Cannonball Read 11

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A Short-Story Novel Hybrid

Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus: Beginnigns by Lydia Sherrer

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The world and the characters in Love, Lies, and Hocus Pocus: Beginnings are so much fun that it really annoys me how short the stories and the book are. To some extent, the two main characters are pretty standard. Lily is bookish, socially awkward, and talented with magic; she’s a wizard. Sebastian is friendly, good looking, a troublemaker, and has little magic talent, but he is a witch. This to me is a tradition buddy mystery-solving/adventure team. What makes them fun is their dynamic and how it comes from the magic system in their otherwise normal/real world. Neither of them […]

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6/30/2018 's CBR10 Review No:41 |

Kill Your Darlings

All Souls Trilogy: A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness

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Deborah Harkness knows a lot about a lot of things. Her depth and breadth of knowledge on things ranging from wine to Elizabethan England to brewing tea is certainly impressive, but the amount of detail crammed into these books sure does make for some slow going. The All Souls Trilogy is about a world in which witches, vampires, and daemons (in this case, daemons are humans who are more than us regular folk–musical prodigies, artistic savants, financial wizards, scientific geniuses–or sometimes drug addicts or mentally ill) exist and walk among us. Humans don’t know about them. Trying to write a […]

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1/28/2018 's CBR10 Review No:3 |

Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

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It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it and also how much people are obsessed with it. And whether the bragging is a […]

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12/7/2017 's CBR9 Review No:39 |

God bless busybody community matriarchs, and all that sail in them.

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

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More, please. More, more, more. I just love me some Peter Grant. And fair warning to the reader who may be interested in this series: this book, Broken Homes, which is Book 4 of the “Rivers of London” series, isn’t the strongest of the bunch. But it’s still a delight and a treat, and I will fight anyone who isn’t a fan. Listen, I have five more “Dark Tower” books to read in the next five weeks, but I still just checked out Foxglove Summer (Book 5 of “Rivers of London”) from the library, and investigated the graphic novel series […]

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6/30/2017 's CBR9 Review No:26 |

Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation.

Whispers Under Ground by Ben Aaronovitch

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Oh boy, did I miss Peter Grant while I was taking my super fun journey through the last four heartwrenchers. It felt like I was waiting FOREVER for Whispers Under Ground to become available at the library. Peter Grant is a delight. He is the perfect not-very-straight straight man for all the madness in this fantastic world of Ben Aaronovitch’s creation. I keep reminding myself as I read these books that for all of Grant’s self-deprecation and insistence that he’s a terrible cop with bad instincts, and for all that the non-magical higher-ups on the force hate him and the […]

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6/30/2017 's CBR9 Review No:20 |

The one where Rachel goes on an ill-advised banshee hunt

White Witch, Black Curse by Kim Harrison

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It has taken me three years to circle back to the first book from The Hollows series I found at the library. I unwittingly checked out and read a page from White Witch, Black Curse before realizing it was the seventh in the series! The completist that I am returned it. I finally started with book one in 2014. I’m probably the only one spacing out this series over so many years. 😉 ****Major spoilers for previous books in the series to follow**** Rachel Morgan has been through the wringer, y’all. At the start of this book, she is desperate to remember what transpired […]

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12/30/2016 's CBR8 Review No:2 |


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