Holiday reading is my favorite, and I was fortunate to have a rip-roaring book to tear through this holiday. I was also pleased, per the title of this post, that it ended and it will not continue as a duology or trilogy. Naomi Novik developed an imaginative world populated with interesting characters and an engaging story. I’m quite sure the characters continued living their lives after I closed the book, but I am also happy that all necessary loose ends were wrapped up so satisfactorily. Briefly, Agnieszka […]
2018 – I Can’t Quit You
This last year, like many Cannonballers, I read more books than I got a chance to review and so this final review of 2018, which will end up being my first review of 2019, is a sort of odds and ends. Here in no particular order are books that I read while in China, books I read while on vacation in Northern Wisconsin, and books I read during my fall and spring semesters that I just didn’t have time to write about at the time. […]
Turning Silver Into Gold
I was so excited to get Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik as part of the book exchange because I loved Uprooted and had read and enjoyed the first book in Novik’s Temeraire series this summer. This is a loose (very loose) retelling of Rumpelstiltskin set in a past both realistic and imaginary and involving three young women. Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, and she takes over her father’s business when his inability to demand payment leaves her family almost destitute and her […]
My favourite book this year
Before this week, if you had told me that one of my favourite fantasy books I’ve ever read would be a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin of all things, I would have laughed in your face. But that is one way to describe Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, her follow-up to Uprooted (which was far and away one of my favourite books from a few years ago). Tonally, Spinning Silver is similar to Uprooted. Both feature a non-traditional European fantasy world, in that the Polish grounding for Uprooted and the Slavic folklore for Spinning Silver […]