Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


A wholly satisfying ending to a great fantasy trilogy

The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden

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Spoiler warning! This is the third and final volume in the trilogy, and the action starts immediately after the second book. This is not the place to start. If you are not caught up, drop everything and start from the beginning with The Bear and the Nightingale.  Vasilisa “Vasya” Petrovna managed to defeat one enemy, but at a great cost. Releasing the legendary firebird has caused much of Moscow to catch fire and the citizens, spurred on by the vengeful and jealous Father Konstantin are looking for […]

Everybody please read this so I can have somebody to talk to about it.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy, #1) by Marlon James

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NB: I received a gratis copy of the book from the publisher but that has not affected the content of my review. “You want to know what’s my purpose? To kill the men who killed my brother and father, leaving a grandfather fucking my own mother. To kill the men who killed my brother, because they killed him because he killed one of theirs. Who killed one of his, who killed one of theirs, and on and on while even gods die. My purpose is […]

A defiant girl in a man’s world

The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden

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4.5 stars Spoiler warning! This is book 2 in a trilogy, and the story pretty much follows on directly from the ending of the previous book. This book, while very good, doesn’t really stand on its own, you would do much better to start at the beginning, with The Bear and the Nightingale.  There are roving gangs of bandits travelling the countryside around Moscow, pillaging and burning the villages and abducting young girls. Prince Dimitri sends his cousin, brother Alexandr, affectionately known to his family as Sasha, […]

you will falsely remember being told about Melmoth by your grandmother’s mother when you were very small

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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There is something immediately nauseating – hear me out- about this book. You can be nauseous when you feel ill, when you ride a roller coaster, when you are nervous, or when you eat too many sweets. There is a feeling of hopeful dread that climbs over you (and all of the characters within) before you have finished reading the first page. There is a feeling that you have been here – in a cafe in Prague, under an overpass in Manila, in a field […]

And now the end is near…

Always Forever by Mark Chadbourn

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After slogging through its predecessor over a matter of weeks, I tore through Always Forever (the last in the Age of Misrule trilogy) in just two days, although this had more to do with wanting to read the tower of books I got for Crimbo than with how much I was enjoying it. To be fair, I did enjoy this one more than the Darkest Hour, but it never quite got back to the same level as the opener, World’s End. We left Darkest Hour with […]

Not only is it the Darkest, it’s also the slowest…

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Having taken a couple of weeks to slog through Darkest Hour, I’m starting to see where my rating knocked off a couple of stars in my first read through, as the breakneck pace of World’s End came almost to a complete halt, and our ‘heroes’ screwed up yet more things in their fight to save humanity. World’s End saw Church, Veitch, Shavi, Ruth and Laura summon the Tuatha De Danaan to help them to defeat the Fomorii, only to discover that once the Tuatha were […]



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