Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

The Brothers Grimm’s Six Swans retold – and well

Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

by 1 Comment

Do you love old myths and sprawling, inventive low fantasy epics? Did you really enjoy Circe and wished there was a whole genre of retellings? Well, I’ve got a book for you. Plot: Sarcha is the seventh child and only daughter of the ruler of Sevenwaters. When her father, who has been mostly absent her entire life, brings home a new wife who happens to be an evil sorceress who tries to kill Sarcha and her 6 brothers to gain control of their land, Sarcha […]

Pass me ALL the tissues

Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier

by Leave a Comment

A retelling of The Six Swans, Daughter of the Forest pulled me fully into its story, often leaving me trying (and failing) to look like I hadn’t been weeping during my lunch break. Set in 10th century Ireland, Sorcha is the seventh child of a mother who died in childbirth and a distant father. With dad usually off protecting the borders of his land – Sevenwaters – against the Picts, Britons and Vikings, Sorcha has spent most of her childhood roaming the forests of her […]

A Woman Will Always Sacrifice Herself

by 2 Comments

I decided I would find a more obscure banned/challenged book for the bingo game and came across Daughter of the Forest, which was challenged in a Missouri high school in 2015 for the rape scene that happens about a third of the way into the book. Since the rest of the story is filled with violent warfare, torture, imprisonment, and an attempted witch burning, I found it ironic that the most unwholesome plot point to the challengers was the rape and subsequent PTSD our main character […]

An epic fantasy anthology, cherry-picked from other sources.

by 2 Comments

This was a pretty great anthology. I was probably destined to like it because it’s pretty hard for me to dislike most kinds of fantasy. This is also different than some anthologies because the editor didn’t commission pieces for this book, but collected them from other already published sources. I sampled a lot of authors I’ve been meaning to try for some time, although I’m annoyed that some of the stories occur halfway through a series or something like that. If you like Epic fantasy […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo