Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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A fitting end to a wonderful trilogy

Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty

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Empire of Gold featured in my ‘Best Books of the Year’ blurb, so why haven’t I written a review yet? I’m not quite sure, but I do know that it’s not the malaise that sometimes comes with ‘average’ books. I have loved each entry in the Daevabad trilogy more than the next, and Empire of Gold was that gold standard (no pun intended)–a conclusion that manages to surprise and yet feel inevitable and right, one that hits a perfect thematic ending note. Chakraborty has built up […]

Fun story, bad editing

The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty

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3.5 stars. This book was a pretty slow to pick up pace, but by the end I was digging both the story and characters. Nahri, a con woman in 18th century Cairo, is used to scraping by and lying for survival. She tricks rich people into giving her money in exchange for palm readings and healings. It’s never meant to be taken seriously until she accidentally summons a djinn warrior. When questioned by the djinn, it comes out that she has some actual skill with […]

It’s complicated; romance, family, politics, whether one is dead or not, all of it is complicated

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This book suffered from next book-itis.  I started reading it but got distracted by wanting to read other books when I realized that two more bingo squares would give me a second bingo (Between the Bridge and the River and Eleanor and Park).  I half-heartedly kept reading City of Brass while waiting to get to my main city library where I could pick up both books.  At the time of stopping reading, I was feeling so so about the City of Brass.  I was having trouble keeping track of the […]

Don’t do me like that

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CBR10BINGO: And So It Begins My favorite book series is Iain M. Banks’s Culture. Each book offers a self-contained story of its own time and place within the vast universe of the Culture. Sure, it’s helpful to have the incremental, accumulated knowledge of the Culture that comes from reading multiple books, but you don’t have to keep track of characters and timelines.  I also appreciate series like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Vandermeer’s Southern Reach that are really just one long book broken into […]



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