Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Love in the time of chaos

Chaos Burning by Lauren Dane

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Chaos Burning is the second Bound by Magick novel by Lauren Dane. I LOVED the first book, Hearts of Darkness, and hunted down the entire series. This go-round, we meet a new witch named Lark Jaansen. She has been kicking ass and taking names in Los Angeles. After the dangerous attack in the first book, Lark arrives in Seattle to teach these witches how to fight dirty. Just in time for a big bad of apocalyptic proportions to show up. It likes to devour Others […]

You learn your lessons and stay vigilant, or you die

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

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4.5 stars Official book description: A Deadly Education is set at Scholomance, a school for the magically gifted where failure means certain death (for real) — until one girl, El, begins to unlock its many secrets. There are no teachers, no holidays, and no friendships, save strategic ones. Survival is more important than any letter grade, for the school won’t allow its students to leave until they graduate… or die!    The rules are deceptively simple: Don’t walk the halls alone. And beware of the […]

A whole lot of fighting happens

Battle Ground by Jim Butcher

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Spoiler warning! This is book 17 in a long, ongoing series. This really isn’t the place to start. In fact, this book doesn’t even work on its own, so don’t even think to read this review if you’re not caught up. Normally, I’d recommend that you start with book 1, but the first three books of The Dresden Files are pretty bad, so you’d be better off starting with book 4, Summer Knight. I highly recommend the audio books, narrated by James Marsters. They’re what finally sold […]

Fly My Pretties! Oh wait, wrong witch…. !

Witches of Brooklyn by Sophie Escabasse

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Witches of Brooklyn is more of a 3.5 review and not 3. This is because it was not an “OMG LOVE!” nor was it, “OMG HATE!” read. There is a lot going on, but at the same time it is an easy story to follow. Good guys are good, bad guys are … well there are not “bad guys” just one spoiled pop-princess and people with no sense of visiting at decent hours of the day or night (depending on what you consider 1 AM). […]

Ehhh, it was fine, but a lot of the magic was lost from the first

The Glamourist by Luanne G. Smith

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I really enjoyed the first book in this series The Vine Witch. Interesting magic, self-contained story, solid pacing, believable romance, fun mix of characters. The Glamourist, the second entry in The Vine Witch series, loses a lot of the fun and magic of the first book. While still a self-contained story which I greatly appreciate, The Glamourist lacks focus and fails to add anything interesting to the stories of characters that stick around. It’s– fine. Vine witch and potion master, Elena Boureanu, finds herself in Paris with her […]

Some big hits and major misses in an overall forgettable collection

Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane by Jonathan Oliver

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Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, edited by Jonathan Oliver, is an anthology of short stories centered around magic in all its various forms: ancient folk magic, new age witchcraft, stage magic, and even some techno-magic. There are 15 short stories in this collection, and, over all, this anthology is fine. Too often, the stories told are not short stories but rather truncated ones. For many of the stories, it feels as though the authors were limited by a page or word maximum […]



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