Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What’s in a name?

The Swifts A Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln

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Cbr15bingo Dwelling, illustrations by Claire Powell This is a really fun work of kids lit (ages 8-12) that involves a murder mystery set in a very old ancestral home. Swift manor is a house full of secret passages and rooms, a place that has evolved over time along with the highly unusual Swift family. Each member of the family, at birth, is given a name chosen at random from the family Dictionary. Names seem to turn out to be strangely fitting for each member; is […]

monsters and miracles in Mexico

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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CBR Bingo Square: In the Wild I do love a good retelling, and early sci-fi seems especially ripe for the revisionist takes, given how centered they are on white male protagonists, and how absent the perspectives of women and POC are. So the idea of Moreno-Garcia’s follow-up to Mexican Gothic being a retelling of The Island of Doctor Moreau was a very appealing one, especially with moving the action to the Yucatan peninsula and engaging with Mexico’s history of indigenous resistance. Carlota, the eponymous daughter, is one of […]

CBR15 Bingo: Dwelling

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

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CBR15 Bingo: Dwelling (the “haunted” house is pretty central to the story). This was my fantasy/sci-fi book club’s selection for May, and while I normally don’t like horror books, I read this mainly because I was so impressed with T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone, and also because it really was very short. It’s a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, which I have never read, and because I’m not a huge fan of Poe, I didn’t bother reading it […]

Rough but Important Middle Grade Novel

No Place Like Home by James Bird

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This is a rough, emotional story, but also a story full of hope and love. Opin is living in a car with his mom and older brother, Emjay, since they left his father several years ago because he was violent and abusive. Emjay has a tendency to run off when they stop places on their way to Watts Los Angeles and is full of anger, which sometimes is expressed in violence and being cruel with his words towards his family. But Opin finds a dog, […]

A master distills fantasy down to its essence

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

The Moon of Gomrath by Alan Garner

Boneland by Alan Garner

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Bingo (In order):  Guide, Relationships, Nostalgia, Europe, Adulthood Passport: England When Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize I was surprised, not because I don’t think he’s a brilliant writer worthy of a major literary award, but because awards like this don’t seem to take fantasy seriously, despite the depth of the ideas and the beauty of the prose, and I hadn’t realised that this author I loved in my childhood was still alive and still writing.  Treacle Walker is not […]

What were the choices? She had a bed-making intruder, she’d done it on autopilot, or the place was haunted. With bed-making ghosts.

Inheritance by Nora Roberts

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Nora Roberts starts off her new series, The Lost Bride Trilogy, with a couple of classic tropes – coming home early to find your fiancé in bed with another person, and discovering you have an unknown wealthy relative who has died and left you a manor house and the funds to care for it. These things happen to Sonya in different chapters, but neither is a spoiler. The newly single Sonya discovers her father had an unknown twin, who has left her the family home […]



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