Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Read it, like a child, into the night

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

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Helen Franklin is an English ex-pat in Prague on a mission to penalize herself for a mysterious past. However she cannot avoid the friendship of Karel and Thea and for a while she is almost happy. Then Melmoth appears. Melmoth is the an old tale of the wanderer, the one who is there to witness when no one else is and what she sees is the depravity, the loss the despair. Melmoth is just a myth, or so it seems until Karel gets a letter […]

Not only is it the Darkest, it’s also the slowest…

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Having taken a couple of weeks to slog through Darkest Hour, I’m starting to see where my rating knocked off a couple of stars in my first read through, as the breakneck pace of World’s End came almost to a complete halt, and our ‘heroes’ screwed up yet more things in their fight to save humanity. World’s End saw Church, Veitch, Shavi, Ruth and Laura summon the Tuatha De Danaan to help them to defeat the Fomorii, only to discover that once the Tuatha were […]

Here, There Be a Lot of Info Dump

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One of my students suggested this book to me last year, and I finally got around to getting it from the library.  If I was twelve years old again, I would have absolutely loved this book and been hooked for the duration of the series. It was fanciful, had a cute ending, and hit all the correct markers for decent kids’ fantasy, but the older I get, the harder a time I have sinking into YA fantasies, and this book was no exception. Our three […]

Prophecies, magic and lust

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A Promise of Fire is the first entry in Amanda Bouchet’s Kingmaker Chronicles. Our heroine protagonist, Cat, has been on the run for the past 8 years. At the start of this novel, she blends in with a magical circus. She tells fortunes and does fire tricks to pay her way. The circus becomes her adopted family with Cat helping out with performances from time to time. Things were going pretty well until a strange man catches her eye. He gives off the aura of a warrior […]

Myth, history and culture collide

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Ho Lin’s short story anthology was an interesting read. Each tale aimed to shed light on random moments from varying points of view. He pulls in the reader with unexpected juxtapositions of settings and tone. The collection exudes emotion as if the stories were collective memories meshed together. He rarely delves deep into any specific narratives. The stories bounced between Asia and American even within the same story. We meet an American ex-Pat in China, then a host of characters in San Francisco, while another […]

“But. My hammer,” said Thor.

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Before I read it, it felt like I’d been waiting for Norse Mythology my entire life. In the sense that I wanted it so badly the minute that I heard that it was coming. So, oops. It’s fine, but it’s not, like, life-alteringly amazingly incredible. I could have waited another minute before reading it. Taken a breath. Read something else. Taken this to the beach. Which isn’t to say it’s not a delight, it’s just that it doesn’t take a thing and change everything you’ve […]



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