First, some shameless self-congratulations: Cannonball! I was originally thinking I could only do a half, which I signed up for, but here I am with a full 52! Yay me 🙂 OK, moving on. Steampunk Tea Party is probably the best Christmas present I’ve gotten in a long while. Long Live Book Exchange! It’s part cookbook, part photo book, and part short story collection. Each of the six chapters has a theme with recipes, excerpts from character voices, pictures of characters in elaborate costumes, pictures […]
Forward but in Reverse
So The Lazarus Gate is the predecessor of The Iscariot Sanction. These 2 books as it turns out are nearly stand-alones. If I’d read them in the correct order, I’m not sure I would have liked book 2. The Lazarus Gate takes place in the better of the two alternates; for the details of the bad one, you’ll need to read Iscariot Sanction. When the bad universe that’s falling apart with demons etc is described in The Lazarus Gate, there isn’t much detail, so it’s […]
Imagine a world where Robert Jordan knew how to write women.
This is the first Wheel of Time book I haven’t enjoyed more than the last. I was hoping the loss of narrative control I’d been warned about would start later for me than book five. It varies from person to person, from all the reviews I’ve read; some people note a decline starting with this one, others as late as eight, some never (though those are rare, at least in my friends’ GR reviews). Even though I ended up enjoying this book more than I […]
Goblins, Gnomes, Cobs, Oh My!
I had decided this summer to re-tool my sophomore English class and teach genres that don’t always get taught in small, private schools. One of those genres, and one of my favorites, is Fantasy. So I’ve been trying to read as much YA Fantasy as I can, looking for contemporary and classic works. One of the classics that I’ve stumbled across is George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. Interestingly, C.S. Lewis saw Mr. MacDonald as an inspiration for writing. Mr. MacDonald’s style is very […]
It doesn’t get much more epic than this
So. The Stand. I have been listening to The Stand on audiobook since before Thanksgiving. It’s 48 hours long. I’m so glad that I was able to to hit my 5th Cannonball of the year on this particular book because I love it dearly, but have never had a chance to review it for Cannonball. So here we go! “Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll […]
Strangeness with Magic, Dragons, and a Quarkbeast
I read Jasper Fford’s Tuesday Next series, and I liked it for a while. I got bored after about book 4. So when I saw a YA fantasy novel by the same author, I wanted to try it out. The Last Dragonslayer was mostly what I expected, and also a little not. What defines Fford’s writing for me is a sense of slightly off-kilter in an otherwise normal story, and that is totally here. The normal is as follows: 15 year old indentured servant Jennifer […]