Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Maybe through the next door…

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alex E. Harrow

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January Scaller is not white. This makes her stand out as an oddity in early 1900s New England despite her clothes and demeanor that would have passed every high-society test on a girl with white skin. Her caretaker, Mr. Locke, has done his best to provide January with all the things she will need to be comfortable: a home, nice clothes, training in being demure and quiet, and a nursemaid. Despite his best attempts to stifle, January is determined to find her own path in […]

I’d rather spend time with David Tennant’s Crowley

The Night Jar by Deborah Hewitt

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I had a hard time getting through The Nightjar. I liked the premise, although it sounded a little like the His Dark Materials trilogy, I liked the setting, although it’s kind of like Neverwhere, and I liked some of the characters, although I never took a liking to either of the two leads. I really wanted to like this, and there were a lot of times where I almost did. The premise is that there is an alternate world attached to our own where people […]

Summer, Baba Yaga, and a were-house

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I love portal fantasies. I’ve loved them for as long as I can remember, from Narnia to Oz to Wonderland to Amber and even for a brief moment Xanth, I have loved stories of someone from this mundane world transported to a world full of magic and wonder. Summer in Orcus is an offering in this category from T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and it is marvelous. The best I can describe it is a middlegrade fantasy for adults, and much like Catherynne Valente’s The […]

You have forgotten the face of your father.

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It’s so funny, as I’m reading this series for the first time, to see the (very) polarizing opinions about each book. One person gives it up after the first thirty pages of the first book because it’s so fucking weird, the next wants to read all of them in a mad, passionate frenzy. One person thinks book two is the greatest (me), another thinks it’s boring as shit (an opinion I can’t understand). Yet another counts this here book as their favorite and reviles book four. […]

A Book is a Door and the Door leads Home

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Portal fantasies are pretty common in middle grade and YA literature, but it isn’t often asked what happens to the children who come back. Seanan McGuire attempts to answer that with her latest novel but I’m not sure the book, and its answers, works for me completely. Eleanor West runs a school for children who have returned from their otherlands/Fairylands. These are children who no longer feel at home in the mundane world and long, more then anything, to return to the world that kicked […]



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