Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Sweet Spin on Shakespeare

Midsummer's Mayhem by Rajani LaRocca

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I am a regular listener of the podcast The Worst Bestsellers. While the hosts often read and make gentle fun of some very popular books, they also recommend books to read instead of the bestseller. This book was recommended and I really enjoyed it. Midsummer’s Mayhem is a cute confection of a book for readers ages 8-12 and loosely follows the plot of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mimi Jackson is 11, living with her two older sisters and one older brother. One day, a new […]

Do you know the gingerbread man?

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

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I need to start this off by saying this book was perfect to me. Well, almost perfect, but I’m giving it a five-star review because the good outweighed my little nitpicks, and it felt like it was written directly to appeal to me. However, before I start raving about the parts of this book that just made my heart sing, I want to flag that I have read other books by T. Kingfisher, and those were for adults and a little more creepy than this […]

Fake marriage and further hijinks

The Secret Service of Tea and Treason by India Holton

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Alice Dearlove works for the secret organisation the Agency of Undercover Note Takers, or A.U.N.T., staffed by spies and agents disguised as ladies’ maids, butlers, footmen, and other household staff who mostly go unnoticed by the higher classes, but are usually in a position to see and hear everything. She’s one of their top agents, known within A.U.N.T only as Agent A. Usually, Miss Dearlove works alone and gets excellent results while doing so. Now she faces one of the biggest challenges of her career. […]

Magical queer historical romance

Of Socialites and Prizefights by Arden Powell

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Arden Powell has been on my radar for a while and I’ve been collecting their books, but lesbians is what finally broke the seal (I am but a simple lesbian lol) and now I want to dive into the whole Flos Magicae backlist to see all the characters in their own stories. Deepa is a singer at a club and doesn’t believe in love, so when one of her paramours curses her to become a leopard every midnight and tells her the only way to […]

“He wasn’t grateful, he was homicidal. It wasn’t enough that they endanger his friends and servants, they had to attack his most valued enemy as well.”

The Book of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells

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The Book of Ile-Rien collects the first two books in Martha Wells’ Ile-Rien universe, which takes place in a fantasy world with a steampunk flavor. Though I have the much-lauded Murderbot series on my TBR, I have never read any of Wells’ work before. The Element of Fire is her debut, and when this book crossed my dashboard I thought it’d be a decent place to start. The Element of Fire – 3.5 stars The return of the king’s bastard sister to the court of […]

“As Charlotte plummeted to the ground, still locked in Alex’s arms, she recollected Miss Plim’s warning that kissing a man was bad for one’s health.”

The League of Gentlewomen Witches by India Holton

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4.5 stars Everyone knows there’s no such thing as witches, but if there were, they probably wouldn’t use magic in flashy and extravagant ways to fly houses around and try to rob and assassinate one another. If there were witches, they would probably use their magic in tidier ways, ensuring polite society was functioning properly. Possibly liberate those who have excessive financial resources of some of it to the betterment of those with less of it (like say, themselves). If there were witches, Charlotte Pettifer […]



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