Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Featured Review Archive

These reviews, which were promoted in CBR social media, on our homepage, and in Pajiba Love, appear below by review publication date, not by date featured.

 

don’t understand how I don’t already have a review for this but okay

Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher

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If you’re anything like me and already several books deep into The Saint of Steel and the entire world of the White Rat, you’re not here to decide whether or not to read this book—you’re here to bemoan the wait for the next one. This book offers all the reasons we’ve grown to love this world: precious paladins are once again utterly precious, all of them “good boys” (even the women) (good girls are a different breed). They’re tough but tender, deeply loyal, and need to be […]

Historical Fiction meets True Crime

The Mesmerist by Caroline Woods

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The Mesmerist by Caroline Woods is captivating historical fiction based on a real place in Minneapolis, The Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers, as well as on a true crime story that transpired in the area in 1894. The story revolves around three women. The mysterious Faith, a traumatized young woman who, judging by her dress, worked as a “sporting woman” in a brothel. She does not seem to speak, but she does come with a suspiciously large amount of money on her person. Abby Mendenhall, […]

“a hobbastyu was both a turbulent sea and a great difficulty, or dilemma”

Clear by Carys Davies

by 1 Comment

The idea of a historical fiction novel that sends you repeatedly running to Wikipedia usually sounds like a hefty tome, some kind of sweeping epic like Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. But Carys Davies’s Clear is a tiny little jewel box of a novel, not even 200 pages long (or just a hair over three hours for the audiobook I listened to). But Davies takes you into the Scottish clearances, the 1843 schism in the Scottish Presbyterian church, Scots dialect, the dying Norse-derived languages of the northernmost […]

Greek gods + The Hunger Games, but so much worse

Blood of Hercules by Jasmine Mas

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I am in a bit of a slump, and this seemed passably interesting. The cover is pretty and Hoopla tells me it’s popular? Set in the future, which, it must be said, sucks. Titans have emerged (from where?) to murder humanity, prompting Spartans (collective name for Greek Olympians) to reveal themselves after millennia in hiding in order to dispatch them. Spartans—you and I know them as Olympians-have their own internal conflict which forces the losing district (Chthonics) to serve as the Titan death squad. Anyway, […]

A Dark Academia Masterpiece

Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang

by 1 Comment

I literally just finished reading this, and wow — what a compelling read! I learned from reading Wang’s first book, Sword of Kaigen, that she is not afraid to do terrible things to her characters or to break your heart without fully mending it, and she does that again here. This dark academia novel primarily follows Sciona, who early in the novel becomes the first female High Mage of the city of Tiran. There’s a lot of sexism in this world and she is not […]

Project managers and analysts are the ones really living the good life

The Ex Vows by Jessica Joyce

by 1 Comment

There are very few books I can think of that have, in my opinion, the perfect first chapter. The Ex Vows opens in a flashback, but as a memory rather than dropping us into the exact time. The narrating character (Georgia) misremembers, corrects herself, and even rewrites history to be more in line with what eventually happens between her and her love interest (Eli). It leaves you with a need to know more, to find out what happens to these people after their incredibly charming […]



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