Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Have I moved on emotionally from Gail Carriger?

Prudence (The Custard Protocol, #1) by Gail Carriger

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This was a perfectly fine and entertaining book that I for some reason had a hard time picking up and making myself finish, and I feel almost no pull to continue and finish the series. This is such a huge turnaround for what my feelings were about her first series, The Parasol Protectorate, which featured the main character of this book’s mother. I was enchanted and delighted by those books. Our main character here is Prudence Alessandra Maccon Akeldama, and I’m not even going to […]

First contact, near-past historical science fiction.

Axiom's End (Noumena, #1) by Lindsay Ellis

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 1/30 I don’t even really know what I want to say about this one! It wasn’t what I was expecting, even though I didn’t think I was going in expecting anything. Figure that one out. All I knew was that it was a First Contact story, and I liked the cover. I think I also might have known it took place in 2007. Our main character is twenty-one year old Cora*, whose father is basically an answer […]

A cloth mage, a journalist, and some bad guys walk into a bar (this does happen at one point)

Innate Magic by Shannon Fay

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Innate Magic is an alternate history dark fantasy set in 20th century London. “The War” and associated arms races have happened and there’s the threat of some new major conflict on the horizon; this is mostly background though. Paul Gallagher and his best friend/found brother Thomas Dawes have just graduated magic college ready to pursue careers as Cloth Magicians; it seems like there’s basically 2 types of allowed magic: cloth and book. The ‘innate magic’ of the title is technically only allowed to one person, […]

Unfortunately, this one was just meh for me.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

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I actually don’t have too much to say about this one because it didn’t really hit for me. I’m not really sure why, because I’ve liked everything else P. Djèlí Clark has written (Ring Shout was the last thing of his I hadn’t yet read). And I mean, I didn’t not like it, but it’s never really a good sign when your reader is liking your world-building and the alternate history aspects of your story more than your actual story, and more than the characters. […]

Late arrival on the Colson Whitehead Train, but I’m here to stay

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

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I’m using this as my #machinery square in Bingo!  I originally bought this book for an undergraduate class, like 15 years ago. And we never got around to reading it. Ever since, it’s been on my “to read” list.  I can’t believe I waited so long!  Colson Whitehead has risen to prominence for his other works – especially The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle – but this is his first novel. And it’s fantastic.  The Intuitionist takes place in an alternate […]

A mystery on the moon.

The Relentless Moon (Lady Astronaut, #3) by Mary Robinette Kowal

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This is my favorite of these books so far, but I will admit that there is just something about Kowal’s writing that doesn’t perfectly gel with my tastes. I’m curious enough to keep going to see how this series turns out, but I may need to rethink reading any more of her books (I also was pretty unenthused about the first book in her fantasy-Austen-pastiche series). We switch narrators from Elma York (who is on her way to Mars during the course of this book) […]



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