Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The monster, the thief, and the vampire lover

Monstress Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu

Once Burned by Jeaniene Frost

Bayou Book Thief by Ellen Byron

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I’m wrapping up the CBR15 Passport Challenge with three books from my bookshelf. I’ve had some of these for YEARS, so it was past time. I’ve enjoyed a few of Marjorie Liu’s short stories in paranormal romance anthologies like My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding. When I learned she penned a graphic novel featuring magic and monsters, I was all in! I won an Amazon gift card from Mocha Girls Read and picked this up. And then it sat on my endless TBR pile until I […]

Bloody, beautiful Monstress

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I adored the first volume of Marjorie Liu’s Monstress. Sana Takeda’s art is one of the most stunning that I’ve come across in a comic. At the same time, it’s also unbelievably violent and brutal. I find this pairing somewhat evocative of the Hannibal TV series, which I also loved. (I don’t know what this says about me – that I am ok with gore, provided it’s beautifully presented?) Monstress is set an alternative, matriarchal, steampunk Asia, which is inhabited by humans, anthropomorphic animal gods […]

Gets me thinking

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This graphic novel does a good job of dealing with a fundamental question I always have in nearly every fantasy novel, movie, cartoon, video game, or anything else. It deals with it, but doesn’t fix it, but still it’s something. It’s a common issue with the genre for me and something I am not sure I will ever figure out so long as I persist in reading (etc) fantasy. That fundamental issue is: how does the world function? What I often understand about fantasy worlds […]

The Art is Better Than the Story

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I think a few Cannonballers reviewed the Monstress series last year, and when I saw volume one at the local comic book store, the art was so beautiful I decided to make the purchase. The art is truly stunning, a combination of anime and Art Deco (the blurb on the back says Art Deco, but I think it looks a bit Nouveau; maybe elements of both). The story itself is complicated and involves a variety of races of creatures that have a complex history together. […]



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