Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

That magical unicorn, a successful prequel! (From someone who’s never read the other books.)

Magic Lessons (Practical Magic, #0.1) by Alice Hoffman

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Don’t let your preconceptions keep you from reading this one if it sounds like something you might be interested in. I thought, because I saw the movie adaptation of Practical Magic one time a couple years back, that I knew how Maria Owens’s story would end, because her story is the entire reason that first book exists. That’s how prequels work! The curse she put on her own family as she was killed for being a witch in Salem: that anyone who loved an Owens […]

Hard to really make a successful prequel, and this book doesn’t change my opinion of that.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0) by Suzanne Collins

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I gave in to my curiosity despite knowing this probably would not be a satisfying read, and it went about as well as I expected it to. A misfire for me. (I was going to round up to three stars, but one thing annoyed me a great deal even beyond what I expected, so rounding down to two.) I really wasn’t going to read this*, but then I read in several reviews that part of it was about how the Hunger Games itself evolved and […]

Five novellas smooshed together. Still not sure about this author or this series.

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The Assassin’s Blade is a compilation of five interrelated novellas that take place about a year before the first book in this series, Throne of Glass. Each one can be read separately, but work best together, showing how the infamous assassin Celaena Sardothien went from being rich, spoiled and deadly, to being a slave in the salt mines of Endovier. These five novellas go a long way towards rectifying one of the main complaints I had with that first book, namely that we were shown […]

Confessions of a teen assassin

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The Assassin’s Blade is a collection of 5 prequel novellas about the year in Celaena Sardothian’s life that took her from the King of the Assassin’s heir apparent to a prisoner in a salt mine. If you want a better, more comprehensive, review (with gifs!) of each novella, please read kdm’s review. One of the things I liked best about Celaena in this collection was how teenagery she was. I liked that Maas allowed Celaena to be unlikeable, slappable and a pain in the ass […]



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