Katie is the head chef behind Seconds, the best restaurant in town, but she’s already looking towards new pastures and new challenges. All of her friends have moved away, and she’d like to run her own restaurant, rather than work in somebody else’s kitchen. She’s found the perfect place across the river, but the building work is taking far too long and seems to be tied up in a bureaucratic limbo. She also has the ghost of her previous relationship hanging over her head in […]
Mmm… books about books
At the risk of becoming too meta, I’m going to talk a little bit about one of my go-to books for choosing other books to read.* I tend to think – judging by the Cannonballers I actually know, the general bookish-ness around here, and the sheer amount of things that Must. Be. Read – that a lot of you CBReaders are similar to me, in that you tend to read quite a bit. (And write rather less often than you should/would like too, but that’s […]
A Bit of a Disappointment (or don’t read this right after Eleanor & Park)
(Read 5/26/14) I’m a big fan of Oliver’s other books and her writing, but this novel felt like the least thought out of her work—like an early novel versus the most recent. I’m sure parallels to the Hunger Games will be drawn here though the setting is current (not future) and the stakes not quite as high. The basic plot of the book is this. Carp, New York is a small town in upstate New York, the type of place the economy has hit hard and […]
Many Characters in Search of Magic
This second installment in the Maggie Stiefvater’s series, The Raven Cycle, feels more diffused between all the characters searching for magic and the Welsh king, Glendower. We get some of the story from Blue Sargent’s point of view (the main character from The Raven Boys) but the boys get more say here—starting with Ronan Lynch, the angry tattooed friend of Gansey, who just happens to be able to pull objects from his dreams. Really, this is mostly Ronan’s story—as we learn more about what happened […]