Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I exist as either a small canid with thick fur, pointed ears, and neat black feet, or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by men.

The Fox Wife by Yangtze Choo

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CBR 17 BINGO: Review (see ElCicco’s 2024 review) BINGO: Review, Purple, I, Red, Borrow When I started seeing reviews for The Fox Wife last year, I was intrigued. It wasn’t until I finally picked up a copy from my library that I realized the author is the same person who wrote The Ghost Bride, which I read and enjoyed back in 2014. Now I was really excited. The Fox Wife is a lovely and heartbreaking novel that borrows from Chinese mythology around foxes. Taking place […]

Insert gif of Fred Willard saying ‘Wha’ Happened?’ here.

Dark Star Burning, Ash Falls White (Song of the Last Kingdom, #2) by Amélie Wen Zhao

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Wow, what happened? I should probably say up front that I genuinely do not know how much of my negative experience reading this book was me, and how much was the book. I really liked the first book in this duology, but within about five pages of this one, I had completely turned on it. I really, really did not care what was happening, and trying to read it after that feeling appeared felt like I was torturing myself. FYI I did end up speed […]

Magical Tea Mystery

A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy I. Lin

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I like the story, the characters, and the loose historical basis, but I don’t quite get how the magic fits into things in A Magic Steeped in Poison. Working with tea and medicinal plants certainly can involve the potential for poison, but I wish there was more detail about how the magic that can allow for tea to be used for emotions, healing, or telling the future worked. I’d settled for a little more about the historical aspect of traditional Chinese medicine; there’s an index […]

Natalie Naudus saved me on this one.

Heart of the Sun Warrior (The Celestial Kingdom Duology, #2) by Sue Lynn Tan

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Last year I got into a really bad habit of not only buying pretty much every first book in a series that looked good to me, but oftentimes buying the sequel as well. That is what I did for this series. I was so convinced I would love it, I overcommitted. When I finally got around to reading the first book, Daughter of the Moon Goddess, in January, I had a tough time getting through it. Something about the pacing and the writing style did […]

“We should appreciate the flower, regardless of its roots.”

Daughter of the Moon Goddess (The Celestial Kingdom Duology, #1) by Sue Lynn Tan

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I need to write this review now or I will never come back to it (see below). But I will keep it short! I liked this book a lot, but not as much as I wanted to. The story was great, the world was imaginative , and I liked the characters (though the way the worldbuilding was introduced could have been much clearer; I was well into the book before I felt like I understood where the characters were and what their world looked like). […]

“Not running from your emotions is a sign of strength:” Life Lessons from Hell

Hell's Paradise Vol 1-13 by Yuji Kaku

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CBR14Bingo: Monster — many of the characters are seen as monsters and they also fight monsters The story of my struggle to get all thirteen of these volumes would drag on too long, but sufficed to say that the paper shortage and resultant out of print plague striking manga has affected us all and I had to wait over a month for the tenth volume to show up. What I really liked about this series was that it’s complete and thirteen volumes is a satisfying […]



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