So. The Stand. I have been listening to The Stand on audiobook since before Thanksgiving. It’s 48 hours long. I’m so glad that I was able to to hit my 5th Cannonball of the year on this particular book because I love it dearly, but have never had a chance to review it for Cannonball. So here we go! “Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll […]
Strangeness with Magic, Dragons, and a Quarkbeast
I read Jasper Fford’s Tuesday Next series, and I liked it for a while. I got bored after about book 4. So when I saw a YA fantasy novel by the same author, I wanted to try it out. The Last Dragonslayer was mostly what I expected, and also a little not. What defines Fford’s writing for me is a sense of slightly off-kilter in an otherwise normal story, and that is totally here. The normal is as follows: 15 year old indentured servant Jennifer […]
Charlies’ Angels with Sherlock Holmes at Phantom of the Opera
The premise of Angels of Music is cool: the Phantom of the Opera runs a secret detective service and employs ladies of the opera house as “Angels”. The set up reminiscent of Charlie’s Angels is pretty deliberate. There are several actual characters from the original novella by Gaston Leroux but in different forms. Christine Daee is one of the original Angels, and there is also a Raoul, but no Philippe, and a Count de Chagny. Where things get a little weird is that mix of […]
Another ‘gifted teenage misfit destined to save the world’ story, but with a few original bits
I had seen Sanderson’s name on Cannonball multiple times, but I wasn’t sure where to start. A friend recommended Mistborn, so I figured a double recommendation (meatspace friend and CBR folks) was a pretty sure thing. And I really enjoyed it, even though I can’t tell which book in the series this is (there’s a snippet of ‘the concluding volume of the Mistborn trilogy’ in the back of the book, though Amazon tells me this is the first one). Teenage thief Vin lives in a […]