Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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I (mostly) liked this series

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard

Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

Queen Song by Victoria Aveyard

Steel Scars by Victoria Aveyard

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The Red Queen series is great for young adult readers who are maybe not quite grown enough for Game of Thrones but love a fantasy adventure involving royal intrigue and superpowers. The first in this series is Red Queen. Mare Barrow is a teenage pickpocket, stealing in the marketplace of her town to help support her family. They are ‘Reds’, an oppressed class of citizens ruled by ‘Silvers’. The designations are due to the colors of the group’s blood. Reds have red blood and work as a […]

Rolling in with a late Cannonball on a hate read

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So, about three weeks before starting Red Queen, I finished a book called Morning Star, the final book of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising trilogy. That series was about a class of humans called Reds who had been born into slavery, in a society that coded humans by color and where each color was assigned a particular role in Society, with Golds on top. The protagonist, Darrow, infiltrated the Golds with the aim of initiating a revolution that would hopefully lead to a more equal society. […]

Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for

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I forgot that I finished this book. I’d been dragging my way through it, reading it only because the library was going to take it back, but then The Raven King came out and then my request for Eligible came in and I started and stopped The Glass Sword so many times that I briefly considered just not picking it back up. But I hate that. So I guess I finished it? But I had to read some spoilery reviews on Goodreads to remind myself […]

Talk less, smile more

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I was hesitant to read yet another YA novel about a young woman thrust into a new, impossible situation (mostly because I’m fairly certain that’s almost all of what I’ve read so far this year) but I was so happy with this one. Which is weird to say now, because up until the last few chapters or so, I was beginning to wonder why everyone loved this book so much. (Spoiler alert: I didn’t LOVE LOVE it, at least not upon first finishing it (maybe […]

When Books Make You Throw Them

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Late last year I read the first book in Aveyard’s series about a young girl with extraordinary abilities. Because this is the sequel, there will be spoilers for the first book. If you plan on picking up this series (and I recommend doing that), then I would skip this review and go right to reading! Mare has such a fun story, one that I think greatly improved with this second book. I thought this was only a two-book series, and when I got to the end of […]

Still bummed that it’s not Alice in Wonderland-related

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I borrowed this one from the library because I’ve seen it on tons of “best of” lists lately (I think Goodreads was the final push for me). While I can see how this could develop into a successful series a la Hunger Games (and isn’t that every YA author’s dream right now?), it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. “In the fairy tales, the poor girl smiles when she becomes a princess. Right now, I don’t know if I’ll ever smile again.” Mare Barrow is a Red […]



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