Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I must ask to strain an imagination you have no right to exercise.

The Marvelous Land of Oz by L Frank Baum

by Leave a Comment

Book 2! This is book two of the Oz series by L Frank Baum. It’s the direct sequel to the Wizard of Oz in that it takes place about half a generation after the events of that book and returns to the world left when Dorothy left. Dorothy is now a kind of mythic figure, and I don’t actually know these books well, so I don’t know if she’ll be back. Instead, we are given Tip, a boy who lives with the witch Mombie. Tip […]

The truth is, men make terrible pigs

Circe by Madeline Miller

by Leave a Comment

I knew almost nothing of Circe before going into this. I remembered that she was in The Odyssey, and that Odysseus lived on her island for a time, but nothing more than that. She is the daughter of Helios, and is an unremarkable and naive nymph. Shunned by her siblings and dismissed by her parents, she finally discovers that her power lies in witchcraft. Because of this, and for how she uses it, she is exiled for eternity by her father to an uninhabited island. […]

Insane, desperate rage twisted Tanis’s face.

Dragons of Winter Night by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Dragon of Springs Dawing by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

by 1 Comment

When I was a kid we ordered a subscription to Nintendo Power. This would have been something like 1990. This was a big coups in my family as it was always seen as a little bit superfluous to play Nintendo as much as we did….or Sega Genesis…or etc etc. Although I do recall my mom being on the phone with Nintendo customer support to figure out why our console was dying and the various, inevitably futile ways in which we worked against the dying of […]

It’s like you’re a mirror/my mirror staring back at me/oooooh!

Otherbound by Duyvis, Corrine

by Leave a Comment

(Blame “It’s Gonna Be May” on my Timberlake quote) Nolan Santiago suffers from frequent blackouts. His family has been desperate to find the medication that will ease his daily and frequent epileptic fits. But the reason nothing is working is because Nolan isn’t having fits. When Nolan closes his eyes – even when he merely blinks – he is in another world, and in another life. Amara has been a servant on the run for most of her life. She was pulled from the palace […]

A Story in Seven Parts

Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick

by Leave a Comment

I can’t remember where I heard about this book, but it was on my to-read list on my account with the library, and since it was there I figured why not! And this was an interesting experience of a book for sure. I was referring to it as back-half-Cloud-Altas but that’s not quite right… Midwinterblood is essentially a series of seven little vignettes or short stories that are all connected in some way, and all take place on the same small island with its many […]

Regressive but with a veneer of ‘Girl Power!’

The School for Good and Evil: A Crystal Of Time by Soman Chainani

by Leave a Comment

This is the fifth book in the School for Good and Evil  Series. If you haven’t read the others, I don’t suggest you start here. If you have read the others and found the plot to be messy and the story unnecessarily prolonged, you won’t find much different in this book. I have tried to like this series. My daughter is thirteen years old, and she has read them all. We read a lot of older kid and YA series together. She is very much like […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo