Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

That rare beast, a great final book.

The Toll (Arc of a Scythe, #3) by Neal Shusterman

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That was a really good ending. I am incredibly satisfied by it. It did what my favorite endings do, which is to manage to surprise me with things that feel inevitable. I am going to hold off on the five stars, after sleeping on it. I’m not quite sure why, though. Maybe when I do an eventual re-read (I most definitely need to, to see the whole arc), I’ll up it to five stars, which I will confess was my first instinct. I don’t really […]

I never actually wrote a review of this, so here are some thoughts I typed up to a Goodreads friend instead.

Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2) by Rainbow Rowell

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I just never got myself together enough to write more than “THOUGHTS” as a review on Goodreads, so here are some disjointed notes (edited for clarity) I sent over to a Goodreads friend instead: 1. In response to everyone going into this book assuming it was a duology: I thought about this, too, but ultimately it doesn’t bother me too much. I had been going in expecting this to be the end of the story as well, and it very much wasn’t. Maybe on a […]

A timely review for a book about Halloween.

Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell & Faith Erin Hicks

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Short and sweet 🙂 I really want to go to an effing pumpkin patch now. (I’ve never been! It’s not really a thing in the Southwest.) I actually read this back in September after it was first released, and I read it in about an hour in one sitting as I was drinking some coffee at Barnes & Noble. I didn’t remember much more than my major impressions, so I went ahead and re-read it just now ahead of writing this review. Some impressions: The […]

Bardugo can do so much better than this entire debut trilogy.

Siege and Storm (The Grisha Trilogy, #2) by Leigh Bardugo

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Sometimes a good author just gets stuck telling a mediocre story, and that’s what you have here. I know she can do so much better than this. So, let’s go over the good thing before I get to the bad: Nikolai. The second son of the King of Ravka, aka SPOILERS the privateer Sturmhond END SPOILERS. That character stole every scene he was in, and breathed life into the pretty much dead on arrival story. He was the lone bright spot in what was otherwise a […]

Just a real bummer here, as this first trilogy sputters to a close.

Fire Study (Study, #3) by Maria V. Snyder

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What a bummer of a book. In more than one way! It’s a bummer in that I didn’t like it and it didn’t live up to how good the first one was, and the second to an extent as well. And a bummer because seemingly nothing good ever happens to these characters, only bad things, horrible things, and everyone spends the whole book arguing basically. The plot was also messy as hell. It supposedly focuses on Yelena and Leif, along with Marrok, Moon Man and […]

Not as good as the first; in retrospect, better than the third.

Magic Study (Study, #2) by Maria V. Snyder

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I liked this book and enjoyed reading it. I basically read it in a day. I did think it was a little scattered, but that was probably inevitable as Snyder builds up her world, and Yelena isn’t confined to the castle in Ixia anymore. But that does mean that it wasn’t as purely pleasurable as that first book, which was so well constructed and centered. I think this book does manage to avoid second book syndrome. Things I liked: *The worldbuilding in Sitia, Yelena’s homeland, […]



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