Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

When Fairies want your head and you just want to go home

Sparrowhawk (Books 1 to 5) by Delilah S. Dawson

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If Alice in Wonderland and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Fight Club and One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest got together, this might be the results. Sparrowhawk (Books 1 to 5) is one “wild, crazy, disturbing, odd, funny, brightly light and dark all at once, and our train is flying off the tracks” ride. Delilah S. Dawson (even their name is beautiful and mysterious and slightly creepy) created a modern Alice in Wonderland, where “Alice” grows wings, uses a big a$$ swords, kills monsters and […]

Superficially, it’s a comedy fantasy with pirates and otters but underneath is so much more

The Princess Beard by Delilah S. Dawson, Kevin Hearne

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The Princess Beard is the third book in Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne’s “Tales of Pell” series.  Once again they have me nearly doubled over with laughter while also appreciating their pro LGBTQ+, feminist, socially conscious agenda and sly pokes at the establishment.  Each of the three books this duo have written together can stand alone and be read individually.  However, the world is much richer if you have read the other books.  And as they are hysterically funny, I highly suggest reading all […]

Endings and beginnings

The Tower of Swallows: A Novel of the Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski

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Throughout the Witcher series, the message has been that something big is coming; the world will end and a new world will dawn, and Ciri, the child of the Elder Blood, will help bring this about. Geralt frequently states that he feels like something in him is changing as well, that something is coming to an end, and in this fourth novel (sixth book) of the Witcher series, the reader gets a sense of what he means. Geralt’s schtick has always been that, as a […]

An impossible job, near certain death, terrible odds…I love a good heist!

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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Six of Crows was recommended to me before I had heard of the Grishaverse.  After receiving it as a gift in the 2018 Cannonball gift exchange, I discovered that it was part of a larger world setting and I should probably read the preceding trilogy first.  It took me a while to get around to the “Shadow and Bone” trilogy and then another length of time to get back to Six of Crows.  I’m glad I waited and read the trilogy first, otherwise, the world […]

“Live fast. Die young. Bad girls do it well.”

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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  I’m at a loss as to how to describe this book. It’s part science fiction, part fantasy, part locked-room mystery and that really only scratches the surface. Gideon the Ninth has gotten a LOT of hype in the book community and it absolutely lives up to it in my opinion.  I’ve already preordered the sequel, Harrow the Ninth (number 2 of a trilogy) from my book store. Gideon is an extremely reluctant servant of the Ninth House. At the beginning of the book we find […]

Somehow this all seems familiar

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry

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I don’t remember how I heard about The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, but I saw it on a library shelf not long after I heard about it, so of course I had to check it out (pun intended). The story concentrates on two brothers, Rob the older from whose perspective the story comes, and Charley the younger, genius of the sort who finished a PhD and publishes an academic book on Dickens at the age of nineteen. There is the usual kind of brotherly […]



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