Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A promising start to a new series

King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo

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Spoiler warning! While this is the start of a new series, it does follow on directly from Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy and her Six of Crows duology. While you will understand the plot fine if you haven’t read the previous books, you WILL be spoiled for events in both series. Spoilers may also appear in this review. Proceed at your own risk. From Goodreads, because I finished the audiobook two months ago (sigh): Nikolai Lantsov has always had a gift for the impossible. No one knows what he endured in […]

Better on a Re-Read

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

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A year ago, I binge read the first three books in the Earthsea Cycle. A Wizard of Earthsea came in a three-way tie for my favorite read of 2018. Tombs of Atuan was my least favorite of the three. I felt like it was too fascinated with the labyrinthian tombs and the ending took too much of the lead character’s agency that she had built. Anyway, I decided to go back to the Cycle and read Tehanu, which is book four. When I discovered it would include the lead from […]

Kind regards, OG

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

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I’ve never seen Phantom of the Opera on stage or as a filmed performance, but I have seen the Lon Cheney film of this novel. And that film, like this novel, is an accidentally hilarious (though very entertaining!) melodrama. But at the same time, it’s drama does not fare too terribly well in 2019 awareness of gender relations, that’s for sure. So here’s what’s pretty funny: The Phantom calls himself in my translation as the “Opera Ghost” and signs all his notes as “OG”. He […]

Watered Down Everything

Fog Season by Patrice Sarath

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Just from the reading, I have a hard time telling whether or not Fog Season is YA or not. It really seems more YA but that’s not where I remember finding it in the bookstore. The case for YA is that it’s very character driven, the few adults present are villains, servants, or non-presences like mom Alinesse and dad Brevart. Also, the presence of romance, more a factor in this book than the first, is reasonably PG. The violence seems to be a bit less […]

A pretty good follow up to Sorcerer to the Crown, even if I did predict everything.

The True Queen (Sorcerer Royal, #2) by Zen Cho

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First of all, on the one hand this was a good follow up to Sorcerer to the Crown, which took pretty much everyone by surprise several years ago. It was like a little breath of fresh air, a light fantasy full of people of color in a setting people of color don’t normally inhabit in fiction (Regency England), taking on existing power structures and being all clever and wonderful. This book continues that tradition (this time with an emphasis on kindness and identity). At the […]

Wow. Not in a Good Way.

Storm Cursed by Patricia Briggs

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So. I initially was just going to give this three stars and move along. However, after thinking it through this morning, this book honestly doesn’t deserve 3 stars (okay). This book’s pacing was off, there was about zero character development, too much repetition, and I think at one point I even said to myself that this book was just filler. It’s a book to bridge to the next Alpha/Omega book or the next Mercy Thompson. The book synopsis on this one sounded so bad ass […]



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