Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Old Magic in Not Too Old Times Past

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

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The Left Handed Booksellers of London sounds like an interesting premise, and thankfully one that gets pulled off reasonably well. One thing I will say right off is that it’s a lot more interesting if you know a little bit about British or Celtic folklore; I also think the 1980s setting doesn’t get enough attention and that’s a totally missed opportunity. In a lot of ways the story is pretty standard: country child comes to the big city to pursue an education and find the […]

The Neverending Battles Get Old

Black Clover vols. 28-31 by Yuki Tabata

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I hadn’t realized how long I’d kind of ignored the Black Clover manga series until I was in the library and saw that I was at least 4 volumes behind; this seems to happen with shonen fighting-based series an awful lot – the pattern of lots of fights with sudden power-ups that feel preprogrammed because the user automatically knows what and how to use the newly developed ability. I’ve gotten behind/bored with quite a few series where this happens; at least Yugi-Oh! had the sense […]

A really good fantasy debut, with one glaring flaw.

The Justice of Kings (Empire of the Wolf, #1) by Richard Swan

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This was promising! I’ve had my eye on it since it was published, and an audio sale at Libro.fm finally gave me the incentive to pick it up. I was originally reading The Pariah by Anthony Ryan at this spot in my February TBR, but listening to that book was a better sleep aid than it was a story*, and after only a couple of hours of attempting to listen, I swapped it out for this one, and that was a great decision. I particularly […]

Very Dumb Name for a Not-So Dumb Character

My Gently Raised Beast vol. 1 by Yeosulki, Teava, Early Flower

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So random mindless entertainment impulse buy at WalMart turns out to be slightly less mindless than I’d assumed. My Gently Raised Beast v.1 is about an orphan girl discovering she’s a princess when her emperor father has her brought to the palace, but given her peasant upbringing and non-noble mother, no one is nice to her. She makes friends with a kitty, who turns out to be pretty special etc. Besides the pretty standard plot, the MC’s name doesn’t get much more cliché: “Blondina” may […]

Forget Swords and Sorcery. Give Me Tea and Books Instead.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

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One’s the most powerful mage in the world.  The other is personal bodyguard to the queen.  And really all the two of them want to is run off and open a store that sells books and serves tea.  That’s easier said than done though. The characters are fantastic, all of them.  Reyna and Kianthe the main leads were a fantastic pair, and the supporting cast is just as good.  There are a lot of found family vibes that I really enjoy, and the way that […]

“This is the year where if you are not careful, you could stand to lose it all. There will be one pregnancy, one funeral, and one marriage. A complete turn around the sun by the next Lunar year. But you must fix your relationship with everyone. And I mean everyone in your family. Starting with your daughters.”

The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh

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This was a fun one. The author has said in interviews that she wanted to portray the complexities of Vietnamese American/diaspora relationships between women, and she wanted the women to be messy and make mistakes and have a really hard time not making the same mistakes again and again. So she wrote about a family of cursed Vietnamese women! From the blurb: “Everyone in Orange County’s Little Saigon knew that the Duong sisters were cursed. It started with their ancestor, Oanh, who dared to leave […]



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