Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.”

The Magician's Daughter by H. G. Parry

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Biddy lives on a small, magically isolated island off the coast of Ireland with her guardian/foster father, Rowan, and his familiar, the rabbit Hutchincroft. No one who doesn’t know that it’s there can find it. While Biddy has no magic of her own, she has grown up with it all around her. Yet magic is fading in the outside world, and far too often, Rowan has to leave Biddy to go to the mainland in bird form to find some small reserves of it. She […]

“Whatever comes of it, I’ll learn more than I know now.” “Unless,” I pointed out, “you die.” He shrugged. “Well. We all have to stop learning sometime.”

A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry

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I feared this was the best of times; I hoped it could not get any worse. Let’s synopsize: Sydney Carton was stolen as a child and forced to serve the Faery Realm. Charles Darnay is his changeling; Lucie Manette is the changeling of Ivy, Sydney’s childhood friend. Sydney wants revenge on the fae and Darnay for how his life has turned out. The French Revolution happens. This is a homage to A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Spoiler Alert: I discuss plot points of […]

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times

A Far Better Thing by H. G. Parry

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My reading experience for H. G. Parry’s A Far Better Thing was somewhat non-standard (at least for me). I first picked the book up back in June of last year. I read a couple of chapters, but the story wasn’t really gripping me, so I set it aside. I’ve really enjoyed other books by the author, so a few weeks ago I decided to give it a second chance, and I’m glad I did. This is a retelling of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two […]

A Tale of Two Realms

A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry

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I have never actually read A Tale of Two Cities beyond the famous opening paragraph and yet I was very much interested in a retelling with Fae. I’ve read a few novels this year that were either retellings or inspired by other classic texts but they were looser, taking those bones and putting them in a modern setting or otherwise being more homage than retelling. From what I can tell, this one takes the approach of following one of the supporting characters of the original […]

“It was just that whenever she had thought of seeing the world, she had never realized what it would be like to have the world see her back.”

The Magician's Daughter by H.G. Parry

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Just lovely from beginning to end. I really need more people to read this! It’s just such a nice little story. The main character is Biddy, a seventeen year old young woman who washed up on the shores of a magical island as a baby and was taken in by the magician, Rowan, and his rabbit familiar Hutchincroft. She can’t do magic herself, but she is raised to love it and want to protect it. And though she loves living on the magical island of […]

I finally understand the French Revolution.

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories, #1) by H.G. Parry

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Okay, I always understood the French Revolution, meaning I understood why there was one, and that it got out of control because hUmAnS, but I have never before been able to hold the chronology of it in my head, or remember the various stages, or the political parties or players. And it never descended to the human level for me before, never really reached my emotions because of the ways it’s been funneled at me before. It feels sort of perverse to say that a […]



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