I'll be honest I struggled with this book. I really wanted to like it and there was a lot of aspects I did like but when it's this hard to pick up and continue I just can't.

Fabulously written and crafted, but unfortunately this just did not work for me. I'd like to give it a try again in the future reading it myself, although I did enjoy the narration.

This was such a spectacular, unique read. It lives up to its title, which is definitely one of the coolest I’ve come across in ages. The world built strikes a good balance so I felt introduced but not inundated.

Also can we talk about the cover?!

Thank you so much Netgalley & Recorded Books for the audio copy!

I had a hard time getting into this book. The narrator was great and I was able to easily know which pov was being represented. The story overall was not interesting enough to make me really want to read it.

This is actually more of a 3.5 stars for me. The concept of this book had me instantly interested but it kind of fell flat for me. I really enjoyed the chapters following the main character, a queer woman in the 1980s, but was less interested in the chapters following the "alien" (not sure that's what the character was, but it surely seemed like it). I enjoyed the overall book-within-a-book concept but I those chapters just pulled me out of the part of the story I was enjoying. I will say, this is a very light SciFi which was nice since I have a hard time reading very intense SciFi. The audiobook narator did a very good job and I was never confused about which POV I was following.

Unfortunately, I DNF'd this book. I struggled to get into the writing style and as a result just couldn't connect with the story or characters. I just think that this book was not for me.

In this dual timeline plot, present-day Cinnamon deals with teenaged life after the death of her beloved brother Sekou. She reads a book given to her by Sekou, which is a memoir following the life of an alien and his/her Dahomean warrior lover as they escape wartorn Dahomey Kingdom.

I really wanted to love this book. There was so much to love. The writing was lyrical – full of beautiful imagery. The plot was intriguing. But I guess I didn’t feel connected to any of the characters. I suspect it’s not the fault of the book so much as the fact that I (a white, generation X woman who is easily mistaken as a “Karen” on Facebook) am not the target audience.

'Love is what you got to do to be free.' -Aidan

Hairston's writing will not be for everyone, but the staccato-like resonance of her tale has me wanting to delve deeper into her world. Her use of history, magic, contemporary society(at the time), and science fiction proves that melding these together can make for great storytelling.

Cinnamon Jones has a lot to deal with: not being beautiful and svelte like the theatre scene warrants, an ornery mother who wants to keep her away from the magic that runs through her, a brother who believes deeply in her talent and magical essence, grandparents and an aunt that embody that magic, a family with strong and hurtful opinions, and secrets kept from her that weigh her down.

Incorporating a story within a story has always appealed to me when reading and with Cinnamon delving into the Chronicles of the Wanderer, we get to experience a bond between an ancient Dahomean warrior woman and a space-faring, shapeshifting alien wanderer.

Hairston does a great job of telling a story across space and time, infusing it with a magic all her own. Her awareness and reverence are on full display here and can be seen in the way she highlights familial and societal structures that do more harm than good. If you love stories that require close attention to detail and are absorbing, this one is for you.

I also enjoyed how the narrator skilfully used tonal and inflection changes to.convey a change in emotion, a character's mindset, time and place.

I got 12% in before I stopped reading. I didn't like the writing style. I think it made most of the story hard to understand.

I was provided both a digital and audio ARC of this book, all opinions are my own.

I struggle with what to rate this, because I found parts of it very interesting and other parts extremely confusing. I attribute that to the disjointed writing style. Some of the chapters are set in the 1984 in Pittsburgh while others are set in 1892 West Africa, then we jump to 1987 also in Pittsburgh and 1893 while the main characters of those chapters are travelling from Africa to France and then the United states. The chapters set in the 80's follow Cinnamon Jones through her trials and tribulations. Her story is connected to the characters of the 1890's via a book called The Chronicles of the Great Wanderer. The Wanderer is one of the characters we follow in the 1890 chapters as well as a warrior woman named Kehinde. Cinnamon's chapters have a different feel and cadence than those that follow the Wanderer and Kehinde. I was often confused by the more poetic nature of Cinnamon's chapters versus the more straightforward story telling feel of the Wanderer's chapters. I could have read an entire book about Taiwo (the wanderer) and Kehinde.

