Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Shakespeare knew too much.”

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

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I really had a good time with this one. I didn’t realize it was YA going in, but while it did lean into YA sensibilities at points, mostly it just felt like a kooky magical adventure story. It was very hard to put down, and I found myself constantly wondering what would happen next, which doesn’t really happen all that often to me anymore because I read so much (usually for me these days I vacillate between “I pretty much know what’s coming” because I’m […]

We are not all heroes

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I was inspired to write this review by this tweet. YA is an interesting genre. Nix’s previous books (which I adore) have given us a very typical YA heroines. They are morally clear, they have self doubt which they work through, and they are generally good. In Clariel – which a lot of Nix fans didn’t like – we don’t get that. Clariel is a prequel to Sabriel – Nix’s first “Old Kingdom” book.  It’s set a couple of hundred years in the past. Clariel […]

Where Necromancy isn’t so bad

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I listen to a lot of audio books because I have a long commute that often becomes long as the Washington DC subway system is falling apart and if one thing goes wrong they tend to snowball and the next thing you know your 30 minute trip is an hour and a half. I didn’t pay attention to who was narrating Sabriel, the first book in a series by Garth Nix, so I was delighted to discover it was read by Tim Curry. He definitely adds […]

This review is about the books you should read instead. But also maybe read this one too.

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tl;dr: Stick with the first three books in this series: Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen.  I don’t know what Nix is doing with these later ones, but he’s not doing it super great and it’s a total bummer. Goldenhand isn’t a waste of time, but it does not hold up to the originals, especially the first two. The Back Story For five years I was a seventh grade English teacher.  One of the best parts of the job was hearing my students’ book reports and reading […]

For everyone who wanted more Lirael and Nick.

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I have so much thoughts right now. So I will ask myself questions and then answer them. (This is a good way to trick yourself into writing things when you don’t know what to write about.) First, is this a worthy successor to the original Abhorsen trilogy (which is one of my favorite fantasy series)? Yes. Is it everything I wanted from a sequel? No. Did I even know what I wanted from it? Weeeeelll, yes and no. Is it a perfect book? No. Ultimately, […]

A Constellation of Tales

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Though the title makes it sound like it’s a collection of new stories, The Starlit Woods is a collection of re-told fairy tales. I had a different perception going into the book, though being a fan of retold fairy tales I didn’t mind that the stories were retellings and not completely original stories.  This is a really good collection of stories and while there were a couple I wasn’t fond of, most were very compelling. I decided to check this book out because the list […]



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