Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Jenny S

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By day (and night really), I teach writing and run a writing center at a community college in the Chicago suburbs. However, my superpowers include racking up large library fines and creating towering stacks of to-read books next to my bed.

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Getting Myself Ready for Stamped from the Beginning

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi

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This review begins with a story. So more than two years ago, I heard Ibram X. Kendi talking on NPR about his book, Stamped from the Beginning, and I knew immediately that I wanted to read it.   About six months later I bought it but it has been sitting on my to-read pile ever since—mainly because it’s a bit intimidating at 608 pages with extremely small type, but also my to-read pile is large. Flash forward to late last summer and I heard Kendi on […]

Stakes Get Higher and the Empire Gets More Evil

A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir

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I read, An Ember in the Ashes, the first book of Sabaa Tahir’s fantasy series while on vacation in January and it hit all my fantasy sweet spots.  It was nice to know that I had two more books to go before I caught up and had to wait like everybody else for Book 4. A Torch Against the Night picks up right where the first book left off—with Laia and Elias trying to escape the city of Serra through underground tunnels with the goal […]

How do you know it will be any different? Because it has to be.

Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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I had a lot of expectations going into reading Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue and the good news is that it was even more delightful than I expected.  In times like these, it was wonderful to be able to immerse myself in a slightly more positive alternative universe (think Great British Bakeoff meets Madame Secretary) and truthfully, I did not want to leave. For those of you who haven’t read it or read one of the many Cannonball Read reviews of it, the […]

A Hundred Words for all the Ways a Black Boy Can Lie Awake at Night

How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

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Wow!  All I have to say is “Wow!”  Saeed Jones’ memoir is a lot of things—a coming of age story, a story of growing up gay, a story of growing up black, a story of growing up gay and black in Texas, and the story of a single mother and her son.  It’s probably about a lot more than that but as a straight white woman there are frequencies I cannot hear and they are not meant for me. This is the kind of book […]

It Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged That I Am Now Really Hungry for Samosas

Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev

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My second Jane Austen remix this year (and back to back with Jane of Austin), Sonali Dev’s Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors is a fun read that made me hungry for Indian food.  That’s because the Darcy in this novel, DJ Caine, is a talented chef who is trying to make a go of it in San Francisco, having upped and left a Michelin star restaurant in France to be closer to his sister, Emma, who is fighting brain cancer. He first encounters, Trisha Raje, […]



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