Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

If stealing from dragons is bad, what about stealing for them?

Never Steal from Dragons by Patrick Dugan

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Never Steal From Dragons is a fun cozy sci-fi/fantasy heist adventure. A lot of the expected tropes are present: a group of very highly skilled but very different individuals are forcibly assembled by a mysterious powerful individual who wants them to steal something in return for basically making their dreams come true; it is of course an offer that cannot be refused. Chaos, clever remarks, etc. ensues. In the world of Harmony, there are any number of beings recognizable from folklore including pixies, dragons, kitsune, […]

Do you know the gingerbread man?

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

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I need to start this off by saying this book was perfect to me. Well, almost perfect, but I’m giving it a five-star review because the good outweighed my little nitpicks, and it felt like it was written directly to appeal to me. However, before I start raving about the parts of this book that just made my heart sing, I want to flag that I have read other books by T. Kingfisher, and those were for adults and a little more creepy than this […]

Hash and Rehash

Cassiel's Servant by Jacqueline Carey

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After years of training, Joscelin Verrail joins the ranks of the Cassiline Brotherhood as a celibate warrior-priest. As such, he’s displeased to find himself assigned to protect the young courtesan Phèdre, never anticipating how it’ll sweep him up into a world of danger and political intrigue. I should say off the bat that I love the Kushiel’s Legacy series, and the first book, Kushiel’s Dart, is one of my favorite books of all time. While I didn’t exactly like Joscelin when he was first introduced, […]

Witches and Demons missing a little magic

Witch King by Martha Wells

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I wanted to like Witch King so much more than I did. It’s got some good characters (maybe a few too many though), good premise, but the pacing and sense of time are so off. Demon prince and witch pal awake to find a mage trying to syphon the demon’s magic (doesn’t go well for the mage) and then go on a quest to 1) find out how/why they were trapped (and for how long), and 2) find the witch’s spouse. Demons, including Kai, are […]

The Whispering Dark Has an Interesting Concept, but Poor Execution

The Whispering Dark by Kelly Andrew

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How many times can a girl refer to herself as glass? How many times can a young man be compared to a blade of some kind? How many SAT words can you use when standard vocabulary would normally suffice? The Whispering Dark has a neat idea behind it – a Deaf girl can hear the dead – but the execution misses the mark, and badly. Delaney Meyers-Petrov (and you know her full name because various characters repeat it over and over throughout the course of […]

New Old Beginnings

The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie

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Hmmm. I dunno about this one. I mean, it’s as well-written as anything else Abercrombie has done. It moves well, the plotting’s good. But as it is the finale of a second trilogy so closely tied to the first, it leads me to have to consider everything in bulk. The problem I have with the Age of Madness trilogy was realized about halfway through this one: I don’t care about most of these characters. Oreo and Savine are fun, I guess. Vick is somewhat interesting. […]



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