Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The concept is better than the execution

The School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani

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Official book description: The first kidnappings happened two hundred years before. Some years it was two boys taken, some years two girls, sometimes one of each. But if at first the choices seemed random, soon the pattern became clear. One was always beautiful and good, the child every parent wanted as their own. The other was homely and odd, an outcast from birth. An opposing pair, plucked from youth and spirited away. This year, best friends Sophie and Agatha are about to discover where all […]

Magic and War Collide

The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden

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I loved the first novel in this trilogy because for me it was the perfect mix of fairy tale magic with some real life politics mixed in.  By focusing on the story of a young girl in her village, the novel had a nice intimate setting even as it dealt with a figurative battle between good and evil, the old ways and the new.  The greater politics opened up the potential for a broader scale in the rest of the trilogy, and I think that […]

Once Upon a Time, a Girl Lost Herself

Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly

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I picked this up due to crystalclear’s review, and since I have a weakness for fairy tale retellings.  Stepsister takes place after the prince has chosen Ella, and taken her away from home to marry her.  Her stepmother and stepsisters are left behind in a village where they are now hated for their abuse of the country’s future queen. Donnelly decided to use the Grimm’s version of the fairy tale as her starting base so Tavi (Octavia), the older sister, and Izzy (Isabelle), the main […]

“The fairy silver brought you a monster of fire for a husband, and me a monster of ice.” (Bingo)

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

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#CBR11 Bingo: Listicle (on a bunch of best of 2018 lists, including NPR, Bustle and Bookbub). Would also work for “Award Winner”, as it’s won a Locus Award, and ALA Award and an Audie, or “Remix”, as it’s a fairy tale retelling. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of Jewish moneylenders, but her father is a dreadful one, who doesn’t have the heart to actually claim back the debts that the villagers owe, even when his daughter is starving and the long, cold winters are making his wife sicker and […]

Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad … Detective?

Fables: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham

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Bingo Square: Illustrated I admit, I’d been kind of holding off on the Illustrated category because if it hadn’t been its own square, graphic novels could have easily been my “Not in My Wheelhouse” square.  I figured I’d probably do one of the ones dealing with issues, like Persepolis or Maus, but after Behold the Dreamers, I needed a nice, entertaining read as a palate cleanser.  The two graphic novel series that have stuck in my head after countless positive CBR reviews were Fables and […]

Silver in more ways than one

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

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Bingo Review 6 (Remix) I am loving this Bingo thing; it’s forcing me to pick up things I’ve been wanting to read but have hesitated to start for various reasons. Spinning Silver is one of these books. I really loved Naomi Novik’s Uprooted fairy tale retelling, and Spinning Silver does a lot of the same things. The biggest change though is also my biggest complaint. Verdict: Spinning Silver is a distant silver to Uprooted‘s gold. Spinning Silver is a mix between a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin […]



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