Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Luke Cage meets noir meets The Diviners meets more please!

Abbott by Saladin Ahmed, Sami Kivelä

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Abbott is a brief, five-issue series set in 1970s Detroit about journalist Elena Abbott, lone black female reporter at the Detroit Daily. Abbott prefers to delve into the stories the paper’s board would rather not see printed. She’s recently getting heat for her piece on the death of a black teen at the hands of police, but so far she’s been protected by her loyal boss. She has a new case on the horizon and it’s a grisly one.  A mutilated police horse is found […]

Getting to know some new authors in a familiar setting

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There won’t be any spoilers for Star Wars in this review.  This book also contains no spoilers for the movies.   Canto Bight is a new location to the Star Wars universe.  It is a planet that is relevant only because on it rests the city of Canto Bight.  Canto Bight, the place, is Las Vegas and Dubai but more extravagant.  Canto Bight, the book, is a collection of short stories follows a several minor characters, heretofore unknown to the greater Star Wars universe. So, […]

A novel, if predictable science-fiction adventure

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For one of my teaching gigs, I’m at an Islamic college in my nearest big city, and it’s been a rewarding and enlightening experience already. My boss has asked if I wanted someday to teach a Muslim-American literature course, and I obviously said yes, I would. That day, when I got home, I did a ton of Googling and Goodreads digging. I’m fairly widely read, but I wanted to see what scholars and publishers counted as Muslim-American, so that I could be fair in my […]

A promising new fantasy series (without a single white character!)

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3.5 stars Resorting to the blurb for a plot summary, because I need to get my reviews up to date, and trying to come up with my own synopsis takes too long: The Crescent Moon Kingdoms are at a boiling point. A struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the mysterious Falcon Prince is reaching its climax. In the midst of this brewing rebellion, a series of brutal supernatural murders strike at the heart of the Kingdoms. Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, three score and more years old, […]

1001 Nights, for Beginners

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Engraved on the Eye is a collection of 8 short stories told in various settings of Fantasy Middle East, drawing on Islamic and Middle Eastern folklore. It’s an extremely quick read.  The stories are entertaining and the characters are lively, jovial, and diverse.   Every story has some sort of supernatural creatures; ghuls feature prominently, along with ghul-hunters, martial artists, gunslingers, supervillains, rogues, dervishes,bounty hunters, and shaykhs. As with many short story books, there’s a range in subject matter and quality.  I particularly enjoyed Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride (about a gun-slinging Muslim wizard in […]



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