Reviews tagging 'Homophobia'

Cinnamon and Gunpowder: A Novel by Eli Brown

4 reviews

mizreads's review

adventurous challenging emotional tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Ohhhhhhh my gods. OHHHHHHHHHHH my gods. I don't know why it took me over a year to finish this, but it did - yet at the very least I'm so glad I finished it.

I remember reading the first half like a madman. I really enjoyed the premise of a chef and a pirate - and a female pirate at that! And then I started reading it and I was immersed into an absolutely fantastical world. The writing is fantastic, every time I read I felt like I was quite literally transported into a pirate's ship navigating the roaring seas. New vocabulary, too! Especially about ships. Wait till all my neurodivergent friends hear about this 😂

I can't really say why I dropped the book for a while. I think it was mostly because I got super busy as I was moving to a whole new continent, and then school came in like a cannonball and I had to drop reading for a little bit. But then I finally picked it up again, this time in physical form, and I immediately fell in love again with the text. It was as if I hadn't even forgotten it, honestly.

The book is so vivid in its words about the sea and the ship and food, and ugh it just feels so real in my head. The visuals are breathtaking, and they're all text! The focus on day-to-day interactions was also something really fun and cool to me.

I don't know what to feel about that ending :) Bittersweet, I suppose. I wish Mabbot didn't die, but I also don't see any 'correct' reading aside from that. I'll keep her in my fanfics though.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Drug abuse, Violence, and War

Moderate: Homophobia and Death

pelledorso's review against another edition

adventurous emotional funny medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Fire/Fire injury, Islamophobia, Kidnapping, Medical content, Murder, Racism, Religious bigotry, Slavery, Trafficking, Blood, Death, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, and Violence

Moderate: Grief, Homophobia, Sexism, Ableism, Alcohol, Animal death, Cursing, Drug use, Gore, and Racial slurs

Minor: Classism, Drug abuse, Sexual content, Adult/minor relationship, Addiction, Child abuse, Death of parent, Sexual violence, and Vomit

sarah984's review

adventurous medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

This is a very difficult book for me to rate. I loved the concept: kind of a "1001 Nights" type story about a chef kidnapped by pirates who can keep himself alive only if he makes a special meal for the enigmatic captain every Sunday.

The cooking and food descriptions are great, and the inventiveness that the main character uses to create meals he knows within the limitations of being at sea are clever and fun.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book is very weird. The book starts out with an almost lighthearted swashbuckling tone, but then veers wildly into a darker type of story where

major characters are dying left and right.

There is a minor "mystery" subplot about a saboteur on board but it is immediately obvious who it is so there's not a lot of suspense there. A few of the characters are standouts (Mr Apples was great, and while he was basically a plot device I liked Joshua) but most of them are flat and stereotypical (the Chinese twins, everyone involved with the Brass Fox). Sometimes there were huge revelations about characters that never went anywhere, and the confrontation that the whole book builds up to ends in under ten pages.

I feel like a lot of the historical issues were not understood particularly well (multiple characters imply that Americans dumped tea into the sea because of the unethical way it was acquired), which would have been fine in a more fanciful pirate story but not the more serious story the book became.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Medical content, Religious bigotry, Torture, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, and Violence

Moderate: Fire/Fire injury, Grief, Racism, Slavery, Ableism, Animal death, Child abuse, Colonisation, Confinement, Gore, Blood, Child death, Gun violence, Homophobia, Misogyny, and Vomit

Minor: Drug abuse, Pregnancy, Addiction, Cannibalism, Death of parent, Pedophilia, Racial slurs, Rape, and Trafficking

There is a scene where a character is accused of bestiality but he is actually doing something else. (this is played for laughs)

snoriime's review

adventurous funny lighthearted slow-paced

• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This read certainly starts off slow, and the main character is a bit of a knob, but the book really picks up at the end and becomes a lovely adventure story. The perspective is that of the main character, a Catholic Englishman with a heavily xenophobic view of the world, but the pirates more than make up for his horrible opinions and help him grow into a sympathetic character. I would recommend this book for anyone who wants to get lost in a history-informed adventure. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Racism, Xenophobia, and Homophobia