Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Messing Around a Lot in the Woods

The Fifth Wards: Good Company by Dale Lucas

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The Fifth Ward: Good Company was kind of hit or miss for me. I totally saw Rem’s big personal reveal coming a mile away, and a lot of the other characters’ reaction to it were not surprising either. Of course Indilen and Torval are going to accept it; on the one hand, I’m glad there wasn’t a lot of unnecessary drama there, but on the other, there was so little reaction it’s like all that time trying to build it up was wasted. The set […]

Medieval Mayhem Aligns with Modern Politics

Fifth Ward Friendly Fire by Dale Lucas

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Bingo 14 (Reading the TBR) Fifth Ward: Friendly Fire has been on my shelf for a while, long enough for me to have gotten it not too long after it came out and have a sequel already out by the time I got to it. In a way, it’s a good thing that I waited as long as I did, because it seemed really timely for the political here and now in spite of not being set anywhere close. The Fifth Ward series is set […]

fabricati diem, pvnc

First Watch by Dale Lucas

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First Watch is a buddy cop movie in a high fantasy setting, where our two comically mismatched partners (a wet-behind-the-ears human and a grizzled veteran dwarf) have to find a way to get along and solve an increasingly complicated mystery in an early-modern city riven by factionalism and peopled by elves, orcs, mages, humans and dwarves.   The premise would have sold me on this book immediately… if it was 1988 and Guards! Guards! By Sir Terry Pratchett didn’t exist. Unfortunately for Dale Lucas, Pratchett’s […]

Watered Down Pratchett Doing Columbo

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Fifth Ward: First Watch is pretty standard in a lot of ways. It’s a standard fantasy story of the sort which largely takes place in a vaguely medieval city in which a variety of difference races interact including humans, orcs, elves, and dwarves. It’s also a standard buddy cop story in which the naive young trainee is paired with the gruff experienced veterans, they get on each other’s nerves a lot, but eventually through a series of trials become friends and partners. As is not […]

From prisoner to watchman seems like a lateral move

First Watch (The Fifth Ward #1) by Dale Lucas

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Rem, a human male in his early- to mid-20s, wakes up in a jail cell, barely able to recall the drunken antics of the previous night. Given that he can’t afford to buy himself out of whatever it was he did the night before, he impulsively volunteers to join the city watch. Within a few short hours, Rem is out on his first patrol in Yenara, a city he barely knows. Rem is clever and good with a sword, and he has no trouble learning […]



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