Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

There was a game he could see and another he couldn’t, and he would play them both.

Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington

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My formative King Arthur works were the 1963 Disney movie The Sword in the Stone, and 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When I discovered Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, as a preteen, my life as a reader of fantasy and romance was set. I’m a King Arthur enthusiast, but not a purist (except for Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur – great cast, beautiful visuals, terrible movie that should never have been marketed as “historically accurate”). Hearing that a work is a retelling of […]

Power of the Greenwitch, lost beneath the sea…

Greenwich by Susan Cooper

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In 2020, I started an occasional readathon I participate in – The Dark is Rising readathon, which is a seasonal reread of my favorite book series! Basically, we read the series on its own timeline, taking on each book in the season it’s set. And so I reread the first book in 2020 summer (Over Sea and Under Stone) and reviewed it here, and then I am pretty sure I reread the second book at Christmas (The Dark is Rising) but forgot to review it. […]

cbr12bingo – Red!

Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch

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Every entry into Rivers of London starts with a splash; we are always diving head-first, sometimes literally, into rivers of blood. Every delightful cover, all done by Patrick Knowles, is a map with a big, red, bloody “X” marking the spot. Every cover is a map, every map is filled with teensy tiny detail, and every seemingly unrelated sketch or nursery rhyme lyric builds together into the marvelous mess that is London. I love his minute details; I feel like I’m looking at a Where’s Waldo illustration for […]

“In the name of King Arthur, and of the old world before the dark came.”

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

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CBRBingo11 – Back to School! I’ve read this book about 800 times. The first time I read it was with my fifth grade class, and I’ll forever thank Mrs Cook for introducing us to this wonderful story. I blasted through the rest of the five-book “sequence” after that and it remains my favorite middle grade series (before middle grade was a thing). This year I am participating once again in the Dark is Rising readathon  and so it also made sense for this to be […]

The King Arthur Legend Grounded in Historical Reality

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Bingo Square: Throwback Thursday I originally read this novel, and the rest of the trilogy it belongs to, over a decade ago when I was in Iraq.  It was a gift from the same friend that turned to me onto A Game of Thrones, and I had fond memories of this take on the Arthurian legend that mostly attempts to be grounded in reality. As a historical fiction nerd, I can definitely see why this approach appealed to me, especially since it leaned heavily on […]

This is what KA demands.

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I couldn’t tell you whether it’s because I have finally given in to this journey, or whether it’s that the telling gets stronger as King’s writing matures, but riding this wave has become comfortable, easy, and more and more thrilling. I probably should (but choose not to) brace myself for the next book, Wolves of Calla (Book 5), because this one, The Wind Through the Keyhole (Book 4.5) was written eight years after the final book of the “The Dark Tower” series. I had a choice to […]



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