Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About ElCicco

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Married, mom of two, history PhD, feminist. I've been participating in Cannonball Read since CBR4. I love to read, and writing reviews keeps me from reading without thinking. I feel like I owe it to the authors who entertain me to savor their creations. It's like slowing down and enjoying a delicious meal instead of bolting your food. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: ElCicco's Quick Questions interview.)

ElCicco's Reviews:

The Greatest Generation

A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America’s Schools by Rachel Devlin

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Perhaps you have heard of Ruby Bridges, the little girl shown at right. She was the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in 1960. But have you heard of Lucile Bluford or Ada Lois Sipuel? What about Marguerite Carr, Karla Galarza, Barbara Johns, Betta Bowman and Elaine Chustz? In Rachel Devlin’s A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America’s Schools, we have an outstanding history of the unsung heroes of the American Civil Rights movement — […]

I Am Somebody

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In 1994, when Clemantine Wamariya was 6 years old, she and her 15-year-old sister Claire had to leave their family in Kigali, Rwanda, due to the “conflict.” The two girls spent the next 6 years as refugees, traveling through 7 African countries, having to learn new languages and find the means to survive, not knowing whether their parents and younger siblings were alive. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine Wamariya tries to come to terms not only with the upheaval and trauma of her […]

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle

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The Surface Breaks: A Reimagining of The Little Mermaid is a wonderful feminist take on the popular fairy tale. Louise O’Neill stays very close to Hans Christian Anderson’s original classic story (as opposed to the Disney version), but gives her little mermaid (Gaia/Muirgen) a much darker back story and provides a fuller description of the world that exists under the sea. Little mermaid Gaia has grown up under a misogynistic patriarchal system, where women are valued for their beauty alone. Gaia and her five sisters […]

Hope is the thing with feathers

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This Newberry Medal winning YA novel is a fantasy/fairy tale about hope’s triumph over sorrow. Kelly Barnhill writes about a world populated by witches, dragons, monsters, and humans. She writes of bogs, forests, and towns separated by fear and magic. In this world, one town in particular, the Protectorate, engages in a terrible human sacrifice every year, wherein the youngest child in town is left in the forest as a tribute to an evil witch. It is an age old practice, perpetuated by the town […]

A Witch with a Badge

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Black Magick is a really well written and beautifully drawn series by Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott featuring a police detective named Rowan Black who, unbeknownst to her colleagues, is also a witch. In Volume I of what I can only hope will be a long running series, Rucka and Scott introduce the reader to Rowan, some of her fellow Portsmouth police officers, and another witch named Alex, who is also Rowan’s friend/lover. The story opens with a Wiccan ritual in the woods interrupted by […]

Great story for the middle school introverts

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This graphic novel, pitched for 8-12 year olds, is the story of Emmie, a middle schooler who is so shy and introverted that she feels invisible. It’s also the story of Katie, who is sort of the anti-Emmie, and what happens when Emmie and Katie’s worlds collide. Emmie and Katie take turns narrating this story, which takes place over the course of a day at school. Emmie is the youngest of three kids, and the only one still living at home with her parents. Emmie […]



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