Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Another quest for our favorite middle-aged lady pirate

The Tapestry of Fate: Amina al-Sirafi #2 by Shannon Chakraborty

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I seem to be drawn this year to adventures on the high seas: lady pirates, survivors of shipwrecks, badass dude divers, and even more badass lady divers. So it’s only fitting that I continue with Shannon Chakraborty’s second Amina al-Sirafi novel, The Tapestry of Fate because Amina al-Sirafi is, of course, a badass lady pirate. If there’s one trope I cannot resist, it’s the retiree with a very specific skill set called out for one last job. If you read the first Amina book, you’ll […]

The Tapestry of Fate: Supporting women’s rights…and women’s wrongs.

The Tapestry of Fate by Shannon Chakraborty

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Tapestry of Fate picks up shortly after the ending of the Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, and is deeply related to some of the happenings towards the end of the first book. So, there will be spoilers below for the Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi. Amina has been granted super-human abilities and tasked with finding five Transgressions. Well, four after the Moon of Saba. We get a small glimpse at Amina, Dalila, Tinbu, and Majed’s adventure to collect the second Transgression early on in the book, but […]

The River of Silver: A nice reward for finishing a wonderful series

The River of Silver: Tales from the Daevabad Trilogy by Shannon Chakraborty

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After taking a brief rest from tearing through Empire of Gold, I took a much more gentle pace through River of Silver. River of Silver is a series of short stories from multiple character points of view that stretches across the whole scope of the original trilogy. The stories are arranged chronologically from decades before we start City of Brass through to just after the ending of Empire of Gold. There are a few stories from the trilogy’s main protagonists, but mostly the stories are […]

The Daevabad Trilogy: “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Revenge. Giants. Monsters. Chases. Escapes. True love. Miracles.”

The City of Brass by Shannon Chakraborty

The Kingdom of Copper by Shannon Chakraborty

The Empire of Gold by Shannon Chakraborty

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It has been a while since I’ve made such dubious choices regarding reading hours as I did to read this trilogy. I read City of Brass at a decent pace and finished it in about 6 days. Kingdom of Copper lined up with a weekend so I ignored pretty much all of my responsibilities to finish in 2 days. While Empire of Gold technically took 8 days, I read the last 250 pages in about 7 hours – staying up until 2:30 AM to finish. […]

“…your ambitions are a feast, Amina Al-Sirafi…”

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

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I’ve seen Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi on a lot of book lists as an entertaining fantasy novel not to miss, and it has been given good reviews here on CBR, too. I enjoyed it immensely and was excited to see that a sequel, The Tapestry of Fate, is coming out on May 12. Based on The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, I would imagine that several more novels will be forthcoming. If they are as imaginative and well written as this one, I […]

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: Wow. Wowwowwow.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

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For quite a few years now, I have been avoiding reading things that cover truly difficult material. The world is hard and weird, and I have preferred to read “lighter” stories as a way to escape, to feel the joys with out the lows. This self-preservationist approach to choosing reading material has led me further down the road of comfy, cozy reads which are lovely, but there are never real stakes. I think I have begun to notice that choosing books which do not have […]



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