Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Road trip!

Dragon Haven: Volume Two of The Rain Wilds Chronicles by Robin Hobb

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Cbr18bingo Wheels This is the second book in a four-book series. I reviewed Volume 1 Dragon Keeper here. In Dragon Haven, a group of Rain Wilds youth, outcasts due to their physical “deformities”, are now functioning as Dragon Keepers (or shepherds, if you need something for the sheep square). Their job is to guide the dragons, who emerged deformed from their cocoons, up river, away from people and civilization, on a quest to find the fabled lost city of Kelsingra. In an ancient past, when […]

Hobb-a-thon Part II

Dragon Keeper: The Rain Wilds Chronicles Book 1 by Robin Hobb

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cbr18bingo – One I have been holding off on starting this part of Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series. The Farseer Trilogy, The Liveship Traders Trilogy and The Tawny Man Trilogy were all fantastic, but when I looked at Dragon Keeper, the first of the four novels in The Rain Wilds Chronicles, I was a little bummed out. It looked like the characters I knew and loved from her previous novels weren’t going to get much page time and a whole new set of […]

Ferrante did it better

The Book of Goose: A Novel by Yiyun Li

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Cbr18bingo – Bird Almost as soon as I started reading The Book of Goose, I was reminded of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. Both Ferrante’s series and Li’s The Book of Goose feature impoverished girls living in post-WWII Europe. Both feature a friendship that can be competitive and dysfunctional. And both focus on the creative process of writing as well as the strains on childhood friendships when people grow up and apart. I loved Ferrante’s series. I liked this novel, but I might have liked it […]

Imagination is real

The Book Censor’s Library: A Novel by Bothayna Al-Essa

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This is a wonderful book about imagination, books, libraries, and censorship. It’s a love song to some literary classics and a picture of a dystopian not-too-distant future where most literature is banned and burned. How far would you go to preserve the ideas and literary creations that have formed us? What is worth saving? What price would you pay? The characters in this book have no names; rather they have titles or descriptors. The main character is the Book Censor, a man who wants only […]

Love on the Spectrum, Austen Style

The Perils of Lady Catherine de Bourgh: A Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery by Claudia Gray

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I enjoyed this installment of Gray’s Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney Mysteries even more than the previous book, The Late Mrs. Willoughby. I think in large part this is because the main characters and the setting for this one are straight from Pride and Prejudice, featuring a couple of my favorite characters: Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins. After two successful sleuthing adventures, Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney have returned to their own lives. Jonathan is back at Pemberly with his parents Lizzie and Darcy, while […]

The gang’s all here!

The Late Mrs. Willoughby: A Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney Mystery by Claudia Gray

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My local bookstore recently had a table full of Claudia Gray’s Jane Austen-based detective series on sale, so I picked up a couple, not realizing that I was starting with books 2 and 3. That’s a little bit of a shame, and I might circle back around to the first book eventually, but I still find this introduction to Gray’s series most entertaining. Gray has taken Austen’s best known and beloved characters from across several of her novels and created extended families for them, including […]



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