Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“I never stopped trying to save you, so don’t you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.”

A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables #1) by Alix E. Harrow

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A Spindle Splintered is a queer retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, playing on the variations that exist and adding one of its own. The basic story has been around for almost seven hundred years and has flown through the hands of Basile, Perrault, and Grimm, and that’s before we get into the hundreds of adaptations so what’s another? Harrow brings her own lens to this, and imbues her lead, Zinnia Grey, with a wonderfully clear voice. It is so realistic that I initially thought […]

Like a big, warm, adventure hug

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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January Scaller has never quite fit in anywhere.In the early 1900s, she is a mixed-race almost-orphan. She lives with her enormously wealthy guardian, Mr. Locke, in his house full of treasures, while her father travels the world seeking curiosities for Mr. Locke’s collections. January is an inbetween kind of person, not fitting in fully anywhere, but largely insulated from her own otherness by Mr. Locke’s wealth and status. And then, January finds a book. The book tells the story of doors – doors between worlds, […]

Ten Thousand Escapes

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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I am going to start this review by thanking John Green for giving me a quote I can use to describe my feelings for this book: “I fell in love like you fall asleep: slowly then all at once.” I haven’t even read that book but it’s a pretty good quote and fits here so well. If I was more critical or reviewed and rated based on quality over the feelings that a book makes me feel I might lower this rating. It is far […]

This book is TOO SHORT, which is probably the best critique a book can get

A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

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A recommendation by narfna! Quite short and interesting, especially writing this review after all the multiverse talk that has permeated the pop culture o sphere with the release of Spiderman: No Way Home. In a nutshell, this is a Sleeping Beauty retelling where Zinnia Grey is our Briar Rose. She’s suffering from a genetic disease brought on by an Evil Corporation, but the clock is running out and she’s unlikely to make it to her twenty-first birthday. Zinnia has decided to live life to the […]

Into the Sleeping Beauty-Verse.

A Spindle Splintered (Fractured Fables, #1) by Alix E. Harrow

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This was so fun! I didn’t actually know what this book was really about going in. I knew it was a Sleeping Beauty retelling, and that Alix E. Harrow wrote it, and that was all I needed. So the actual premise was surprising and refreshing! There’s definitely a reason the title for this series of novellas is ‘Fractured Fables.’ Harrow notes in her afterword, she pitched this book to her editor as “I want to Spider-Verse some fairy-tales.” I mean, who can’t get behind that? […]

When doors open, stories happen

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow

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CBRbingo: Flora “If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway.” January Scaller is a young woman of uncertain status.  The mixed race protégé of a wealthy and controlling man,  she barely knows her father, who travels the world in search of artefacts for his employer, her benefactor.   When she finds a mysterious book it unlocks the story of her own past, and the secret of the Doors that […]



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