad Mo is a book doctor. She supposes the rest of the world calls him a “bookbinder,” but to her he’s a book doctor. He takes well-loved, well-worn, well-wrecked books and carefully restores them to even better than before. He’s got a magic touch, and every bookseller in Europe knows it. Meggie has spent her life traveling with him from bookshop to bookshop, repairing books. So she knows that he doesn’t just travel all over for the sake of it. There’s something he’s […]

A Plague — and a Madman in a Masquerade

Physicians of Vilnoc by Lois McMaster Bujold

Masquerade in Lodi by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Blink and you miss ‘em… Lois McMaster Bujold has released two Penric and Desdemona novellas in the past year when I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t know how these releases keep on passing me by, I really don’t. Usually, these novellas are mostly light-hearted fun, but the first one, The Physicians of Vilnoc, might be a little uncomfortably timely, as it revolves around a plague. Looking at the publication dates, I don’t think Bujold did this on purpose, as she would have started writing this […]

A strong heroine, political intrigue, and magic? Yup, it’s YA fantasy time!

The Frozen Crown by Greta Kelly

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I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from this fantasy debut, but I enjoyed it immensely. While this book doesn’t really do anything new with the various standard fantasy bits and pieces, it’s an engrossing and fast-paced read. As a warning, this is the first book in a duology, and it does have a heck of a cliffhanger. Askia’s cousin has killed her grandfather the king, stolen the throne, and basically made Seravesh into a vassal state of the Roven empire. Askia and her band […]

When the annoying one of the hero/friend/rival pair is positioned to win

Black Clover vol 22 by Yuki Tabata

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Besides comfort reading, I sometimes turn to graphic novels and manga for some brain relief or palate cleansing when also reading a book that is either much longer or more complicated; in this case, that would be an 1100+ page sci-fi/ speculative fiction novel (review to come in hopefully a week or so). I’ve been following the Black Clover series a while, and I’m about 2 or 3 volumes behind the published in English volumes, but whatever. The basic gist of the series is pretty […]



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