Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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And Holy Be The Terror

Holy Terrors by Margaret Owen

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Holy Terrors is the final book in the Little Thieves trilogy and it picks up well over a year after Vanja dismantled (sort of) the cult she managed to accidentally create after a drunken night out. And this being Vanja, she’s still completely unable to keep herself out of trouble. There ’s not a lot of detail as to what Vanja has been up to since the last book, but we’re given some hints to it being a bit messy—not out of character for her. […]

“She’s been painting the devil on the wall and hoping we won’t know it from the real thing”

Painted Devils by Margaret Owen

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Now, spoilers here for the previous book; it is a direct continuation, after all.  The blurb for Painted Devils starts out fantastically: “Let’s get one thing straight—Vanja Schmidt wasn’t trying to start a cult.” With Little Thieves, I knew that it was a trilogy coming in, but by the end of the book, I wasn’t 100% certain where the story was going to be heading next. After ridding herself of a nasty curse, putting the displaced Princess Giselle back where she belonged, settling most of […]

There are only two kinds of story worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war. I need the second.

The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow

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Well good thing there was a bingo square for ‘Craft’ this year, because I have not read a book as well crafted as The Everlasting for a very long time. Alix E. Harrow has always been an ambitious writer, but here she really exceeds herself. The Everlasting is, at its core a love story, but I’m sort of reluctant to categorize it as just a romance; it’s so, so much more. Around it’s romantic core, it is a story about the power of myth-making, nationalism, […]

Dark Administration

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

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  There’s one sub-genre of fantasy that’s been having a moment in the last few years that I have been really struggling to fully embrace and that is ‘dark academia’. You would think this might be kind of thing that I might be into given my background, but I’ve never really vibed terribly well with it. I guess I don’t really feel the need to read something from the perspective of students these days? That’s what made The Incandescent by Emily Tesh a little more […]

“There’s a saying in the Blessed Empire: Little thieves steal gold, and great ones steal kingdoms, but only one goes to the gallows. “

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen

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One of the consequences of working through the Hugo Award nominees is that I’ll be making my way through a lot of YA entries for the Lodestar Award. And while most of the nominated authors have a positive buzz, they are also all new to me. One of the nice things Worldcon did for the voters this year—in addition with the publishers, I assume—is provide not just a copy of Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors, but the two proceeding books in the series as well. A good […]

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 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 things […]



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