Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“But all’s well that ends well, and if your adventure is successful, all those little problems you had will soon become very funny to you indeed.”

Nell of Gumbling: My Extremely Tiny Forest Adventure by Emma Steinkellner

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This is the charming sequel to the first Nell of Gumbling book. The series takes place in a fairy tale based town, but it’s just normal life for everyone and the focus is more on the power of community and learning positive lessons versus the magical elements. I like this sort of everyday life within a fantasy world, so the setting really works for me, and Emma Steinkellner’s art is perfect. In this volume, Nell is going to do a summer camping course (the Wilderness […]

Magical Reads That I Come Back To Again and Again

The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones

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I think I’ve already extolled the virtues of this series at length here before, so I’ll just say that this is one of my favorites of all time and I am completely biased in favor of these books. I am a lifelong Chrestomanci fan and re-read a couple of these about once a year. This year I took on The Magicians of Caprona and Witch Week, which I was less obsessed with as a kid so I don’t remember the plots quite as well, which […]

It was super weird finally continuing this series.

Song of the Wanderer (The Unicorn Chronicles, #2) by Bruce Coville

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I didn’t have the experience of reading this first as a kid, so my reactions are entirely coming from adult Ashley on this one. I mentioned this in a GR status update, but having initially read that first book back in 1994, it felt incredibly strange to finally be picking up the thread of the story again after 28 years. First, my main complaint on this one, and the reason it’s getting 3.5 stars (rounded up): I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing itself, […]

Revisiting a childhood favorite so I can finally finish the series, twenty-eight years later.

Into the Land of the Unicorns (The Unicorn Chronicles, #1) by Bruce Coville

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Let’s step in to the Wayback Machine for this one. 1994! Bruce Coville was very in at the time, at least in my circles. You know, the ones featuring nine-year olds. We all coveted those books that implied our teachers were aliens, or whatever. But Coville didn’t just do wacky, humorous sff, he could also do straight epic fantasy. Enter this book, which I read approximately ten thousand times (though I settled on marking that as 10 in Goodreads). Twelve year old Cara is pulled […]

Will I quit you, Riordan? I still don’t know. This review is barely about the book, which was good!

The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo, #5) by Rick Riordan

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I did end up liking this series ender. As up and down as I’ve been with this series, it could have gone either way for me. This book definitely got the closest to my preferred version of the series, which had Apollo actually realizing the consequences of his actions and not just joking his way through some pretty serious stuff. Although, it still never gelled for me that Apollo the God and Lester the Teenager were the same character. There was some moves towards that […]



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