Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I found this dull, and won’t be continuing the series.

Forest of a Thousand Lanterns (Rise of the Empress, #1) by Julie C. Dao

by 6 Comments

Honestly not sure I can milk 250 words out of this one. Forest of a Thousand Lanterns didn’t really spark my attention back when it first came out, but when Read Harder wanted me to read a retelling by an author of color, this was on one of the lists I looked at, and picking YA fantasy seemed a good idea at the time. And honestly, it wasn’t bad, I just didn’t find it interesting, at all. It doesn’t help that I didn’t realize this […]

What if your school was always trying to kill you?

A Deadly Education (The Scholomance, #1) by Naomi Novik

by Leave a Comment

Semi-brief review because I read this back in October, and my memory of it has faded. I remember being engrossed in it. I love the concept of a magic school that runs itself. And I love the horror aspect of this, that all these kids are trapped in this school because it’s too dangerous outside for them, even though it’s dangerous inside the school as well. I really liked the protagonist, El (short for Galadriel). She is so grouchy and anti-social, but as with all […]

This was fine, but the satire didn’t really resonate for me.

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

by Leave a Comment

Everybody raves about Patrick Ness, but this is my first experience with his books. He seems like a talented writer. His prose was well-executed. He knows his way around story and character arcs. And he seems very imaginative and inventive. I even read this book pretty fast, and while reading, I wasn’t ever wishing I was reading something else. But . . . I just didn’t click with it. And the parts I did click with were sort of undercut by the ending. It was […]

Keep with the New Fun magic Falcons or Stick with the Plan?

The Tethered Mage by Melissa Caruso

by Leave a Comment

Bingo Review 15: Fresh Start I’ve kind of had my eye on The Tethered Mage, Book One of the Swords and Fire trilogy, and using it for the starting a new series square worked out just fine. Looking at the cover I actually just noticed that one of my favorite fantasy writers, Genvieve Cogman, approved of it too; I don’t always have great luck with things authors I like like, but maybe this is an exception. I should also admit that by the end I […]

“It was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.”

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Discworld, #28) by Terry Pratchett

by Leave a Comment

I very much enjoyed Terry Pratchett’s first foray into young adult literature. I know he’s written a handful of YA books (many of them also set in the Discworld), but I wish he had written more. He was very good at it! One thing I loved as a kid, and which I still love now, is when children’s books have darker edges to them. Kids live in this world same as adults. They worry about death and violence and hunger. Like, kids are people, too, […]

This series still not living up to its potential, for me.

One Dark Throne (Three Dark Crowns, #2) by Kendare Blake

by Leave a Comment

I liked this one better than the first one, but there was still some issues lingering from that book, and I have some things to say about Katharine. The plot has officially arrived, and while it felt sort of meandering and messy, at least things were happening. After Beltane, the three Queens of Fennbirn are officially free to murder one another, and the last Queen standing takes the throne. If they haven’t killed each other by the end of the year, they will be locked […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo