Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Strange Worlds

The Midnight Library by Matthew Haig

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Read as part of CBR15Bingo: strange worlds. The premise of the book is the MC traveling to different lives she lived in different worlds as she exists in a state between life and death. I’m gonna be honest up front: it will be very hard to squeeze 250 words out of me regarding this book. If it wasn’t for the bingo, I’d just slap it on the leftovers. I’ve long considered the concept of living past lives, wondering if things would have been better. I […]

Nah.

The Cloisters by Katy Hays

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What it comes down to is that I found this book extremely unpleasant. And also dull. And reading it made me feel like I would rather be banging my head against something very solid. This was made even more frustrating by glimmers of stuff I probably would have found very intriguing in another author’s hands, or in another type of story altogether. The Cloisters is about a woman whose name I have long forgotten who is heading to her first post-graduate job, supposedly at the […]

Not for me, alas.

The Red Scholar's Wake by Aliette de Bodard

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This wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much better. I think I just really don’t gel with this author. I read a short story from her that one year I voted for the Hugos and it turned me off so hard from her stuff. She seemed like the kind of author who was more interested in being artsy and impressive than in telling a good story. Those kinds of authors and I usually butt heads. So when this book was chosen for December’s […]

I finally understand the French Revolution.

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories, #1) by H.G. Parry

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Okay, I always understood the French Revolution, meaning I understood why there was one, and that it got out of control because hUmAnS, but I have never before been able to hold the chronology of it in my head, or remember the various stages, or the political parties or players. And it never descended to the human level for me before, never really reached my emotions because of the ways it’s been funneled at me before. It feels sort of perverse to say that a […]

Bloody Magic Books and the Future Reread

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs

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You know it’ a good read when you start thinking about re-reading a book as soon as you finish it for the first time. Ink Blood Sister Scribe is the first book like that for me in a pretty long while. In some ways the premise is familiar but it still works: Esther and Joanna are half sisters from a family who guards a collection of magic books, but they’ve been separated for years for reasons neither of them fully understands; they need to reunite […]

Vampires as in Monsters and Vampires as in Monsters-But-Anglos

Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Canas*

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*Note: My alt key and other shortcuts for the “enye” tilde over the “n” of the author’s name is not functioning but her name is Isabel Canas pronounced “Can-yas”. This is the first time I’ve been a person to review a book for the first time on Canonball Read break out the champagne. Vampires of El Norte is an upcoming title from Isabel Canas* and it looks like this is her lane. It’s a great lane. Historical fiction with horror elements – if not fully […]



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