Cannonball Read 17

This is quite a short novella and therefore there’s quite a bit of rushing to get to the plot that there is. But if the worst that I have to complain about is some deus ex machina nuns, I think we’re overall pretty fine. Did not realize that there was more fiction in this vein by Clark, I’ve read some of his pretty awesome punk sci-fi (?). There are too many au...

A quick read but at the end of the day never quite felt the sense of “the game is afoot.” Montgomery does a fantastic job of fleshing out a very large cast of characters– I was a bit worried at the outset when they were all being described without names, but as soon as our narrator (Stephen) learns who they are, we very quickly learn who they are as well. But e...

Format in which I consumed this book: audiobook Did I like it/love it/hate it? Liked it What’s it about? In the 1740s, a British ship sets sail to try to capture a Spanish galleon filled with treasure. They fail, and become shipwrecked on an island near Argentina and Chile. In the months that follow, the crew and leadership divide into factions and struggle to survive. The...

Biddy lives on a small, magically isolated island off the coast of Ireland with her guardian/foster father, Rowan, and his familiar, the rabbit Hutchincroft. No one who doesn’t know that it’s there can find it. While Biddy has no magic of her own, she has grown up with it all around her. Yet magic is fading in the outside world, and far too often, Rowan has to leave ...

I love an unreliable narrator. Whether they are divorced from reality à la Montresor of “The Cask of Amontillado,” deceiving themselves as a defense against trauma, like Pi in Life of Pi, or intentionally deceiving the reader, as in many mysteries I won’t name to avoid spoilers. . .I just can’t get enough of them. What intrigues me about June Hayward (aka...