Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I’m So Done with This Series

The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life, vol. 5 by Usata Nonohara

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I totally only read this book to finish the story; I’d kind of given up on The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life but I wanted to see how the main group of heroes would save the day as they inevitably would (and did). One of the only reasons this conclusion to the question of will they be bale to defeat the Labyrinth and how isn’t a bad finish is because there’s not much of either Mariela or Sieg. Throughout the […]

Fantastic second book!

The Bone Shard Emperor by Andrea Stewart

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[review contains references and spoilers for Bone Shard Daughter, book one of The Drowning Empire trilogy] After defeating her father, Lin hoped taking over as emperor would be a smooth transition, but no one knows who she is and don’t trust the Sukai family after the terrors of tithing festivals and constructs. But with Jovis, who has become a folk hero, at her side she decides to travel across the empire to announce the ending of tithings, return everyone’s bone shards, and try to get […]

Witches, demons and cops

Black Magick Vol 3: Ascension 1 by Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott

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I reviewed the first two volumes of Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott’s Black Magick series for Cannonball 10. Given the gap in time, I did a quick reread so that I could remember what was going on for this third volume. This series is pretty cool, dealing with police work and witchcraft/demons. The main character Rowan Black is a witch and police detective who finds her worlds colliding when a series of murders seems to indicate the presence of dark forces that are coming for Rowan […]

“Funny who gets to call themselves a hero, too.”

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach

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I don’t even know how to begin describing this book. It’s like mashing a noir detective novel with a queer pirate fantasy and adding in a dash of horror. It’s weird and sort of wonderful and while parts didn’t work for me, the ones that did worked really, really well. While this is the first in a series, enough is resolved to give it a very satisfactory ending. Yat lived on the streets of Hainak after the death of her father, and joined the police […]

“Who knows upon what soil they fed/ Their hungry thirsty roots?”

Goblin Market by Diane Zahler

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But Lizzie was speechless. She simply held up the hairbrush, clumps of yellow hair dangling from it. Minka screamed, clapping her hands to her head. But it was too late. Much of her hair had separated from her scalp, and it lay in a mound in Lizzie’s lap, like a fairy-tale pile of straw that had been spun into gold. Lizzie is shy and nervous, but when her sister Minka falls prey to a mysterious boy at the marketplace and his strange fruit, she must […]

Which World is Really the Game?

Noble Roots by Drew Hayes

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One of my least favorite fantasy adventure tropes is the tournament arc; often there’s virtually no plot, no character development, just a lot of fights with miraculous and/or unexpected power-ups. About half of Drew Haye’s Noble Roots, books 5 of the Spells, Swords, & Stealth series, goes here. I suppose it was kind of inevitable that this happen since the series is based on two premises: what happens when you focus on the NPCs in a D&D-style game and their lives when they aren’t interacting […]



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