Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: ya fantasy

I hope you die, I hope we both die

The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

by 7 Comments

This book surprised me. For about the first 100 pages or so, I was sure I wasn’t going to like it and may not even finish it. But eventually it pulled me in and I found myself pretty caught up in the story. The protagonist of The Cruel Prince is a teenager named Jude, a human who lives in Faerie with her human twin sister Taryn and their fairy half-sister, Vivi. They live with Vivi’s father, who is wrapped up in the various intrigues and violence of […]

Chainsaw <3

The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1) by Maggie Stiefvater

by 6 Comments

If someone had told me ten years ago that this book featured an emotionally turbulent teenaged boy hand-raising a baby female raven whom he has inexplicably named after a deadly tree-felling instrument, I would have read it a hell of a lot sooner. As it is, though, I’m glad I haven’t been spoiled for anything in this series. I really enjoyed my time with this first book, also my first book by this author. I think I had been avoiding it because I didn’t want […]

Lyrical prose, historical setting, and a fairytale feel mesh well together

A Rush of Wings by Laura E. Weymouth

by Leave a Comment

A Rush of Wings is YA fantasy author Laura E. Weymouth’s most recent book (with a gorgeous cover in a different style than her other equally gorgeous covers). In many ways it resembles her second book, A Treason of Thorns in its historical setting (this time the Scottish highlands) more than her first, The Light Between Worlds, but there is some shared DNA with that one too, especially in its protagonist. While The Light Between Worlds offered a sort of justice for the Narnia character Susan Pevensie, […]

“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.”

The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air, #1) by Holly Black

by 2 Comments

This one was fine! I liked the ending much better than I liked the first third or so. It was just, it was a lot of dramadrama, lots of characters, court politics, feelings, like a fairyland prime-time soap opera, and there’s a reason I don’t watch those anymore. But I did get pulled in as soon as Jude and Cardan started to interact more in a real way, because I am nothing if not a sucker for well-done enemies to lovers, and that part of […]

“Shakespeare knew too much.”

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

by 2 Comments

I really had a good time with this one. I didn’t realize it was YA going in, but while it did lean into YA sensibilities at points, mostly it just felt like a kooky magical adventure story. It was very hard to put down, and I found myself constantly wondering what would happen next, which doesn’t really happen all that often to me anymore because I read so much (usually for me these days I vacillate between “I pretty much know what’s coming” because I’m […]

“I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway.”

The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2) by Naomi Novik

by 10 Comments

Yet another great book I’ve read this year that I really just do not want to write a review for, because it means having to find the words and think thoughts and all that stuff. I always have the most trouble with books I love and give five stars to. It’s always like, HOW DO I CONVEY THIS FEELING which morphs into I DON’T EVEN WANT TO TRY with some whining in there for good measure. I really liked the first book in this series […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo