Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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CoffeeShopReader's Reviews:

When is 8 not really 8?

The Vegan 8 by Brandi Doming

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The Vegan 8 claims that it contains “100 simple, delicious recipes made with 8 ingredients or less.” This is not entirely true. The introduction says there are 3 free ingredients: salt, pepper, and water. This is fair, but then if you look at the recipes, there are many which actually either cheat by separating into multiple recipes that combine or try to suggest that things like black pepper corns and ground pepper are the same thing. It may be in the letter or the rule, […]

Magical Tea Mystery

A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy I. Lin

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I like the story, the characters, and the loose historical basis, but I don’t quite get how the magic fits into things in A Magic Steeped in Poison. Working with tea and medicinal plants certainly can involve the potential for poison, but I wish there was more detail about how the magic that can allow for tea to be used for emotions, healing, or telling the future worked. I’d settled for a little more about the historical aspect of traditional Chinese medicine; there’s an index […]

The popular thing I don’t get

Tower of God, vol. 1 by Siu

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You know how when there’s all this hype over a story and then you finally get to it, and it just doesn’t seem that special? That’s Tower of God vol 1. Granted, the anime is the thing that really took off and I’m looking at the comic strip version that the anime’s based on, but still. This seems so generic, I don’t get it. Basically, there’s this mysterious tower, and if you get in (and apparently only the chosen usually are allowed) then you have […]

Back from whence you came

The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner

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This was an airport bookstore grab on my birthday, one of those deals where if you bring it back within six months, you can get 50% of the cover price back. The London Séance Society will indeed be going back. It’s not a bad read or story, just not amazing enough to take up some of my limited shelf space. The alternating back and forth between two perspectives and narrators actually does some pretty cool stuff with unreliability; both narrators are but for very different […]

Are the Good Eats Really Worth Attempting?

Good Eats 4: The Final Years by Alton Brown

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Alton Brown’s last cookbook really is basically his show Good Eats in written form, down to the use of footnotes. Good Eats 4: The Final Years is basically the recipe (both actual how to make and creation history) catalog from Good Eats: Reloaded and Good Eats: The Return (including the “lost” planned but never made season 3 of The Return). For most all recipes there’s a lot of segmented information to work through including the narrative of the episode and some thoughts thereon, the history […]

Trope Blend of Culture, Mystery, Food, and Romance with Mixed Results

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

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Arsenic and Adobo is a decent cozy mystery that is pretty aware that it is that, as well as a romance. It pulls off one of those things better than the other. What I don’t get is how Lila can open the novel with “my life has become a rom-com cliché” but be so dense about a romance that doesn’t involve her. There’s obviously something going on with her Tita Rosie and a certain detective, but she (Lila and Rosie both) never even says anything. […]



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