Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I do love the cover of this book, especially paired with the title. It makes me laugh.

The Feeling of Falling in Love by Mason Deaver

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This was a cute story and well written, but I didn’t connect to it emotionally as much as I did with Deaver’s first book, I Wish You All the Best. Deaver still plays with themes of gender nonconformity and coming of age while queer and discovering your sexuality and gender identity, but their main character is a much more difficult and complicated person (read: kind of an asshole). This is also a romance, though as with their first book, the main character’s emotional growth is […]

Gender Roles Are Bullshit

Down Among The Sticks And Bones by Seanan McGuire

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Down Among the Sticks and Bones is the Second Book in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children Series and I loved it even more than the first. This novella gives us the backstory of Jack and Jill (formally named Jacqueline and Jillian), twin sisters who were raised to have very specific gender roles, whether they actually wanted them or not. Their parents, who always did everything perfectly, expected one girl and one boy. When they didn’t get their expected male child, they decided to make Jillian into […]

Poūkahangatus (pronounced “Pocahontas”)

Poukahangatus: Poems by Tayi Tibble

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CBR15Passport, other country Tayi Tibble is a young woman from New Zealand. They are pretty, smart, serious, funny and did I mention young? She was born in 1995 (I have shoes older than her). Therefore, what does a not yet thirty-year-old know about life? Well, if Poukahangatus: Poems is any indication, a lot. The publisher description says she channels her Māori heritage and childhood, under what she calls “the red fog of memory.” I am not completely sure what she means, but I am going […]

Zadie Smith (1)

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

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“You’re either for me or against me, thought Alex-Li Tandem, referring to the daylight, and more generally, to the day.” Apparently I initially published without my review! Crazy! This is a reread for me. I first read this soon after it came out and soon after I devoured Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what to make of this book, and I think I have a better sense of it now, maybe because I am older or maybe […]

Jason Mott (1)

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott

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“In the corner of the small living room of the small country house at the end of the dirt road beneath the Carolina sky, the dark-skinned five-year-old boy sat with his knees pulled to his chest and his small, dark arms wrapped around his legs and it took all he had to contain the laughter inside the thrumming cage of his chest.” This novel won the National Book Award in 2021 and at times is a soaring book and at other time is confounding, especially […]

Various (1)

A People's Future of the United States by Victor LaValle, ed; et al

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“My father and I saw each other only three times before he died.” This collection is modeled, according to the introduction by Victor LaValle, on the structure and spirit of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which, among other things, has always invited a lot of reaction and response. If you look at your local library or on Amazon, and especially in bargain bins of books, you will find a handful of reactionary Right-wing reversions of the text called things like “A […]



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