Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Bardugo can do so much better than this entire debut trilogy.

Siege and Storm (The Grisha Trilogy, #2) by Leigh Bardugo

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Sometimes a good author just gets stuck telling a mediocre story, and that’s what you have here. I know she can do so much better than this. So, let’s go over the good thing before I get to the bad: Nikolai. The second son of the King of Ravka, aka SPOILERS the privateer Sturmhond END SPOILERS. That character stole every scene he was in, and breathed life into the pretty much dead on arrival story. He was the lone bright spot in what was otherwise a […]

Two humans and a talking dog are chased around Europe for three months, intermittently pausing to give one of them tattoos.

Trapped (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #5) by Kevin Hearne

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Protagonists being chased from place to place while antagonist nearly always has one-up on them has never been a favorite plot of mine, so this book wasn’t ever going to be my favorite in the series, but surprisingly it does work better than I thought it would. Maybe because it’s so short, less than 300 pages, or maybe because I’m already invested in the characters. The central plot here is that after twelve years of secret training, because everyone (mostly everyone) believed the druid Atticus […]

The contemporary voice worked for me

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Like most of us, all I knew about Gideon the Ninth going into it was “lesbian necromancers in space” and yeah, that’s not a bad four-word description. It’s accurate but it still doesn’t fully capture the book. Gideon manages complex characters, way too many names, and an anachronistic voice that works where it really shouldn’t. I’ve already put myself in line for the sequel and it isn’t even released until next June. A lot of world building went into this one. Effectively there are nine houses representing nine […]

My mother was her most lively when she talked about this small bottle.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

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By the author of The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris, Revenge, The Diving Pool, etc, this is a 1994 dystopian novel which is compared to Nineteen Eighty Four all over the cover, but is more clearly similar to Fahrenheit 451 for me. The method of control in this island society is the disappearing of words and memories associated with objects, concepts, people, and even professions. Our narrator is a novelist living on the island who is positioned uniquely because her father, an ornithologist, was one of the society’s first […]

Victorian fantasy horror mystery romance. PSA: Currently $0.99 on Kindle.

The Magpie Lord (A Charm of Magpies, #1) by K.J. Charles

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Really liked this! You can barely tell that this was her first book. It was pretty short, and for the most part that was fine, but there were parts where she sums up conversations instead of showing them, where I wanted her to actually show them. There’s a significant story that Crane tells Stephen about how he got his tattoos, and we don’t get to hear it at all! She also glossed over their initial bonding and friendship. But other than that, this was actually […]

Just a real bummer here, as this first trilogy sputters to a close.

Fire Study (Study, #3) by Maria V. Snyder

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What a bummer of a book. In more than one way! It’s a bummer in that I didn’t like it and it didn’t live up to how good the first one was, and the second to an extent as well. And a bummer because seemingly nothing good ever happens to these characters, only bad things, horrible things, and everyone spends the whole book arguing basically. The plot was also messy as hell. It supposedly focuses on Yelena and Leif, along with Marrok, Moon Man and […]



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