Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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This one deserved better than I gave it

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

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I’m in a bit of a personal slump where I just haven’t had that voracious, must-read-now feeling, and that’s a bummer because this book deserved it. As opening lines go, this one hooked me right from the start, but I still slogged through it. I mean, look at this! There’s no such thing as witches, but there used to be. That is a hell of an opener. This book is so craftily written and I flagged so many lines but on the chore-to-pleasure scale, this still […]

“There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.”

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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I picked this book as my first read of 2021 because I was honestly being cutesy and thought it was low-key funny to read a book with this title on January 1st. I have actually been avoiding this book, and it was so weird in my brain that I was doing that, because I love portal fantasies, and this is a portal fantasy and it’s got great reviews, so I should read it! Maybe I thought there were enough portal fantasies and what could one […]

Cannonball in the nick of time

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alex E. Harrow was on NPR’s Best Books of 2019 List, but despite my avid perusal of that list every year, it didn’t catch my attention. I’m not a big fantasy reader, and there are so many books on that list it’s inevitable that I’m going to miss out on some. However, my book club chose Ten Thousand Doors to read. Honestly, I was dreading it. One book club friend is a big fantasy reader, and she’s made me read so many […]

I really wanted to like this one; I really, really tried.

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow

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It’s 1893, and the witchways are gone from the world. There is no more big magic: no more calling of storms, no curing of plagues, no blessings on fields and pastures. But a little magic still exits. Women still charm the wrinkles out of shits, bewitch bread from burning in the oven, or enchant a needle to be threaded on the first attempt.  Though she has been living with just her abusive father for the last several years, Juniper Eastwood, a wild and ferocious independent […]

“Because it’s easy to ignore a woman . . . But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

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I really liked this book. To quote the book itself, it’s “witchy as hell.” Honestly, the only thing keeping me from giving this five stars is that the style of the writing didn’t perfectly gel with me, and that is obviously very subjective. I would looooove to see this adapted as a limited event series on a premium streaming service or network. The premise here is that we’re in an alternate history where magic and witches were once real, not just scapegoats for whatever was […]

How do we write good stories about storytelling

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

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By happenstance, I wound up reading Alix Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Erin Morgenstern’s follow-up to The Night Circus, The Starless Sea, within just weeks of one another. Digital library loan hold lists just shake out like that sometimes. And I was struck by how both were, at their heart, doing much the same thing, which is to say, telling stories about the power of telling stories, and doing so through an apparatus of doors that lead into other worlds/stories, and how the encounters with the […]



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