Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Magically Heartwarming

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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Crystalclear recommended The Magic Fish to me for it’s fairytales and the beautiful illustrations. And she couldn’t have been more right. Trung Le Nguyen weaves a heartwarming story of Tien and his mother, two Vietnamese immigrants living in the US who are trying to navigate language, culture, and coming of age while battling loneliness and family duty. Tien’s mother asks him to read her fairytales to help her with her English, and as they unfold, they remind her of how the fairytales are different in Vietetamese […]

Goose Girl Redux

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen

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“I think there are lives that make it easy to be good. Or what most people call good. When you have wealth, status, family, it’s easy to be a saint, it costs you nothing. I can’t say if you’re a good person or not. But the more I know of you, the more I understand that the world keeps making you choose between survival and martyrdom. No one should fault you for wanting to live.” Vanya is the goddaughter of Death and Fortune, but that […]

A lovely escape from the real world

Reflections (Indexing #2) by Seanan McGuire

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I’ve been struggling to read much this year, particularly as I’d been picking quite weighty books to plough through, so I decided it was time for some brain candy. I’ve been loving Seanan McGuire for a while now, so while waiting to get my hands on more of the Toby Daye series (the UK kindle release dates would appear to be years behind everywhere else) I decided to visit her Indexing world again. For those who are new to Indexing, we follow a team from […]

Into the Woods to Grandmother’s House and Home Before Dark

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert

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I was the kid that had the Complete Collection of Grimm’s Tales and The Illustrated Hans Christian Andersen and got really annoyed when Disney didn’t get them right. Cinderella’s sisters are supposed to mutilate their feet to try to get the shoe to fit! The witch needs to kill Snow White THREE TIMES! The Little Mermaid is supposed to die, dammit! That’s the only way the story really makes sense! Basically, I was that kid who wanted her stories dark and gorey. I have a feeling Tales […]

Me? I’d be a Sleeping Beauty. 1000 years of sleep sounds fantastic.

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Not yet able to get my hands on Night and Silence but jonesing for more Seanan McGuire, I plumped for Indexing, a book that appears to have initially been written in serialised form in which fairytales meet the X-Files. In a world where fairytales are constantly trying to force their way into real life, twisting people’s lives into forms that fit the narrative with often deadly results, it’s up to the ATI Management Bureau to step in before the ‘mimetic incursions’ can run amok. Each […]

Naomi Novik is two for two in my book (I still need to read Temeraire!!)

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I read most of this book in a day. It was so charming and lovely. In the vein of Uprooted, Spinning Silver is another loosely inspired retelling of a fairytale, this time Rumplestiltskin. I’m honestly not sure which book I liked better. It’s been a while since I read Uprooted, and this book is one of those that gets better in your head the longer you sit with it after you finish. Our Rumplestiltskin is actually one of our heroines, Miryem, the daughter of a moneylender (a historically […]



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