#CBR10 Review #44: Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown


Continuing with my intake of pirate-themed books and tv this year, we have Cinnamon and Gunpowder! A delicious (haha) and fun story from the point of view of a master chef named Owen in the 1800s who is kidnapped by an infamous pirate captain known as Mad Hannah Mabbot: Mabbot has killed Owen’s previous employer, and takes him on to her ship with the intention of making him prepare for her a delicious meal every Sunday. From this basic premise we see Owen struggle to try and escape, as well as to figure out how exactly to prepare fancy meals aboard a ship with little in the way of tools or ingredients. We also see how he seemingly becomes part of the crew, and therefore entangled in Mabbot’s journeys and desire to bring down a massive trading empire which has effectively crippled the lives of farmers in various countries due to the demand of the opium trade.

This novel has a lot going for it, in terms of character and action. But what I always love to see in any pirate story is a movement away from simply being raucous on the high seas: there is more to Mabbot and her motivations, in regards to the slave trade as well as colonialism and its effect on the citizens of the world. So while this is really a fun story, it is not purely empty, and they do touch on a few other serious topics that maybe could have been spoken on a bit more as they briefly flew by, but ultimately I think the balance of seriousness versus levity is pretty good here, sliding more to the light side of things at most times.

I did however have a bit of trouble getting into this one at first, and I think it may be to do with Owen himself as the main narrator: he goes through character development throughout the novel, but it really did take me quite some time to warm up to him and his rigid belief systems. It almost seemed like a bit much at first, a too difficult a barrier to break at times, but perhaps it is also because many of his thoughts are so traditional yet so different from my own. And then after this difficulty to get going, the end portion of the novel seemed to almost fly by with activity and action, so the pace was a little off for me at times.

Ultimately, however, Cinnamon and Gunpowder was not a bad read by any means, and definitely a good addition to the much needed break from some of the really emotionally heavy stuff I was getting into for a while there. Will it be super memorable to me at the end of the day? Probably not, but I’m not unhappy that I took the time to read it!

CBR10 Bingo Square: Delicious!

[Be sure to visit the Cannonball Read main site!]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#CBR5 Review #20: Th1rteen R3asons Why by Jay Asher

Image
Jay Asher’s young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why focuses on the important topic of teenage suicide, and how a young person may be led to it. While the writing is effective in demonstrating how a person’s actions may affect another in ways that they could never have imagined, reading this novel made me feel a little strange, almost as if it left a slightly sour taste in my mouth upon finishing it. Not in that the topic of suicide makes me uncomfortable like it does some people, but that there may have been ways to make the whole thing have more of an impact? The tone was a little more bitter than I thought it would be? I’m not sure. In any case, here is specifically what the story is about: Thirteen Reasons Why starts with a young boy named Clay receiving a series of cassette tapes anonymously in the mail. As he listens to them, he finds that they are from one of his classmates, Hannah, who recently committed suicide, making a list of thirteen people/incidents that in...
Read more

#CBR5 Review #33: Peter Panzerfaust, vol. 1 – The Great Escape by Kurtis Wiebe and Tyler Jenkins

Image
The simplest way to describe the comic series of Peter Panzerfaust would be as a mid-teens Peter Pan, fighting through World War II Europe with a group of French orphans. It’s the kind of thing that makes some people turn away as it seems ridiculous, while others are intrigued by how it could work, putting this classic figure of Peter Pan into a completely different and historically real universe. And does it work? I think it does, extremely well: Peter Panzerfaust takes the iconic image of the boy who never wants to grow up and turns his mythology on its head to become something else entirely. It’s not about not wanting to grow up, but about keeping a youthful spirit in a situation where you are forced to grow up before you are really even an adult. The first volume of Peter Panzerfaust (there are only two trade volumes as of now), entitled The Great Escape deals with how a group of young French orphans first meet up with the vivacious figure of Peter. The story is told fro...
Read more

#CBR5 Review #28: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Image
I started out reading John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men while picturing it as an old-timey travelling farmer story starring Walton Goggins and Hodor (hooray!). Oh, how amusing this was to me at first. And it really was the easiest way to picture the characters (with some slight changes, of course) in my head as it all went along. Until the course of the story started to fill me with worry and doubt, which ended up in just plain old heartbreak. I should have seen it coming; I did see it coming, but just like how you may watch a film even though you know you’re going to end up crying in it, I walked right into this one as well. That’s not to say that it made me intensely emotional or anything, but it kind of weighed a little heavy on my heart at the end. This could definitely be seen as a testament to the author’s abilities as a writer, and it really was a beautiful and brief story, but at the same time, I’m not sure if it was really for me at the end of all things… It is true,...
Read more