Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I had rather face wild beasts and diseases than the perils of civilization.”

Voyage of the Basilisk (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #3) by Marie Brennan

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This series is a nerdy good time. And this book in particular really leaned into the scholarly nature of Lady Trent’s calling. The last book, a lot of page-time was taken up by Lady Trent and her companions navigating local and global politics while trying to learn about dragons, and while that is a factor here, too, Voyage of the Basilisk feels more balanced, with a focus more clearly on her science and what she got up to while doing it, and also on her personal relationships […]

Look, I just want to give this author five stars but he makes it so difficult!

The Tyranny of Faith (Empire of the Wolf, #2) by Richard Swan

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Look, I may feel differently upon re-read, but this author cannot write romance to save his life. Both of these books so far have been made worse by his efforts in that department. His instincts are all wrong. In the first book, it was an underdeveloped and ill-advised “romance” between our narrator, Helena, the apprentice of famed Justice Sir Konrad Vonvalt, and some village rube who had zero personality. Here, it’s between Helena and Vonvalt himself and just UGH. NO. WHY. Luckily the romance never […]

Amazing fantasy!

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

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I’ve had Black Sun on my radar since it was first announced, especially with how much I adored Roanhorse’s debut, Trail of Lightening. Her world building and character development always has me enthralled and I find it nigh impossible to put her books down. Black Sun was no different. Note, I read via audio, and if that’s a format that jives with your brain I highly recommend it! Black Sun follows four main protagonists – Serapio, a young man blinded and scarred who is the […]

“Home is a choice and sometimes a hard one. What you choose to accept. What you embrace.”

Lute by Jennifer Marie Thorne

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Nina Treadway is the lady of Lute, but she’s only lived there for seven years, since she got married to Hugh. As a foreigner, she doesn’t believe in the island’s day of the tithe, but as things start going wrong all around her, she wonders if it might be more than a superstition. Folk horror! A mysterious day of human sacrifice as an island extracts the price of its bounty from its residents! An American abroad! And that cover is so very beautiful, and so […]

Cat Transformations and Found Family

Spell Bound by FT Lukens

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Rook has a secret – he’s non-magical, yet a powerful sorcerer has taken him on as her apprentice. But when the Magical Consortium comes down on them for breaking the law, he ends up going on the run with Sun, the apprentice of a rival sorcerer. I  read FT Lukens’s So This is Ever After last year, which I gave an A for the romance but found the other aspects of the story less impressive. But I’ll try most things twice, and intrigued by the […]

Sigh…Vampires

No Dominion by Charlie Huston

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On Goodreads, there is a reviewer named Kemper (an alias). He has since retired, which is a shame because I love his reviews. He enjoys a lot of the same crime fiction I do. Anyway, Kemper had this tic I once found annoying in that he would write reviews by doing faux interviews with the authors of the books he read. He usually did this when he read something that wasn’t so good. I preferred reading his regular reviews. However, as I’ve written so many […]



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