Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

World Cold and Hard, Legends & Lattes Soft and Warm

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

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There’s something delightful about a story with low stakes. So often stories set in fantasy worlds have so much at stake that the quiet moments can be lost, the fates of the kingdom or the world taking over. Legends & Lattes is all about the quiet moments, of the therapeutic joy of brewing a cup of coffee. It’s also about the joy of making something with people you care about, and dare I say it, of chosen family. Not that the last part is super […]

Pre-Murderbot Martha Wells is worth checking out, but it’s not really like any other fantasy I’ve read.

The Serpent Sea (The Books of the Raksura, #2) by Martha Wells

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This is a good series, it’s just not attention grabbing in a month (May) when I had six five-star reads. I’m gonna keep going with the series, though, and definitely on audio! Martha Wells’ writing in this series is just so much more subtle than it is in my previous experience with her work, that featuring the lovely curmudgeon Murderbot. The world the Raksurans live in is also extremely alien, with sometimes completely different cultural mores and practices, not to mention physiological differences. Luckily our […]

“I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions—much good it did me.”

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel

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I think it was probably a little unfair of me to go into this one with super high expectations as I almost did, thanks to the Circe comparisons, so luckily I curbed those as best I could before I actually started the book. That turned out to be a very good idea. I think going in with no expectations is probably the best way to experience this one. I was also almost completely unfamiliar with the Ramayana before reading this book, and that held until about […]

Do I like YA fantasy again???

This Vicious Grace (The Last Finestra, #1) by Emily Thiede

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Thanks to Macmillan Audio, Macmillan Young Readers, and NetGalley for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review. Well, this was an impulse request on NetGalley, and despite some complaints (mostly centered around this being a debut, I think), overall I did like this and I will be reading the sequel. The premise here is that our main character Alessa is a Chosen One, but she’s kinda sucky at it, and she’s lonely and miserable. She is the Finestra (Italian for “Window,” which […]

“So you just live quietly with these powers? Haven’t you ever wondered why you have them? Suleiman’s eye . . . you could be overthrowing governments, and instead you steal from peasants!”

The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy, #1) by S.A. Chakraborty

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Yet another book I don’t want to review because I put off writing the review so long that I’ve forgotten details of the book and what I wanted to say about it, if I ever knew. Mostly I’m just mad I didn’t read this sooner, although now I don’t have to wait in between books if I don’t want to. (I don’t want to, but I can’t manage to fit the second book into my OCD color-coded TBR—don’t ask, it’s too complicated to explain—and also! […]

Times are changing and not for the better

Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett

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CBR Bingo 3: Time Shorefall is the middle part of a trilogy and you can definitely tell; everything goes from bad to worse for nearly everyone, good and bad. The time element actually has several applications here: first, there’s a race against time as the good guys Sancia, Gregor, Orso, and Berenice try to stop the return of first hierophant Crasedes who is probably mega-evil, and when that doesn’t work, they discover Crasedes might be able to use scriving to manipulate time, or he’s somehow […]



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