Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I’m basically Reviewer 2 here with this so bear with me

Shadow of Night (All Souls #2) by Deborah Harkness

The Book of Life (All Souls #3) by Deborah Harness

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I didn’t quite make the comparison when I read A Discovery of Witches, the first book in the All Souls Trilogy, but after finishing the set it’s obvious: these are books that are pitched toward fans of Outlander (or books like Outlander that fill in the spaces between major plot twists with lots and lots and lots of small expository details.) It’s probably not a coincidence that Deborah Harkness and Diana Gabaldon both have doctorates and both brought a very academic sensibility to their fiction […]

“Sparing another person is a tricky thing. It’s easy to think you’re succeeding when you’re failing spectacularly.”

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

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I like Holly Black’s writing. She she sets books in, basically, our real world with fantasy tweaks, and the stories are unapologetically confident in defense of myth and magic. The Darkest Part of the Forest is set in and around an ordinary town called Fairfold with a supernatural attraction: there is a faerie boy trapped and hibernating in an unbreakable glass coffin in the forest, symbolic of the town’s close proximity to the Fae people. Generations of residents have built lore around the boy and […]

I believe the woman behind the case study, but she’s not unimpeachable

Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey

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What an interesting book this is, and what a challenge to review, given how I came away from it. Anna Lyndsey’s story is that after decades of normal living, she slowly becomes so sensitive to light — both natural and artificial — that she ends up confined to a completely blacked-out room in the home she shares with her husband. Girl in the Dark focuses mostly on her declining health and the time that she spent at her lowest, while she lived in complete darkness […]

The academic research paper of fiction

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

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For a book that seemed to be received so positively initially, around the time of release, it seems like all I’ve read lately are reviews that are disappointed by how boring it is and confused by why it was so well-liked. You might say my expectations were pretty low. So I had to laugh as I realized I was enjoying it. A Discovery of Witches is EXCESSIVELY academic. Not just in the subject matter, which obviously is, but in the whole tone and writing approach. […]

Rolling in with a late Cannonball on a hate read

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So, about three weeks before starting Red Queen, I finished a book called Morning Star, the final book of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising trilogy. That series was about a class of humans called Reds who had been born into slavery, in a society that coded humans by color and where each color was assigned a particular role in Society, with Golds on top. The protagonist, Darrow, infiltrated the Golds with the aim of initiating a revolution that would hopefully lead to a more equal society. […]

Bee biology re-imagined through the language of human dystopia

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The Bees is a very weird and cool book that’s a third-person narrative of a literal bee, navigating the dystopian politics of her hive. There are a lot of tropes in here that are not exactly unique to this book among the glut of other dystopian fiction, but the framing of the insect colony is novel. While, naturally, some liberties are taken with facts, the structure and major events of the novel are based on known entomology of bees and how hives operate. All that […]



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