Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“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

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

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

by Leave a Comment

  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

by 1 Comment

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

by 1 Comment

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 […]

In Pursuit of Destiny and Desire

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

by 5 Comments

I felt like a bit of a dumb-arse after picking up She Who Became the Sun. I don’t know if it was just me stumbling around blindly perhaps, but it took me a good long time to realise that the this book was a reimagining of the Ming Dynasty’s rise to power. The ebook version of the book didn’t have a blurb on the back cover, true, and that might have helped. But it did have a map of  north east of China on one […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo