Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Language of Thorns

The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo

by Leave a Comment

Absolutely fantastic. This was so good I didn’t want it to end. Bardugo does an excellent job with the stories and Kipin’s illustrations evokes the fairy tale setting and characters so well. I may just buy this in hardback for the illustrations alone. These stories are a great blend of retellings as well as something darker that leaks into each story that makes it just as much a cautionary tale as Grimm’s original fairy tales. Here are my ratings for all of the stories, but […]

Dance Like No One is Watching

by Leave a Comment

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is a retelling of Twelve Dancing Princesses set in the 1920s. It is light on magic, or rather has absolutely none, but heavy on feminism and awesomeness. Despite being a fairy tale retelling, I can’t really label this a fantasy novel, so I’m not. I really, really liked it and I loved setting this story of women finding liberation and defying the ‘king’ against the backdrop of the proto-women’s liberation that happened during the 20s. It’s a glorious mashup. Twelve […]

The night is dark and full of terrors

by 7 Comments

I found this through Scalzi’s big idea series and immediately put it in my library request list. The list of contributing authors is heavily weighted to my recent favourites, not to mention that I always love dark reinterpretations of fairy tales. This was an awesome collection, starting strong and ending great (and the physical book is gorgeous with lovely internal illustrations, I’ll be buying my own copy). There was a good representation of countries as well as a nice mix of modern retellings with more […]

My other theme this month is Fairy Tales

by Leave a Comment

Toad Words and Other Stories is a collection of fairy tale retellings by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) most of which were published previously on her blog, though there is at least one new story. I’ve read a couple of the stories when they were on her blog, but there were a number that were new to me. I really enjoy Kingfisher’s approach to fairy tales, where magic may exist but that’s no reason to throw logic out the window. For the most part this book […]

Cinderella with naughty bits!

by 5 Comments

It’s becoming quite the habit that I start one of these books before bed and then stay up to ungodly hours finishing it, because I have no self control. But I just wasn’t tired! And I wanted to see what happened! (Okay, so I knew what was going to happen, that’s the whole point of reading romance novels, but you know what I mean.) An Offer From a Gentleman is the third of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton books, and it’s basically a re-telling of Cinderella* (with […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo