Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


My Year of Dark Academia is Off to an Uneven Start

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

by 16 Comments

Lately I’ve been finding myself drawn to dark academia, so I thought this year I might embrace it and go whole hog. I started the year off with two very different dark academia novels–one that I mostly enjoyed, and one that I didn’t really enjoy at all. First up, I read A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid. Effy is an architecture student at a prestigious college, but she wants to be a literature student–only women aren’t allowed to study literature. Her favorite author is Emrys Myrddin, […]

“This is a man’s first, last, and greatest fear: a world that exists empty of him.”

Lady Macbeth: A Novel by Ava Reid

by Leave a Comment

I have to admit I’m torn about this book. The first couple of chapters, I wasn’t really a fan, then I started really enjoying it. Now having finished and letting it all sink in, I’m back to poking large holes in it. Lady Macbeth (claims) to tell the feminist reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, told from the perspective of the aforementioned Lady Macbeth. Only instead of the forty-something woman named Gruoch pushing Macbeth towards power for herself as well as him, we have Roscille, the seventeen […]

“I’ll watch and I’ll wait. I’m seventeen, and I have a thousand brilliantly hued hazardous sunrises to spare.”

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid

by Leave a Comment

CBR17 Bingo: Purple – Behold, the cover. In a world consumed by debt, Inesa’s mother’s compulsive spending causes her to be selected for the Gauntlet, in which she will almost certainly be killed on live TV to wipe out what her family owes. But when Inesa and the girl assigned to kill her, Melinoe, are forced to rely on each other in the wilderness, the line between predator and prey gets blurred. This is a YA dystopian romance which is in many ways a homage […]

A Theory of Dreaming

A Theory of Dreaming by Ava Reid

by Leave a Comment

cbr17bingo: school Unfortunately, this book did not live up to the first one, A Study in Drowning, which was atmospheric and felt like it was making an important point. This one is more muddled and unfocused. The perspectives are divided between Effy and Preston, and I appreciated learning more about Preston. He and Effy have returned to their university, where they have to deal with the aftermath of their discoveries at Hiraeth, the trauma of what happened there, and Effy’s becoming the first female student […]

“And there is nothing more dangerous than a creature who pretends to be one thing and is in truth another.”

Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

by Leave a Comment

This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth focused on Lady Macbeth. This version is split into five acts (just like the play!), with Lady Macbeth as a 17-year-old new bride of the title character. Something I found particularly interesting is that the author chose to reflect the various languages spoken in eleventh-century Scotland, so the characters have different versions of their names depending on the language used. In the book, the main character thinks of herself as Roscille, so for the sake of this review, […]

Gothic Vibes in a Waterlogged Setting

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

by Leave a Comment

To start with, this is one of the most accurate and well-chosen titles I have seen for a book. It’s relevant on multiple levels, from the literal to the psychological to, we eventually find out, the medical. This stood out to me more than book titles typically do. Our psychologically drowning main character is Effy Sayre, the only female architecture student at a university that wouldn’t accept her to the literature college, which was where she wanted to be, because “women dumb” basically. This reflects […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo