The Shades of Magic series continues to be a delight. A Gathering of Shadows picks up a few months after the end of A Darker Shade of Magic, with Lila maybe going down with a sinking lifeboat. “I am Delilah Bard, she thought, as the ropes cut into her skin. I am a thief and a pirate and a traveler. I have set foot in three different worlds, and lived. I have shed the blood of royals and held magic in my hands. A ship […]
Is there anything more San Francisco than sourdough bread and tech start ups?
I wasn’t crazy about Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore when I read it along with what seemed like half of CBR6. My biggest complaint was the magical realism but the longer I stay in the Cannonball community the more open to new genres I become. Plus Yesknopemaybe read and reviewed Sourdough at the start of CBR10 and prefaced her review by stating she despised Penumbra so if I haven’t stretched my tastes as much as I thought what could it hurt? Sourdough is a quirky story about a software engineer named Lois […]
Confessions of a recovering literary fiction snob
I loved reading fantasy and horror and suspense as a kid, and I loved the literary fiction we read in school. As an adult, I started taking myself and my choice of reading materials far too seriously, staying away from anything too genre, making rare exceptions for Atwood’s Madd Addam series or Tolkien. [I know. Insert eye roll <<here>>] And then about six years ago, I read and loved Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and I started looking into his other books and found that […]
Apparently Anarchists Can’t Fight Without Their Leader?
Renegades, the first book of a superhero duology by Lunar Chronicles writer Marissa Meyer, starts out a bit rough, but it ends up becoming an enjoyable enough read that I’ll probably check out the second one whenever it comes out. The story is told from two perspectives: Nova, aka Nightmare, who can cause people to fall asleep with her touch, and Adrian, aka the Sentinel, scion of the reigning superheroes in a fictional city. The setting is our world at some point in thefuture, as […]