Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The best fantasy has dragons

The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

The Bloodless Princes by Charlotte Bond

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I came across The Fireborne Blade at the library, and between it being a novella (tis the season (IYKYK) lol) and having a dragon on the cover, I took a closer look. I’m so glad I picked this up, and between picking it up and starting it, I swung by the library again and happened to see the sequel, The Bloodless Princes (it was one of those “why is this look familiar? Oh! Same series!” moments). The Fireborne Blade does a lot of typical dragon […]

Marvel Fatigue?

What If… Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were Siblings? by Seanan McGuire

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I don’t know her.  Marvel has had me in their grip since I was a little smidge reading Power Pack. I’ve seen every movie and show except, ironically, the animated What If… series. I might have to rectify that now. When I saw Seanan McGuire was the author. I could not resist. She knows Marvel and most especially the Spiderverse. The story basically flows right from the title. We meet Wanda as a young adult wishing to join the Avengers, and then spin back in […]

Out of the Mouths of Nursemaids and Travelers

The Watkins Book of English Folktales by Neil Philip

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England has a great culture of letters, but when it comes to folklore, people often don’t think further than Jack and the Beanstalk. In this collection of English folktales though, we can see that the isles have a great tradition of oral storytelling beyond it. In my ongoing pursuit of folklore from around the world, I never really stopped to consider English folktales until this book reminded me that my knowledge of it was in fact pretty scanty. Over the course of about 400 pages, […]

Lost in Translation

Babel by R.F. Kuang

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After reading and enjoying the Poppy War trilogy, I was excited to see a new book by R.F. Kuang. I found the world of Babel intriguing right away. It is mostly set in Victorian era England, but where much of the technological progress of the industrial revolution has been replaced by a form of magic imbued into silver bars. The people working the magic into the silver are the translators of Oxford University. They work on finding translations of words from various languages into English, […]

More Pirates than Tea or Tomes

A Pirate's Life for Tea by Rebecca Thorne

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Teas and Tomes is officially a series. I saw the sequel to Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea, A Pirate’s Life for Tea at the airport, and it’s a decent light travel/beach/need a mental break read. There’s two plot threads: first, Reyna and Kianthe have to find the dragon eggs they promised to find in the first book, and second (during that investigation) they get involved in local politics by agreeing to capture a river pirate who has been annoying the local diarn Arlon. Naturally, things […]

Another okay book in a series I keep going back to

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

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This is book nine in the Wayward Children Series, a series of books about children who have found portals into alternate worlds that can be the stuff of nightmares or dreams, depending on the child. A good thing about this series is that you could probably read the books out of order, since they deal with different children and worlds. But there are recurring characters and themes throughout, which might be lost by going out of order. This book is about Antsy, who has a […]



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