Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Politically topical and relevant but did it stray from what the first novel set up?

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

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I feel like I am the odd one out because I didn’t like this one as much as the previous one. Not sure if I had certain expectations for this novel and the fact that Bennett took a different approach colored my reaction or if it was something else entirely. It’s also why it’s taken me 2 months to even want to try to tackle this review. I wonder how much this is the novel he had originally intended to write when he started his […]

Vampires and Demons and Fae, Oh My!

Sparrowhawk by Delilah S. Dawson, Rebecca Nalty (Primary Contributor), Matias Basla (Illustrator)

A Vampire in the Bathhouse by Niko Izuki

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Sparrowhawk by Delilah S. Dawson, Rebecca Nalty (Primary Contributor), Matias Basla (Illustrator) – 3 stars The illegitimate daughter of a naval captain, Artemisia has always been out of place in her family and English high society alike. But when she’s yanked through a mirror into a dark realm, she will have to fight for a way back home if she means to save everyone. With the explosion of fae in popular literature in the last decade or so, I feel like they’ve generally lost their […]

Gettin’ some lovin’

Young Men in Love: New Romance by Various

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Young Men in Love: New Romance by Anthony Oliveira, Joe Glass, Matt Miner (these two are highlighted as they are the ones in the email that included an online reader link), Luciano Vecchio, Bradley Clayton, Ilias Kyriazis, David Brame, Josh Cornillon and various others, came to me via an email from A Wave Blue World and Diamond Book Distributors. The email itself (which I assume was sent via a mailing list) was from Jesse who has sent other emails for the books they rep. And […]

I really did want to like this!

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

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hot take I think I just can’t read YA anymore. they all seem to be written (if you excuse the generalities and stereotyping) for a generation incapable of patience in pacing, and so there’s no end of exposition dumping that has to happen asap…well before we care about anyone or anything in the book. There are so many shortcuts used here to try and get us to empathize with Bree despite having known her for about ten seconds and being way more confused (as, I […]

Prophecy, gods and a shield maiden

A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L Jensen

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Ugh. I know the author’s other work is a 5 book series so I had assumed that this, too, was setting up a longer series and then discovered halfway through when looking up the sequel that it was the first of a duology. Based on what happens in book 1, I’m very much thinking this story would have been better served as a stand alone novel. Here is the thing – it’s hard to write a story that has a twist that is going to […]

Magic school from a fresh perspective

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

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Emily Tesh is one of those authors that I’ve been meaning to try for quite some time and just have somehow never gotten around to. I recently got approved for an ARC (obligatory this hasn’t impacted the contents of this review, etc.) for her recently released novel, The Incandescent, so I figured this was a good place to start with her work. Set at a boarding school that teaches magic (not a magic boarding school, it’s just one more subject for students, along with more […]



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