Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About LB

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A queer nonbinary reader living in the Midwest, LB practices their Adult Face by working in a lab, though they always have at least one book at hand for when they can steal a few minutes of quiet. LB reads across target age ranges and genres, focusing on enjoyment over how many books they finish. They have a black cat named Bruce Wayne who is very dedicated to sniffspections of books.

LB's Reviews:

Historical middle grade with unions!

The Pecan Sheller by Lupe Ruiz-Flores

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The Pecan Sheller is set during the late 1930s and follows Petra, a thirteen-year-old girl who has to leave school and get a job shelling pecans after her father’s death in order to help her Amá pay the bills and take care of Petra’s younger siblings. While working in the pecan factory, Petra makes new friends, but also is confronted with terrible working conditions and seeing many people get tuberculosis and die. When one of her new friends dies and the factory owners want to […]

The best fantasy has dragons

The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

The Bloodless Princes by Charlotte Bond

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I came across The Fireborne Blade at the library, and between it being a novella (tis the season (IYKYK) lol) and having a dragon on the cover, I took a closer look. I’m so glad I picked this up, and between picking it up and starting it, I swung by the library again and happened to see the sequel, The Bloodless Princes (it was one of those “why is this look familiar? Oh! Same series!” moments). The Fireborne Blade does a lot of typical dragon […]

A cozy paranormal romance for the holidays~

Clara, Darling by Chace Verity

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Chace Verity is one of my absolute fave authors, and they’ve held that title since their debut, Team Phison, so any time they have a new release I get all excited. Clara, Darling is a holiday (Christmas) novella, but unlike Verity’s previous Christmas story (Team Phison Forever), this has much less family trauma and is almost dream-like in its story tell. Sadie has been married to Alvin for ten years, but in all that time she’s never forgotten her best friend and first love, Clara. […]

Powerful story of climate change

Dust by Alison Stine

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There was so much of this I loved, but also this was a book that felt really slow through most of the middle. Thea is partially deaf and after her family’s home in Ohio flooded, her dad brought them to Bloodless Valley in Colorado in order to live a simple life and return to basic farming lifestyle. But there is nothing simple about living in the Valley. There’s been a drought for a long time and corporate farms keep buying the water, making it harder […]

Mythology in a Modern World

The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie

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I first tried to read The Wicked + The Divine in September 2017, and got through the first five volumes, but felt the series was weird and confusing. Earlier this month, I scrolled through my library’s entire adult graphic novel collection, and saw that the series was now completed, so figured this was as good a time as any to give the series another chance. And I’m so glad I did! The core premise of WicDiv and the phrase that gets repeated as a central […]

A complex fantasy with many stories woven together

Aunt Tigress by Emily Yu-Xuan Qin

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I was immediately drawn to Aunt Tigress by the cover, and the synopsis had me intrigued. Tam is a young woman living in Calgary where the magic from her tiger father is weak because it’s far from the forces she calls on for exorcisms and other magics, but she also knows to respect the magic of First Nations without trying to steal it. Or at least, that’s what her father tried to teach her before he died when she was 12, and her Aunt Tigress […]



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