Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I’d rather spend time with David Tennant’s Crowley

The Night Jar by Deborah Hewitt

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I had a hard time getting through The Nightjar. I liked the premise, although it sounded a little like the His Dark Materials trilogy, I liked the setting, although it’s kind of like Neverwhere, and I liked some of the characters, although I never took a liking to either of the two leads. I really wanted to like this, and there were a lot of times where I almost did. The premise is that there is an alternate world attached to our own where people […]

The spotted custard was the kind of place where exceptions were made, because everyone was strange and exceptional.

Reticence by Gail Carriger

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CBR BINGO: Love This I have been a huge Gail Carriger fan now for a decade. Yep. That’s when she started rolling out her “Parasol Protectorate” series. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE those books and pretty much adore the “Custard Protocol” series (of which this book is the last of). Sassy, witty, stylish romps served with the perfect cup of tea. This is the 13th book (plus a handful of novellas and short stories) in Carriger’s alternate Victorian London full of vampires, meta and pretnaturals, were-younameits, […]

I was astonish’d at how greatly I admired the writing of this book

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The title of this post will be my one attempt at a pseudo-19th century style–I won’t inflict such an atrocity upon you any more, dear readers. I’m rather late to the game when it comes to reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell–after all, there’s already a miniseries adaptation (which I have not yet seen)! But so deeply was I affected by… ahem! I’ll just say that the writing style blew me away. I’m certainly not the first to describe this book as ‘If Charles Dickens […]

Fun Junk with a Hint of Handmaiden

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God Save the Queen is junk, but it’s fun junk. 3.5 stars really. It reads sort of like a Janet Evanovich novel, not terribly well-written but entertaining because of some interesting characters and narrative possibilities. In a world where vampires and werewolves are in charge (Queen Victoria is one of said vampires), goblins run the underworld (literally), and humans are viewed with suspicion (because they hate the monsters and half-breeds), of course Xandra the half-breed daughter of an aristocrat would discover something unusual about herself […]

In which I project my hypocritical political ire…

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Set in an alternate United States, in which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated before taking office, the Civil War was never fought, and slaves were never emancipated, Underground Airlines is the story of a young black man (who goes by various names) working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshal service. His job? Hunting escaped slaves in contemporary America. First, this was a very well-written book. It’s in the style of a hard-boiled detective novel, and the world building by Ben Winters is fairly well […]

NOmentum

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Where does this story go?  Nowhere, really.  There are a handful of decent, interestingly written passages, but they do not really add up to much of a story, and certainly not the level of dread or suspense I was expecting based on jacket reviews from authors I generally like. A nameless Biologist is part of Expedition 12 into Area X, which has a border apparently encroaching on the “normal” part of the world.  The story relates her point of view as the small, unnamed, all-women […]



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