Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Magical Tea Mystery

A Magic Steeped in Poison by Judy I. Lin

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I like the story, the characters, and the loose historical basis, but I don’t quite get how the magic fits into things in A Magic Steeped in Poison. Working with tea and medicinal plants certainly can involve the potential for poison, but I wish there was more detail about how the magic that can allow for tea to be used for emotions, healing, or telling the future worked. I’d settled for a little more about the historical aspect of traditional Chinese medicine; there’s an index […]

“The magic is not in the ceremony of pouring the tea or the sharing of the cup. It is in the connection, the brief joining of souls. The tea leaves are a channel, the ingredients the signposts.”

A Magic Steeped in Poison (The Book of Tea, #1) by Judy I. Lin

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A Magic Steeped in Poison is a YA fantasy that follows Ning, who is an apprentice teamaker (shennong-shi) in a world where teamaking is magic. She was an apprentice to her mother, but one day accidentally brews the tea that poisons and kills her. Her sister did not die, but is gravely ill and fading fast. Amidst a rash of poisonings across the country, and Ning’s frantic attempts to cure her sister, the government announces that they are looking for the greatest shennong-shi in the […]

Come for Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace, stay for PAN (Practical Automaton Number One).

My Imaginary Mary (Mary, #2) by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton & Jodi Meadows

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Still not as good as the first Lady Janie book. A lot of this made no sense, and anachronisms were flying around willy-nilly, but I had a good time. My Imaginary Mary is what you get when you mix light fantasy (there are fairies! and Mary Godwin (Shelley) is one! (different kind of fairy than you’d expect)), alternate history (what if Mary met Ada Lovelace?), and a truly ridiculous sensibility (they invent the name Peter Pan for some reason?) with egregious unconcern for historical accuracy. […]

A real witch is the best kind of person

A Hat Full of Sky: A Tiffany Aching Adventure by Terry Pratchett

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This is the second book of Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series. Tiffany is a young witch living on “the Chalk,” a land full of sheep and the fairies known as the Nac Mac Feegle (NMF), or Wee Free Men. In book one, 9-year-old Tiffany teamed up with the NMF to save her brother and the world from the queen of the fairies. Her witchly abilities were evident to other witches like Miss Tick and Mistress Weatherwax, who gifted Tiffany a hat. A witch’s hat is […]

“It’s a role I play.” Max shrugged. “Just as you do.”

The Agency for Scandal (2023) by Laura Wood

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The Agency for Scandal (2023) is a children’s/YA late-Victorian set romantic romp with a dash of adventure and a feminist core. Isobel Stanhope has inherited her father’s talent for lock-picking but also his debts–which she must keep a secret from her delicate mamma and her younger brother, conveniently away at school. She is recruited to a mysterious agency called The Aviary, led by Miss Finch, a group of women dedicated to righting the wrongs that patriarchy inflicts on their sisters, and often using rather sneaky […]

Is Dorothy dead yet? It’s book 3 of 4 so…

Yellow Brick War (Dorothy Must Die series book #3) by Danielle Paige

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I gotta tell you, this book seems more like a vehicle to get from book 2 to book 4. I don’t really remember much about it except that Amy has returned to Flat Hill Kansas and is looking for the first pair of Dorothy’s magic shoes (apparently the ruby slippers were her second pair that Glinda used to bring her back to Kansas after returning home). Amy has returned to her mother, who seems to be doing better without her, but is eager to make […]



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