Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Crowley and Aziraphale Are the Best Part of Good Omens

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

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The demon Crowley (initially Crawly, the snake who tempted Eve) and the angel Aziraphale have known each other since the creation of the universe. They’ve developed a friendship, even though outwardly they would seem to have, and perhaps should have, different views on life. However, they have come to enjoy the life they live on earth, and they aren’t looking forward to the Antichrist coming of age (age 11) and bringing about Armageddon. Most of the novel is set in the few days leading up […]

The burden and the gift of knowing one’s history

The Deep by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes

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The Deep is a novel inspired by a song by the rappers known as clipping  (Diggs, Hutson and Snipes). It is the story of Yetu, a 34-year-old wajinru (mer-person) who serves as her people’s historian, and of the burden that this vocation entails. It is also the story of the enslaved people of the Americas and of the trauma handed down through generations. The sea-dwelling people known as wajinru were born from a traumatic experience: their foremothers were land-dwelling women who had been enslaved and […]

I finally understand the French Revolution.

A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories, #1) by H.G. Parry

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Okay, I always understood the French Revolution, meaning I understood why there was one, and that it got out of control because hUmAnS, but I have never before been able to hold the chronology of it in my head, or remember the various stages, or the political parties or players. And it never descended to the human level for me before, never really reached my emotions because of the ways it’s been funneled at me before. It feels sort of perverse to say that a […]

Series Conclusion but Maybe Not the End

The Untold Story by Genevieve Cogman

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The Untold Story is kind of the end of the Invisible Library series, but in the post-script there is the suggestion that maybe that’s not quite right; maybe there will be an Act 2 of sorts at some point in the future. For most of the series, there’s been a couple of major questions that do get answered as well as several others brought up in more recent volumes, including why was Alberich trying to destroy the Library, who are Irene’s birth parents (and why […]

Bloody Magic Books and the Future Reread

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Torzs

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You know it’ a good read when you start thinking about re-reading a book as soon as you finish it for the first time. Ink Blood Sister Scribe is the first book like that for me in a pretty long while. In some ways the premise is familiar but it still works: Esther and Joanna are half sisters from a family who guards a collection of magic books, but they’ve been separated for years for reasons neither of them fully understands; they need to reunite […]

Sharp-Dressed Cats, Angels, Murder, Noir that Stands Apart

Even Though I Knew the End by CL Polk

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I feel like I came to Even Though I Knew the End by CL Polk late even though it’s still a relatively new release. I also started it, had to pause because I had to read for work on deadline, and then picked up where I left off… but only after my required reading made it abundantly clear that, by comparison, this book is amazing. That said, it moved slower for me than others and perhaps that affected my overall rating for it. This is a novella that […]



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