Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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If Poetry Could Kill

The Poet Emperess by Shen Tao

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I have both ElCicco and Narfa to thank for bringing this book to my attention earlier this year. Completely worth it and up there with The Everlasting and The Raven Scholar as one of the best page turner’s of the year so far.  Very mild spoilers below: This is another one of those fantasy novels that carries over a close Venn diagram with another sub genre—in this case politics intrigue. If you like stories about court politics, this will likely appeal. In the kingdom of […]

“Age would have taken her if they’d just had the sense to leave well enough alone.”

Daughter of Crows by Mark Lawrence

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More fantasy with older protagonists please! With Daughter of Crows, Mark Lawrence is giving us a new trilogy—one that is not meant to be tied back to his previous works. Despite this, I thought we might end up covering some old ground when I first read the synopsis: a magical academy that exists to train young women to become killers? Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like his Book of the Ancestor series? Thankfully, this turned out not to be the case; the two stories […]

A Great (and Chunky) Prequel

A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

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My first 5-star read of the year! I liked The Priory of the Orange Tree a bit more because I was 100% engaged all the way through, and with this prequel my engagement dipped occasionally, but it was still excellent. In some ways it was easier to settle into the world because we already know the basics from Priory, though there will still a lot of names and titles to adjust to. One of the things I really loved was seeing the differences between the world now […]

This standalone fantasy goes incredibly hard.

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

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Sending up the Bat Signal on this book, my first use of it this year. (FYI the last time I used it was with The Raven Scholar, my best book of 2025, so you know it’s serious.) I wouldn’t recommend this book as widely or as often as I have The Raven Scholar, but for a certain type of reader, this thing will hit hard. (As it hit me. Last night, crying softly on my couch as I opined to myself, IT’S SO BEAUTIFUL.) First […]

An intricately woven tale

The Light of All That Falls by James Islington

An Echo of Things to Come by James Islington

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While I read the entire trilogy rather closely together, I reviewed the first novel much earlier in the year. These are large books so it seemed like they each deserved their own review rather than a series review but it was harder for me to articulate my thoughts about the second and third novel. And now, I’m having a hard time entirely distinguishing which parts happened in book 2 vs 3. I had seen some tag lines for this series that compared it to The […]

Are All of Robin Hobb’s Books a Masterclass in Writing?

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

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While I don’t mind multiple POV books, I generally prefer single POV. This book, though, masterfully demonstrates just how useful multiple POV can be. It was so different from the Farseer trilogy in which we’re always in Fitz’s head, and the emotions are unrelenting. In Ship of Magic, when you need a break from the drama with one character, there’s a different character whose drama you can jump into! It’s written in the 3rd person, but don’t expect that to spare you from the author’s toying with your […]



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