Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Join Our Spoiler-Welcome Discussion of T. Kingfisher’s Books  

A Great (and Chunky) Prequel

A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon

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My first 5-star read of the year! I liked The Priory of the Orange Tree a bit more because I was 100% engaged all the way through, and with this prequel my engagement dipped occasionally, but it was still excellent. In some ways it was easier to settle into the world because we already know the basics from Priory, though there will still a lot of names and titles to adjust to. One of the things I really loved was seeing the differences between the world now […]

And Now We Check in With the Rest of Europe

The Mask Falling by Samantha Shannon

The Dark Mirror by Samantha Shannon

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Book 4: The Mask Falling Not sure why I didn’t write this one earlier in the year, since I wrote the reviews for books 1-3 fairly soon after reading. Maybe just too much of the same thing at once? This is the fourth novel of the series, and like the previous ones, this ends up expanding the world quite a bit, following Paige and Arcturus to Paris. Paige needed out of England after the last one, and she owes the organization for they help they […]

A Dark Force Rising

Among the Burning Flowers by Samantha Shannon

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Even though I enjoy everything I have read by Samantha Shannon and pre-ordered this as soon as I heard about it, I then waited till this past week to read it. I think with this universe in particular, even though Shannon very much made these novels independent enough that they don’t require reading the others to get the story, I still worry about trying to remember and fit them in the larger context before I start reading. I really am overthinking it and creating my […]

One of My Quickest and One of My Longest Reads This Year

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

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Several People Are Typing I had such a good time with this one! It’s told exclusively through Slack chat messages, which makes it a really fast read, and it is so funny. There is an ensemble cast, but Gerald is more or less the main character. He inexplicably finds his consciousness uploaded into Slack, and none of his co-workers at a PR firm believe him (understandably!) and assume he is just working from home and doing a comic bit. The main plot of the novel […]

“We cannot turn back time, but we can keep on living.”

Among the Burning Flowers: A Roots of Chaos Tale by Samantha Shannon

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(This is the third book in the series, and the second prequel.) Set a few years before The Priory of the Orange Tree, Among the Burning Flowers tells the story of how the Kingdom of Yscalin became under Draconic rule; told from the alternating points of view of Marosa, heir to the Yscali throne, her fiance Aubrecht Lievelyn of Mentendon, and Estina Melaugo, a former thief living elsewhere in Yscalin. This book proves why the Roots of Chaos series is  my preference in Samantha Shannon’s […]

“When history fails to shed light on the truth, myth creates its own.”

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

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No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough. This book is described as “Saint George and the Dragon but make it lesbian”;  I can somewhat see that. It does have basically the myth of Saint George and the Dragon at the heart of it; the Kingdom of Inys, one of the two main locales for the action, is basically founded on a variation of it, and it does certainly have lesbians in it. The basic story is that in the Kingdom […]



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