Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted.”

The Well of Ascension (Mistborn, #2) by Brandon Sanderson

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Well, I was hoping I would like this more this time, knowing how it ended, but it was about the same experience for me. A bit sloggy up until the last third of it, at which point it really picked up. I know what he was going for here, turning a tired fantasy premise on its head like he did with the first one*, but the nature of that premise and the world and characters he built for himself just made it not a very […]

An excellent, atmospheric Australian mystery and family drama.

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

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This is my favorite of Jane Harper’s four books. The setting is outrageous, and such a good place for something like this to go down, even more so because it’s a real place in the actual world and not, like, an alien planet or something. This is some ‘the year 2133 on Mars’ kind of shit, except it’s now and it’s Australia. I just couldn’t get over how they all live on this giant plot of land as big as my state, and our main […]

“Of all the myriad races of thinking creatures in the world, the two that most delight in telling stories are the flesh-and-blood humans and the long-lived, fiery jinn.”

The Hidden Palace (The Golem & The Jinni, #2) by Helene Wecker

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I’m having a hard time reviewing this one, mostly because I had a hard time deciding what I thought about it. But I’m on the verge of getting hopelessly behind in reviews again, so it’s time to buckle down and figure it out. I was thinking about the book this morning and I think I’ve finally formed some solid opinions, so here we go. This is a book about change in all its forms: death (and grief), destruction, creation, evolution, the way a person changes […]

A book I loved years ago is still great on re-read.

The Golem and the Jinni (The Golem and the Jinni, #1) by Helene Wecker

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This was just as good the second time. Not going to do a whole huge review because I’m tired, and I’d rather be reading the sequel instead of writing things. I still think this is an absolutely lovely portrayal of the immigrant experience, both in the way it portrays actual historical immigrant communities (particularly Little Syria and the Jewish communities in NYC) and in the way that Wecker uses the outsized fantastical experiences of the golem and the jinni (Chava and Ahmad, as they become […]

I had to start this book over again four times before I could get into it, but it was worth it in the end.

The Witness for the Dead (The Goblin Emperor, #2) by Katherine Addison

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You’ve really got to give this one a minute. Similarly to the way I felt about Addison’s first novel (under this penname at least) The Goblin Emperor, the names and the naming system and the worldbuilding are A LOT. Unlike with The Goblin Emperor, there is no glossary, and we are not joining a world as the fish out of water along with the main character like we were with Maia in the previous book. Our main character here, Thara Celehar, a Witness for the […]



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