Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary.

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

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The second book in the Six of Crows duology is the best book that I have read this year. Now, I REALLY want Bardugo to go back and rewrite the Shadow and Bone books. I want to care about those characters the way that I care about these crazy kids. The, ahem, bones are there in the Shadow and Bonebooks but the depth of the characters is not. I understand that Bardugo grew as a writer but the difference between the first trilogy and this duology is startling. The misfits from Six of […]

I will have you without armor…Or I will not have you at all.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

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Okay. This cannot be the same person that wrote the Shadow and Bone trilogy. It just cannot be. While I did like those books, I didn’t love those books. I adore this one. Honestly, I decided to read this first book in the Six of Crows duology just to catch up before watching the Netflix show which apparently blends both series. I had read that these books were better but was flabbergasted by how much better. I don’t mean to harp on Bardugo here but where was this level of writing in the trilogy? […]

“We knew it was coming, but we behaved inconsistently.”

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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Reading Emily St. John Mandel is like falling asleep to the sound of rain: The words wash over you and a steady drumbeat of beauty lulls you into something like perfect contentment. Just reading the loveliness of her sentences would be enough, but then she continues to dazzle by leading your thoughts into new possibilities about the universe, as your mind is apt to drift to questions of cosmic import in the moments before sleep, while those steady drops beat against your windowpane. It’s hard […]

This will be a short review considering the length of the book

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

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I started reading this series during the early days of the pandemic, and it’s proven to be satisfying, escapist fun for me. I stumbled upon this latest entry in one of my local Little Free Libraries, so I decided to read it before CBR BINGO hits, because at 927 pages, there’s no way I was going to let it eat up prime BINGO scoring time. That said, I’m going to write this review in list form of likes and dislikes. Dislikes: 927 pages. There is […]

“Words are our tools of resurrection.”

The Dictionary of Lost Words: A Novel by Pip Williams

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I would not have expected the story of the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary to be a gripping topic for a novel, but I stand corrected. Pip Williams’ historical fiction encompasses not only the work of compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary but also events of historic importance that occurred during that same time period— WWI and the women’s suffrage movement. Many of the characters in this novel are real people, such as Dr. James Murray and Edith Thompson, but through the main […]

Beautiful story of sexual identity awakening and first love

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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And then she asked the question that had taken root in her, that was even now unfurling its leaves and demanding to be shown the sun: “Have you ever heard of such a thing?” Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a beautiful glimpse into a moment in time of a sexual identity awareness and first love, amidst the Red Scare of McCarthyism in 1950’s San Francisco.  Sexual feelings awaken for the first time within Lily Hu but everything she has been taught says it […]



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