Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


The Enemy of My Enemy is… Weirdly Hot?

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers

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CBR18 Bingo: Bird – Sir Cameron gets turned into a vulture by the evil sorcerer Merulo, in which form he enjoys eating various rodents and pooping on Merulo’s castle walls. When Sir Cameron narrowly escapes death from the hands of his friends in an effort to fulfill a prophecy to defeat a mad sorcerer, he flees for help to the only other person who is now invested in keeping him alive – the sorcerer Merulo himself. This is a light-hearted and charming adventure with some […]

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 […]

Yes, hello, we are here, perched on the balustrade, biding our time and being magnificent.

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

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I have had to take a breather from Hugo award voting for a while, but I thought I’d jump back into it this year. Only to have this doorstopper from an author I had not come across before dropped on my feet. Thankfully, The Raven Scholar turned out to be an absolute page turner, a bit of a kitchen sink of fantasy tropes, and a lot more playful than I expected. An absolute joy to race though.  Now to those fantasy tropes: one of the […]

When Lovecraft Comes to Leeds

The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

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One of the issues with the main protagonist ‘leveling up’ is that it can make them harder to write into a story. Bob Howard, who has been the main protagonist of the Laundry Files up until this point, was at the receiving end of both a career and supernatural-power advisement at the end of The Rhesus Chart. And this probably made it harder for Stross the write the same kinds of stories  he had been up until that point. So for The Nightmare Stacks, he […]

When Lovecraft Meets The Home Office.

The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross

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Very blatant spoilers for the previous books in the series here—be warned. Has there ever been a book that you’ve really changed your mind about on re-read? The Annihilation Score is one of these. The Annihilation Score was a Laundry Files entry that was always going to face an uphill battle; not only was the first one to pivot away for Bob’s point of view, it also dealt with a a subject that perhaps does not gel terribly well with the subject of Eldritch horrors—superheroes. […]

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 […]



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