Overall I felt this was a bit on the long side and there was too much going on to keep track of. The audiobook is almost 18 hours long and the book is roughly 500 pages. While this has some elements that I really enjoy, folklore, some magical and fantastical elements, I just couldn't keep up with all of the characters and storylines. Some of the elements were explained well while others were not, and for a book this long, you need some explanation. While the writing is beautiful, it isn't my preferred style to read.

There are some racial and homophobic slurs present in the book which would have been accurate for the 80s. Doesn't make it right but accurate to the setting. There is also body shaming and self loathing. This book isn't for everyone, and I think someone with a more sophisticated palette will really enjoy this. It is a little weird, is very creative, and has some endearing characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the audio ARC!

I really hate to write this type of review, especially because I really was excited to give this a listen. Unfortuantely, this felt like a rollercoaster that I ended up not wanting to be on. Cinnamon was a cute charcter but this flopped back and forth between feeling like a middle grade fantasy and something much darker. Which would have been fine but the flow wasn't there and I kept finding myself losing interest. The writing often impeded my ability to visualize the scenario because descriptions were just worded in a weird way. Lots of cool concepts here and the idea of this book was interesting. It just didn't work for me. However, I could see myself giving some of the authors later works a chance because there was potential in this book, for sure.

Thank you to the publishers, author and NetGalley for the free copy of this audio book.

I'm very on the fence on this one. Interesting premise but I think there was just too much going on with the dual story lines and the multiple genres... It was hard to focus on everything that happens for me. The narrator did good though.

Didn't love this one. While there were sections I enjoyed, they were drowned out by the unnecessary length of the book. The Characters were too numerous and the concepts too fluid for me to get a grasp on the plot.

Plot - 2
Writing and Editing - 2
Character Development - 3
Personal Bias - 2
Final Score - 2.25

Unfortunately this was a DNF for me. Aliens, magic, family secrets involving books, the title, the cover, the author being a playwright and this being a reissue all drew me to the audiobook but ultimately I had a difficult time following the different strands of plot, multiple narrators and the discussions of weight. I look forward to engaging with other media the author puts out in the future but this one wasn’t for me.

Dentro de las lecturas para #LeoAutorasOct tenía pensado escuchar algo de fantasía menos convencional, así que pensé que Will Do Magic for Small Change me vendría como anillo al dedo, con una sinopsis bastante atractiva, que incluye aliens de otras dimensiones que vienen a la nuestra. Ahí he de reconocer que me equivoqué por que el sentido de alien en inglés no es el mismo que el que yo le daba en español, pero es que aparte de esto, la historia está muy deslavazada y me resultaba difícil de seguir, sin llegar a atraparme en ninguna de las dos líneas temporales que utiliza la autora Andrea Hairston.


La novela está protagonizada por la nieta de Redwood y Wildfire, cuya historia también ha contado ya Hairston en otra novela y que quizá debería haber leído antes, pero no he encontrado un orden de lectura sugerido y no fui consciente de este hecho hasta bien avanzada la lectura.

Cinnamon recibe como “herencia” tras el fallecimiento de su hermano The Chronicles of the Wanderer, un libro del que iremos leyendo capítulos en otro momento temporal que pueden llegar a enlazar o no con la propia historia de Cinnamon. The Chronicles relata los azares de ese misterioso alien a final del siglo XIX y resulta muy atractivo el uso que la autora hace de la mitología yoruba y de la cultura africana en general, por ejemplo con las referencias a las mascaradas, de las que también hablaba Nnedi Okorafor en su saga Binti. Pero a pesar del interés del escenario, la ejecución me parece bastante pobre. Es una pena porque me hubiera interesado mucho ver cómo se desarrollaba la historia de una protagonista con tanta fuerza como Cinnamon, pero resulta muy difícil mantener el interés en la historia cuando la propia prosa te va sacando fuera de la lectura. Y eso que yo he escuchado la versión en audio de la obra, interpretada por Tamika Katon-Donegal y Andre Santana, pero aún así resultaba difícil mantener el hilo.

Otros temas que se tocan y que podrían resultar del interés del lector son la sexualidad fluida y el poliamor, pero como digo son buenos mimbres que dan lugar a una obra incompleta.

Me temo que dejaré la obra de Andrea Hairston en barbecho de momento.

Rep: plus-size Black bi mc in a polyamorous relationship, Non binary bi mc, gay sc, BIPOC scs, queer scs

This book is a mix of genres. It has some sci-fi and fantasy, even some paranormal-ish elements, but also in a more contemporary setting in one of the timelines. I went in thinking it was just sci-fi and in space lol I was wrong. It doesn’t take place in space, but it does have sci-fi elements.

