Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I’ll watch and I’ll wait. I’m seventeen, and I have a thousand brilliantly hued hazardous sunrises to spare.”

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid

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CBR17 Bingo: Purple – Behold, the cover. In a world consumed by debt, Inesa’s mother’s compulsive spending causes her to be selected for the Gauntlet, in which she will almost certainly be killed on live TV to wipe out what her family owes. But when Inesa and the girl assigned to kill her, Melinoe, are forced to rely on each other in the wilderness, the line between predator and prey gets blurred. This is a YA dystopian romance which is in many ways a homage […]

A Theory of Dreaming

A Theory of Dreaming by Ava Reid

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cbr17bingo: school Unfortunately, this book did not live up to the first one, A Study in Drowning, which was atmospheric and felt like it was making an important point. This one is more muddled and unfocused. The perspectives are divided between Effy and Preston, and I appreciated learning more about Preston. He and Effy have returned to their university, where they have to deal with the aftermath of their discoveries at Hiraeth, the trauma of what happened there, and Effy’s becoming the first female student […]

“And there is nothing more dangerous than a creature who pretends to be one thing and is in truth another.”

Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid

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This is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth focused on Lady Macbeth. This version is split into five acts (just like the play!), with Lady Macbeth as a 17-year-old new bride of the title character. Something I found particularly interesting is that the author chose to reflect the various languages spoken in eleventh-century Scotland, so the characters have different versions of their names depending on the language used. In the book, the main character thinks of herself as Roscille, so for the sake of this review, […]

Gothic Vibes in a Waterlogged Setting

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

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To start with, this is one of the most accurate and well-chosen titles I have seen for a book. It’s relevant on multiple levels, from the literal to the psychological to, we eventually find out, the medical. This stood out to me more than book titles typically do. Our psychologically drowning main character is Effy Sayre, the only female architecture student at a university that wouldn’t accept her to the literature college, which was where she wanted to be, because “women dumb” basically. This reflects […]

An Atmospheric Gothic Fantasy Novel That Tackles Trauma Deftly

A Study In Drowning by Ava Reid

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CW: Stalking Effy Sayre has always found escape in the works of Emrys Myrddin.  It’s been one of the few things that’s kept the architecture student going.  So when the family of the recently deceased Myrddin announces a contest to redesign the author’s family estate, Effy can’t help but enter.  And when her design is picked it seems like fate.  Once she arrives at Hiraeth Manor, she finds a crumbling disaster as well as an unwelcome companion in a literature student invited there by Myrddin’s […]

“A romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily.”

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

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This was really good but I can’t give it a full five stars for one reason. More on that reason below. But first! I enjoyed this so much! I said this in a status update while reading, but it was such a relief to have a YA book tackle what this book is trying to tackle* and have it SUCCEED instead of falling down on its face. Ava Reid, like her or not, is really talented. There are of course going to be people that […]



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