Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself.”

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

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CBR Passport Challenge: Books Recommended by Friends This is the second book in a trilogy. It doesn’t really make sense if you’ve not read the series from the beginning. So if you’re not caught up, go read A Deadly Education. It’s great, I’ll wait. El and Orion are now seniors in the Scholomance, and they have absolutely no way of knowing if their very dangerous mission just before graduation to fix the furnaces worked. Did they manage to clear the graduation hall of the majority […]

This ending made me love the series more.

The Golden Enclaves (The Scholomance, #3) by Naomi Novik

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This was such a great series, and this book a great ending to it. I feel like I was waiting for sure to say that until I finished this book, and now I can say with certainty that The Scholomance is worth reading. It all just comes together SO WELL. I was happy with the story on the surface, I was happy with the characters and their arcs, and I was happy with what is going on underneath. This one picks up exactly where we […]

Grouping two more re-reads together, with no thematic connection

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase

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Re-read, October 2022: I cannot fully explain why I had the need to re-read this novel, the start of a promising but eventually disappointing series of alt-history books that asked the question, what if Napoleonic wars but also dragons? A decent part was this intense desire to re-read the part of the novel where Laurence realizes that a number of dragons that the UK relies upon for its aerial might insist on having female captains, and is forced to reconcile that fact with his posh […]

Re-reads in anticipation of the last–Scholomance delivers

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

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Re-re-read in advance of The Golden Enclaves, September 2022 Knowing now what I know about how this book is actually a semi-subversive (and by which I mean not at all subversive, was I just under a rock this whole while?) pushback on JKR’s Wizarding World(TM), it’s doubly fascinating to re-re-enter the world of the Scholomance through the eyes of El, our crotchety crocheting evil enchantress in the making. I had read once that Novik wrote Scholomance in a response to the logical inconsistencies of the Potterverse, […]

Beauty and the Beast with no Stockholm syndrome and more magic

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

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In 2020 I read Naomi Novik’s, Spinning Silver, which I found to be an excellent reimaging of Rumpelstiltskin.  I finished the review with,  “Uprooted is going on my “wish list”.  Between then and now I got Uprooted in a Cannonball fundraiser but it has sat on the shelf.  I had this slated for the “Bird” square in Cannonball Bingo because of the bird on the cover.  However, I ran out of time and used Transmetropolitan volume 2: Lust for Life instead. I’ve long been a fan of […]

Harry Potter in the upside down

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik

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I really wanted to love this but ended this more meh. It’s definitely trying to channel later instalment Harry Potter, but with more diversity and less heartwarming-ness. Our protagonist is El, short for Galadriel, who is in her next to last year school at the Scholomance, an international wizard high school. Unlike Hogwarts, the Scholomance is self- taught (no Dumbledores or Snapes) and brimming with danger day to day, mostly in the form of magical monsters (Mals, short for maleficaria). In this world, the surges […]



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