Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A spy thriller set in a fascinating post-climate-change-collapsed world

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

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CBR Bingo: ‘N’ I really enjoyed Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August when I read it last year, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t realize that she’d also written other books. I’ve been somewhat struggling to find appropriate books to review for the CBR Bingo “letter” squares, so when I saw Notes from the Burning Age on a recent trip to my local used bookstore, it both fit the ‘N’ square and looked intriguing. Set in a future where the effects of climate […]

The women of The Odyssey, except eighteen years afterwards, as narrated by Hera.

Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1) by Claire North

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I really, really liked this! Claire North’s writing style translated extremely well to retelling Greek mythology. The undercurrent of female rage and sorrow was pleasing and upsetting at the same time. It’s also darkly funny. I almost feel like I want to re-read this before I write a review so I can get my thoughts more in order, but nobody has time for that. Or, maybe some people do, but I don’t know who they are. I just feel like it was so well done! […]

Will This Be the Year the Earth Refuses to Forgive Us?

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

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Notes from the Burning Age deposits its readers sometime between Mad Max and The Broken Earth. The world that seems in the first chapter to be an unknown, fantastical place, is actually a snapshot of a future Earth, its landscape shifted by centuries of exploitation. Eventually, it seems the Earth fought back, defending itself by unleashing fearsome spiritual creatures called the kakui, who, depending on who you ask, burnt the world or saved it from the burning. Regardless, it was a hefty price that humanity […]

“I saw the forest burn, when I was young.”

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

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CBR13Bingo: Flora If this book does not win a ton of awards, I will be truly disappointed. Climate change science fiction (I’ve heard it called cli-fi but I’m not sold on that name) isn’t anything new, as evidenced by last year’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and N.K. Jemisin’s stellar “Emergency Skin.” But where this author truly excels is twisty plot and excellent characterization. Where most of those stories felt like far in the future scifi, this one felt in many ways startling immediate. “Our ancestors […]

“I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.”

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

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I have in the past frequently compared books to food because I find it helpful. I love both books and food in the way that only comes from consuming something, putting it inside yourself and making it a part of you, quite literally. There’s the immediate pleasure of the consumption itself, and then there’s the afterward, when the food or the ideas do things to you (good, bad or in between; small or large scale). I have previously compared books to cotton candy and burritos […]

Damn, she’s good

The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North

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Reading ClaireBadger’s review of 84K reminded me of how much I enjoyed Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August last year, and I was inspired to move another of her novels to the top of my TBR list. I’m happy to say I was not disappointed, as The Sudden Appearance of Hope was every bit as much mind-bending fun. As Hope says on the first page, the world began to forget her when she was sixteen years old: first her teachers, then her […]



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