So I finally read Alif the Unseen. Wow — what a genre-bender. So many questions about belief, ideology, loyalty, technology, humanity, and identity are explored across multiple metaphysical planes and in achingly familiar real-world contexts. To back up to a plot summary, which I’ll ape from Goodreads: “In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients—dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups—from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif—the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and […]
Say yes to lady brewmasters
I’ll read essentially any historical romance recommended by Mrs. Julien or Malin, and particularly one whose review earns a comment from beloved author Courtney Milan. So that’s how my attention was drawn to Say Yes to the Marquess, which is now my favorite historical I’ve read since The Suffragette Scandal. Catnip alert: Beer. I am way, way, embarrassingly into craft beer. I have even brewed myself. The intersection of beer knowledge and ambition with “Surprise! Ladies beer too!” knowledgebombing was just the most delightful thing. So here’s a […]
A superfluous review
Everyone else has very eloquently summarized the plot of Station Eleven the first hundred times it was reviewed, so I’ll let Goodreads do the heavy lifting here (this is a half joke because I let Goodreads do the heavy lifting a lot of the time even when I’m not the last person in line to review a book): “One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and […]
“We broke the world to make it whole…”
In a possibly controversial opinion, the final novel of the Earthsea cycle just might be my favorite. To get here, we’ve had two great adventures, an exploration of a foreign ritualistic spirituality, and a pointed take on the value of women in a world of male-dominated power, both political and magical. In this last book, all of those elements come together, and the story looks back to the origins of magic, just as it looks forward and asks where the people of Earthsea truly stand in the […]
Beyond my horizons
I initially grabbed Beyond Shame because it was free on Kindle, and then picked up its sequel, Beyond Control, because I was intrigued. Like many series of its ilk, it’s kind of more-of-the-same, kind of not, and YMMV on how much you enjoy each individual book based on how much you like the lead couple. The series is fairly hardcore erotic romance, and it’s definitely out of my comfort zone, so it’s kind of hard for me to review it. Public group sex is the […]
In which I haphazardly scatter a bunch of feels to the wind
I’m afraid I’m not going to be very succinct here. My love for the Fever series has been documented in Cannonballs past, as well as my skepticism about the direction taken of the last book. I’m not going to spoil Burned in this review, but I’ll be talking about trends and events throughout the previous books so consider yourself warned on that score. Here’s one thing right off the bat I feel like I should mention: sometimes that even in 4- or 5- star reviews (so, books I […]
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