Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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A witch and a witch-hunter, sitting in a tree . . .

Boss Witch (Fix-It Witches, #2) by Ann Aguirre

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 21/30 Thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the audio ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. I liked this better than the first one! By quite a bit. The romance was very nice. I liked both Clem and Gavin, and thought they had lovely chemistry. The book really took off though when the non-romantic plot got going. I’m glad to say that the fact that Gavin is a witch hunter is not wasted, at […]

“Shakespeare knew too much.”

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

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I really had a good time with this one. I didn’t realize it was YA going in, but while it did lean into YA sensibilities at points, mostly it just felt like a kooky magical adventure story. It was very hard to put down, and I found myself constantly wondering what would happen next, which doesn’t really happen all that often to me anymore because I read so much (usually for me these days I vacillate between “I pretty much know what’s coming” because I’m […]

Another feel-good entry from T.J. Klune.

Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune

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For me, this needed just a little more dark elements to balance out the schmoop, which is a thing I’m still not fully on board with in terms of Klune’s writing, although it hit me less here than it did in Cerulean Sea. But overall this was a lovely read, like a warm hug. While I do have some criticisms, mostly to do with an overdose of earnestness and not enough subtlety (also known as schmoop), I really did enjoy this book. It was an escape […]

Lord save me from a sad sack narrator.

Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey

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The premise here is: What if your sibling went to magic school and you’re a muggle? And what if you’re a private detective hired to solve a murder at a magic school? Both of these are intriguing separately. Together, I could not resist this book. Unfortunately, I did not like it nearly as much as I wanted to. Parts of it were stellar, and parts of it absolutely did not work for me. Our narrator is Ivy Gamble, a struggling private detective whose twin sister […]

What are the readers on Goodreads smoking?

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

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CBR12 BINGO: Fresh Start BINGO: Red, Gateway, Fresh Start, Cannonballer Says, Money Storm Front reads like a novel created buy a guy who played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons as a teen and always dreamed about writing his own fantasy series. And if that’s true, more power to Jim Butcher for fulfilling his dream. I respect the effort and the ambition. Sadly, that doesn’t change the fact that the result is just not good. The premise of this series is appealing enough. Harry Dresden […]

Good mothers are a gift…

The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

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In my long standing tradition of judging a book by the cover, I grabbed this book based on both title AND cover. The premise sounded interesting: a dark fairy tale take on postpartum depression. In the end, I found a trippy book full of all kinds of weirdness that was more than the sum of its parts. The protagonist, Apollo, is the child of a Ugandan refugee and a New York parole officer. Raised by a single mother after his father disappears, Apollo becomes interested […]



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