Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Gateway Bingo Square: The Cousins

The Cousins by Karen M. McManus

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I’m using this as my GATEWAY square for bingo, because I think it’s a great place to jump into the world of YA teen intrigue and Karen M. McManus in general.  I’m familiar with McManus’s work because of One of Us is Lying, which I very much enjoyed. I haven’t yet watched the series, but that one book was enough for me to want to read more.  The Cousins follows the tradition of teens solving a mystery on an island. It’s almost gothic in the […]

Is this the final Grishaverse book? I hope not

Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo

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4.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Fauna (dragon, wolf, falcon and fox on the cover) In this second part of the King of Scars duology, the stakes are ridiculously high, pretty much as soon as we start off. The book starts pretty much immediately after the end of King of Scars, and if you’re not caught up with all the books in the Grishaverse so far, this review will probably spoil things for you. Continue at your own risk. Nikolai Lantsov has made some peace with the […]

Still not entirely sure what is going on in this story, but it’s an intriguing set-up

Paper Girls, vol 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

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3.5 stars CBR13 Bingo: Gateway It’s just after Halloween 1988, and four 12-year-old newspaper delivery girls have a very unusual night, full of surprises, peril, and unexpected occurrences. I went into Paper Girls knowing literally nothing about it except that it was written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, both artists whose work I’ve liked in the past. Did I know it was set in the late 1980s? Nope. Did I know the protagonists were pre-teens? Big old no. Had I given […]

“We’re not meant to all survive, anyway. The school had to be fed somehow.”

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

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CBRBingo: New Series, Pandemic I loved A Deadly Education so much I preordered The Last Graduate so I could read it on the Australian release day.  Luckily for me I had only a few days to wait. The Scholomance is such a great setting.  A school without teachers, created to keep young magicians safe from the magical creatures that can’t resist the lure of people old enough to be full of tasty mana, but too inexperienced to properly defend themselves yet. A school that is […]

“Once we’re seen … we want to be remembered”

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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CBRBingo: Rec’d This book was not recommended to me by any one Cannonballer, but by the collective.  I was intrigued when I read the 2020 book club discussion post – a book so loved by Cannonballers it was being revisited, and also coincidentally resonant with the then new pandemic.  As the reviews came in I checked them out, and also looked back to the 2015 batch. Emmalita described it as a story of loss, meaning and human connection. MarkAbaddon spoke of resilience and our collective […]

A timely mystery written over 50 years ago

The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side by Agatha Christie

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The Mirror Crack’d is a Miss Marple mystery, and while I generally prefer Hercule Poirot, this is a story that made quite an impression on me when I first read it as a kid. I have thought of it often over the years but especially over the past few years for reasons that I cannot divulge since it would totally spoil the mystery. Let’s just say it’s timely and a fun, quick read. Christie published this story in 1962 and it has gotten the film/TV […]



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