Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I have been a character and I have been a narrator, but now I don’t know what I am.

Or What You Will by Jo Walton

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CBR15 PASSPORT (Stamp #13: Different Genres, Metafiction) CB515BINGO: (Europe square. Takes place in Florence, Italy. The city is very much a character in the book.) This is the right book for the right person but I am not that right person. Trying to summarize the plot here is going to be problematic because there are a lot of threads weaving this story. Here goes. A woman, Sylvia, is living in Florence, Italy as she nears the end of her battle with cancer. Sylvia is a successful author […]

A (very strange but lovely) fantasy for book lovers.

Among Others by Jo Walton

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30 Books in 30 Days, Vol. 2 Book 3/30 “I didn’t ask to have my good leg replaced by a creaky rusty weathervane, but then I suppose nobody does. I would have made much greater sacrifices. I was prepared to die, and Mor *did* die. I should think of it as a war-wound, an old soldier’s scars. Frodo lost a finger, and all his own possibility of happiness. Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this […]

#Red: An Austenian take on the societal and legal niceties of consuming your own kin (plus dragons)

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

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Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton has been described as “Pride and Prejudice, but dragons”. There is no more apt description than this, though I also see a lot of Dickensian influence. Additionally, the primary romance is not as antagonistic as Elizabeth and Darcy are initially. I’m counting this as my bingo square for Red because the cover is, in fact, very red and because the colour actually plays a role in the book. The plot centers around a family of dragon gentility after the […]

The Phurnicite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around.

Among Others by Jo Walton

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This is a really wonderful novel. It’s kind of weird mix of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, Matilda by Roald Dahl, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. This weird combination is never all of one plus, but a blending of elements of each. Morwenna is 14 and has either just survived a horrendous car crash that killed her mother and sister, or conversely, she and her sister worked together using their shared magic to stop their mother from taking over the world of men via the […]

They hang people for murder, and while I didn’t exactly like Mummy, she was my mother after all.

Farthing by Jo Walton

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Maybe it’s just me, but I really didn’t like this book. It’s not unpleasant or anything. That’s not the issue here. It just feels false. So the book takes place in an alternative history Unite Kingdom in 1949. Rather than “what if Nazis” won the war, though it seems like maybe they kind of did, the novel wonders, what would happen in appeasement were taken to its logical conclusion and a binding peace accord were struck with Germany in 1939/1940 after Dunkirk? Ostensibly, I am […]

The one and only time it might be ok to use first person present tense narration

Lent by Jo Walton

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I was hesitant to pick this up because it’s written in first person, present tense; I’m not much of a fan of either of those. It didn’t surprise me that I was having a hard time getting into the story. I don’t know what happened, but when I picked it up again the next day, I couldn’t put it down. Jo Walton might be a bit of a miracle worker for that. Lent is basically a fictionalized version of 1492-1498 Florence, Italy. The city was […]



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