Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fantasy shouldn’t make you feel your early middle age

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

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Bingo 20: Africa Children of Blood and Bone fits kind of into the Afro-futurism arena, and it’s also based on West African folklore/mythology and takes place is an African-esque setting. I was intrigued by the worldbuilding and some of the characters were interesting, but the plot and two of the three main characters were stupid teenagers making cringe-worthy teen angsty kinds of decisions. I know this is YA, but it’s kind of making me feel my age (barely 40+) a little. Zelie and her brother […]

“Our lack of power and our oppression are one and the same…”

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

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In a recent Time Magazine interview, Tomi Adeyemi described her first volume of the Legacy of Orïsha series as a kind of answer to the question, “What if Harry Potter had been black?” If people of color were represented more widely in literature and shown to be leaders, heroes, empathetic characters, would the world learn to become more accepting of them in real life? Children of Blood and Bone is full of powerful and heroic characters, many of them female, all of them black or […]

We Are All Children of Blood and Bone

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

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#CBR11Bingo – And So It Begins Until that night the maji were able to survive because they used their powers to defend themselves. But eleven years ago, magic disappeared. Only the gods know why (15). This book has been on a lot of “must-read” lists and I’m a fan of writers who draw on diverse cultural traditions to develop their fantasy worlds.  One of the things that surprised and intrigued me was how even though this novel is set in a fictional country/region, the story […]

Generic, derivative YA fantasy in disguise.

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Two things: 1. I wanted to like this. 2. I did not like this. I will elaborate. (NB: I waited a couple of weeks to actually sit down and write this review, because I was so aggravated while reading I was afraid my review would come out more scathing than the book deserved. I’m glad I waited. Rant reviews are fun on occasion, but I prefer to be more level-headed for the most part.) I wanted to like this because: There are not enough diverse […]

“I teach you to be warriors in the garden so you will never be gardeners of war”

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After discovering that both my CBR 10 reading list and my personal library have been far-too-heavily skewed towards male authors, I was determined to make a correction, and I set out on my first trip away this year with a too-long wishlist that yielded a bonanza of books by women, sixteen in all, pictured here. I could easily have come home with twice as many but kept myself under control if only to avoid overweight baggage charges.  After dinner on my second night in London, […]

Gotta be ruthless

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First off, let’s give a huge round of applause to the cover designer. There have been some amazing covers in the last few years and this is one of the best. The book itself was also pretty enjoyable. It’s apparently in the works to be adapted as a movie by the same people who did Twilight and The Maze Runner. Not too shabby for a debut novel! Zélie Adebola is a young diviner, what her world calls a magi without power. Her world lost magic […]



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