Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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First Watch by Dale Lucas

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First Watch is a buddy cop movie in a high fantasy setting, where our two comically mismatched partners (a wet-behind-the-ears human and a grizzled veteran dwarf) have to find a way to get along and solve an increasingly complicated mystery in an early-modern city riven by factionalism and peopled by elves, orcs, mages, humans and dwarves.   The premise would have sold me on this book immediately… if it was 1988 and Guards! Guards! By Sir Terry Pratchett didn’t exist. Unfortunately for Dale Lucas, Pratchett’s […]

I would like a copy of the ‘Buggre Alle This’ Bible.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

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This is one of those books that are good when you first read them, but get better as you get older. A lot of satire is probably like that, especially comic satire. I thought this book was funny in 2009, but now parts of it made me laugh so hard I was crying. Plus, I did the audio this time, and it made it even better. Martin Jarvis has a nice sense of comic timing, and his voice characterization is great, particularly for Crowley and Aziraphale. (The […]

I liked this??????

A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1) by Sarah J. Maas

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I was already poised to like this book, past feelings about Sarah J. Maas aside. It’s a Beauty and the Beast/Ballad of Tam Lin hybrid retelling, and unless you make some sort of grave mistake, you’ve already got the outline of the story ready to go (tried and true over hundreds of years and variations), and it’s pretty hard to mess that up. And she doesn’t! I thought the story worked well as a combo B&B/Tam-Lin/original elements mish-mash. The first half is mostly Beauty and the […]

If you love fairy tales

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

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I’ve always enjoyed fairy tales and became a bit obsessed once I discovered the darker original Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Anderson collections.  This book evokes those tales but the stories have been spun in different and interesting directions, in part because it was created as a volume of fairy tales that the characters in the Grishaverse (the world setting Leigh Bardugo created) would know.  In 2012 Leigh’s publisher asked if she would write a prequel story for her first novel Shadow and Bone.  But instead […]

I wish for more

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories by Mahvesh Murad, Jared Shurin, eds.

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I picked up this 2017 collection of short stories because it featured contributions of several writers whose work I’ve reviewed before and liked, and the subject of djinn (or jinn or genies, whatever term you prefer) has been popping up on my radar quite a bit lately. The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories was a brilliant way for me to start CBR11 — immensely entertaining, sometimes provocative, and an entree to the works of writers new to me but whose work I will definitely be tracking down. The stories are a wonderful mix of styles and settings and shed light not only on the nature of the djinn but on human nature as well. The djinn, created by Allah from smokeless fire, are sometimes depicted as tricky and/or evil, but in some ways they are no different from humans.

Damned by high expectations – An ARC review

The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons

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Full disclosure up front: This was an ARC that I won in a contest on GoodReads. This book is not released until February. I am a HUGE fantasy nerd. The words “epic fantasy series” make me happy. When I won a contest to read what was touted as the fantasy star of 2019, I was thrilled. Then I read the inside cover where it is described as “Uniting the worldbuilding of a Brandon Sanderson with the storytelling verve of a Patrick Rothfuss”and suddenly I was […]



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