Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Lord save me from a sad sack narrator.

Magic For Liars by Sarah Gailey

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The premise here is: What if your sibling went to magic school and you’re a muggle? And what if you’re a private detective hired to solve a murder at a magic school? Both of these are intriguing separately. Together, I could not resist this book. Unfortunately, I did not like it nearly as much as I wanted to. Parts of it were stellar, and parts of it absolutely did not work for me. Our narrator is Ivy Gamble, a struggling private detective whose twin sister […]

I just wanted to do my job.

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

by 1 Comment

This is a strong three stars for me. It’s really good in a lot of ways, still feels a little limited for some of the choices and a little thin because of them or what they reveal about the novel, but also succeeds to build a world I am interested in and a story I am invested in. So the novel is almost a perfect Venn diagram of Sara Gran, The Magicians, and The Secret Place by Tana French. Ivy Gamble lives in a world […]

Murder at the Magic School

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

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I’ve not had a lot of luck with things highly recommended and hyped by authors whose works I’ve enjoyed.  V.E. Schwab might be an exception. I found out about the impending publication of Magic For Liars from her social media, and picked it up as soon as it came out. The descriptions of the premise as something between Harry Potter and The Magicians is also reasonably accurate; another point for the book, since I frequently don’t quite agree with the blurbs either. The basic idea […]



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