Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


There is a great difference between fearing death, which you don’t seem to, and not wanting to die.

Debts of Fire by Intisar Khanani

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I highly recommend the Sunbolt Chronicles series. Intisar Khanani writes complex and engaging stories with resourceful girls at the center. At the start of the series, a fortune teller tells Hitomi to run, and so she has been ever since. In Debts of Fire, Hitomi is still running, but is starting to think about how to live her life beyond that, if she survives. Hitomi does dangerous things because they need to be done. Things are more fraught after Memories of Ash – her magic […]

The dreaded cliffhanger!

The Theft of Sunlight by Intisar Khanani

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Oh, is there anything like the dawning horror – 50 or so pages from the end of your book – that it’s going to be darned hard for this plot to all wrap up neatly? And as you hope against hope, page by page, it becomes grimly clear…this is not a standalone book. Luckily I am most happy to forgive Intisar Khanani several times over, because I’m delighted that I’ll get to spend more time with the The Theft of Sunlight’s characters, as soon as […]

You must run now, and—” she hesitates. “And?”“Keep running,”

Shadow Thief by Intisar Khanani

Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani

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A few years ago several Cannonballers were reading Intisar Khanani’s self published YA fantasy books. Khanani writes the kind of book that grabs you and doesn’t let go featuring teen girls who are chronically underestimated. Khanani is rereleasing her Sunbolt Chronicles, and I am brushing off my YA reading hat. I haven’t read YA since the pandemic started, and that’s no slight to the genre, it’s just where my head has been. Shadow Thief and Sunbolt are a great re-entry point. Hitomi is an immigrant […]

I might not know what you are feeling. But I know grief.

The Alchemy of Sorrow by Sarah Chorn, Virginia McClain

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The Alchemy of Sorrow: A Fantasy & Sci-fi Anthology of Grief and Hope was a gamble because I was only familiar with one author, Intisar Khanani. I like anthologies because I get to explore authors I haven’t read before in short bites. I love Khanani enough that I knew her story would be worth the whole anthology.  I did love her “Twice-Domesticated Dragons,” and I also loved several of the others stories as well. I read a lot of advance reader copies, which means that […]

The Trouble is This: I Will Not Sell My Loyalty or My Friendship

Thorn by Intisar Khanani

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I have been eagerly awaiting this book for two years. In 2017, shortly after I bought Thorn, it was purchased by Harper Teen. In the past two years, Intisar Khanani has reworked the book and it will be re-published soon. I hope it is wildly successful and makes Khanani buckets of money. I love the way she writes, builds worlds and creates characters. I opted not to reread the older version of thorn, so I don’t know exactly what she’s changed. I received this arc […]

“When you have chosen a path, you must walk it with courage.”

Memories of Ash by Intisar Khanani

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Memories of Ash is the second instalment of the Sunbolt Chronicles, a series that I hope goes on forever, but only just till the day I die, so that there will never exist a book in the series that I haven’t read. Memories of Ash meets Hikaru as she is living with Brigit Stormwind in a hidden valley being trained as a secret apprentice. One day a rogue hunter (as in someone who hunts secret apprentices) comes knocking; Stormwind has been charged with multiple crimes […]



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