It has a very interesting concept and elements. It was cool that Cinnamon had a magical book that slowly reveals more pages as time progresses. When there are new pages, we get transported into that world and follow the characters of it. Slowly we see the ties between the two timelines.

This book is pretty long and slow. I felt it drag at points. I wasn’t super invested in the characters. I think the dual timeline being in a similar styles and the same narrator confused me at times. I sometimes forgot which timeline I was in. I think I just read the blurb once, so I didn’t really know what the plot was. And listening to the book, I still didn’t really know where the story was going. I’m very visual and I found it hard to visualize what was going on at times.

I liked that it explores themes such as race, gender, sexuality, and family. It was nice to see so many queer characters and the two different journeys with identity the two main characters go through.

Taiwo was probably my favourite. It was cool seeing their fluidity. They were apparently an alien? Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention, but I kept forgetting this fact. They didn't seem like an alien, not in the traditional sense anyway.

There are a lot of homophobic slurs in here. The beginning especially has a lot. I think they could have take a few out and it would have been fine. But that many felt a bit excessive. So beware of that going into this.

Overall, this has a lot of interesting things about it and cool concepts. It’s good if you like mixed genre books. For me it was just okay.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an audio ARC of this book

DNF at 61%. It's not a great sign if I have to repeatedly talk myself into listening to a book.

There are a lot of interesting elements here: magic, West African mythology, warrior women, a teenage theater kid finding friends, family dysfunction. If only the writing weren't so confusing! Jumping back and forth between past and future storylines would be fine if either storyline were easy to follow. Instead I struggled to understand what was actually happening in many of the scenes. The writing style causes a lot of dissonance when poetic description is sometimes something supernatural happening, but that isn't clear until several sentences later. The book is muddled, slow moving, and - as much as I hate to say it - more boring than it has any right to be. I honestly believed this book to be a self-published novel and possibly a debut, but it's neither. It also doesn't seem to have a clear target audience, with the sections about Cinnamon reading as young YA and the sections with the Wanderer very adult.

None of the characters felt very real or deep, and I didn't connect with any of them. I'm not going to touch the mod squad's best friendship beyond saying it comes out of nowhere and is hard to believe. But I do want to address the language around Cinnamon's brother, who is gay. He's gay. That's not a bad word, and it's also not a word used until over halfway through the book. That's not to say his sexuality is in question though; he is referred to - frequently - by a very different, hateful word. I'm not condemning the author's use of a slur to communicate the beliefs and attitude of a character, but I do have a problem with that slur accompanying nearly every reference to a particular character.

Listening to the story as an audiobook does nothing to help with the general comprehension problem. In fact, I think reading a physical copy might have been easier. Time jumps, chapter divisions, and scene changes have almost no delineation, leaving the listener playing catch up with the shifts while the story moves on without them. The narrator's cadence requires some initial adjustment, and while her voice fits Cinnamon it feels too young for the Wanderer. Early in the story there are also several hesitations before pronouncing unfamiliar words, which make the narrator sound unsure and inexperienced.

I wish I could have loved this book.

As much as I really did enjoy this, I find myself wondering why it was sooooooo long! It’s dual timeline, and with the audio version it wasn’t always easy to differentiate between the two since the narration stayed the same.

Like I said I did really enjoy it. It’s a great story, but it’s super long and I honestly can’t figure out why.

Thanks to NetGalley for the audio copy!

I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.

DNF at 22% (after Book 1)

I think this is definetely a a case of 'Just not for me'. It started well, I really like stories where two different timelines are told simultaneously. Unfortunately the writing style is a bit less linear than I need for a story like this. For me it was really hard to follow where the story was going, especially as an audiobook. Maybe it is better when reading it in written form. That writing stylw also made it hard for me too see the plot that was described in the synopsis, it was just a lot different than my expectations.
Rather than forcing myself to continue on when I predict I won't ejoy the book at all I'm going to dnf it now. I will rate it 3 stars because that is my normal rating for books that I deem 'just not for me'. Rating it lower would just feel wrong.


PS: There's multiple uses of the homophoic f-slur in this book, in the first 20% alone. I am not opposed to using slurs in writing to make a point/set a scene/build characters to be homophobic but multiple of the instances where it was used felt unnecessary.