Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Something Wicked This Way Comes

Slewfoot by Brom

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In 17th century England, Abitha’s father sells her off to pay his debts; the end result is that she is shipped off to the American colonies to become the bride of Edward, a man she has never met. Edward turns out to be kind and generous, if meek in the face of his boorish cheat of an older brother, Wallace. The Puritan community that Abitha and Edward live in expects women to be consistently timid and obedient, never heard and seen only in the pursuits […]

Still just OK the second time around

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

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CBR 13 Bingo Square: Landscape Genuine question:  It seemed when Cannonball Book Club was announced The Bear and the Nightingale was presented as a reimagining of Rumpelstiltskin, as that was the fairytale linked to for reading the original.  I don’t see a comparison?  Is there something I’m missing?  Or was I incorrect in that the two were paired together in that way?  Would love to know how others interpret as this feels more like “Cinderella” crossed with “The Twelve Months”. For Cannonball Book Club, I had […]

The woods are lovely dark and deep

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

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In a dark medieval Russian forest, the tomboy daughter of the local chief, Vasya, just wants to continue with her wild and pagan ways- running through the woods, riding horses, communing with the minor domestic and farmyard gods. These ways put Vasya at odds with her stepmother as well as the Church, personified by the local priest.  The stepmother and the priest push Vasya’s father to marry her off, which bodes ill for the village as a whole- the bonds that keep evil forces at […]

Sweet but not sickly so

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

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Beneath the Sugar Sky is the third instalment in the Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire, letting us visit other worlds in this incredibly diverse and imagination universe. Children have long disappeared through doorways and tumbled down holes in the ground and into adventure, and sometimes those children come back. Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children gives those children a place where they can be themselves, away from prying eyes and worried parents who’d prefer their children were just their old selves again.  In this […]

Novik spun gold with her creative re-working

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

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Couldn’t help myself with the title for the review 🙂  Mysterious Galaxy recommened Naomi Novik’s  His Majesty’s Dragon, first in the Temeraire series, way back when it came out in 2006.  I instantly fell in love with concept, the dragons during the Napoleonic wars.  However, somewhere around book 5 I lost interest and never finished the series.  Then I sort of forgot about her as an author.  In the past few years Novik’s name kept popping up for Uprooted and Spinning Silver and I was intrigued.  […]

A book so good I may soon need an intervention if I’m ever to stop re-reading it

Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire

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An absolutely fantastic follow up to Every Heart A Doorway, Down Among The Sticks and Bones gives us the back story to two of the most interesting characters from its predecessor, showing us how Jack and Jill found themselves at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children in an outing that is so brilliant I found myself devouring it within hours before turning around and reading it all over again. Jack and Jill weren’t always who we now know them to be. Born Jacqueline and Jillian […]



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