Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I'm a special education teacher by day and a reader by most other hours.

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Mice and Men

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman

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This book is gripping, devastating, and emotional. It’s also incredibly popular, as it is a Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel. It’s also the subject of book bans, which in turn brought it back to the top of many a library queue (because book people are the best people).  It’s a true story, as told from memory and tape recorded conversations between the author and his father, a survivor of Auschwitz. As a child, I was really interested in literature about the Holocaust, which I can […]

Weaving a family together

French Braid by Anne Tyler

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The Garretts will grow on you. This story centers on the Garrett family, starting with the artistic Mercy and her husband Robin, who meet and marry in the 1940s. Robin works at the hardware store that was once owned by Mercy’s father. Together they have three children – dutiful Alice, slightly more wild Lily and the ever more distant younger son, David. They take their sole family vacation in the summer of 1959, which is a focal point for the early part of the novel, […]

Hope for the future

A Pslam For The Wild Built by Becky Chambers

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Would you like a soothing balm for your mind right now? Dive into another charming book by Becky Chambers – the first in the Monk and Robot series. In this novel, the world has moved past the rise of sentient robots. While machines were once used for all sorts of labor, and the environment was neglected, the world that we are dropped into in this series has moved past that sort of behavior. Robots and humans live separately, and both do their best to avoid […]

Sweet summer reading

What the Fireflies Knew by Kia Harris

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In this coming of age tale, Kenyatta (KB) spends 1995, the summer she turns 11, with her Granddaddy in Lansing. She and her older sister Nia are leaving their home in Detroit for the summer following the death of their father. Their mother brings them to their grandfather’s house and then, without warning, leaves them there – and KB must navigate life after the traumatic death of one parent and the unexplained and hopefully temporary absence of another. KB’s life is full of warmth and […]

Wayfarer’s Series #1 and 2

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

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I loved To Be Taught, If Fortunate, and I am excited to begin the Wayfarer’s series. I am reviewing books 1 and 2 here,  though I am pausing the series for a bit because I need to shuffle my TBR due to library books being due – plus, I have found that while I really enjoy the world that Chambers has built with this series, I don’t mind stepping out of it for a moment to read something else.  I also really want to share this […]

A Middle-aged Coming of Age

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

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Olga Acevedo and her brother, Prieto, are sort of minor celebrities in NYC – Prieto is a congressman representing the neighborhood where they grew up in Brooklyn, and Olga is an event planner with many wealthy clients (including Russian mobsters). On the face of it, they are both successful adults in their 40s, but Olga and Prieto have struggled with trauma from their childhood and neither has fully accepted themselves. Their parents felt something more than pride in their Puerto Rican heritage – they were […]



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