Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Superheroes the Next Generation

Teen Titans: Beast Boy Loves Raven (Teen Titans, #3) by Kami Garcia

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Finally we start to get into the meat and potatoes of the story of Raven and Beast Boy (or Garfield/Gar) with Teen Titans: Beast Boy Loves Raven (Teen Titans, #3). The first two books were Raven’s story “to now” and Beast Boy’s story “to now.” In fact, the third volume starts where the other two books left off. Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo create a Before They Were the Superhero’s The Teen Titans. Garcia makes a fresh story about teens coming of age. Just because […]

Write and remember

Daughters of the Occupation: A Novel of WWII by Shelly Sanders

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Daughters of the Occupation, published this year, is “inspired by true events” and a real gut-punching piece of historical fiction. Author Shelly Sanders discovered some truths about her family’s past as Jews in Riga when both Soviets and Nazis overran the country and persecuted them. She used this information as a springboard to write a novel about Miriam and Sarah, a grandmother and granddaughter who embark on harrowing journeys in very different time periods to find their family members and preserve their history. Chapters alternate […]

Superhero 101

Naomi Season One (TV Tie-In by Brian Michael Bendis

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I am glad I was not the only one who was not completely taken with this graphic novel. The Goodreads reviews were averaging two and three for scores. Naomi Season One has almost nothing original to it. It was created to have representation of a person of color as the main character. It is filled with clichés, and steals Superman’s origin story (alien from another world, left on Earth). Naomi even learns of her alien heritage in a cave. Her white adoptive parents are typical, […]

“Who knows upon what soil they fed/ Their hungry thirsty roots?”

Goblin Market by Diane Zahler

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But Lizzie was speechless. She simply held up the hairbrush, clumps of yellow hair dangling from it. Minka screamed, clapping her hands to her head. But it was too late. Much of her hair had separated from her scalp, and it lay in a mound in Lizzie’s lap, like a fairy-tale pile of straw that had been spun into gold. Lizzie is shy and nervous, but when her sister Minka falls prey to a mysterious boy at the marketplace and his strange fruit, she must […]

Now you know why it’s called His Dark Materials

The Golden Compass Graphic Novel by Stephane Melchior-Durand

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If you liked the novel, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman, this graphic novel is a nice companion to “flesh out” parts. If you have not read the book, this might be a way to be introduced to it, but it will color your feelings about the pictureless novel. I did not picture the characters the way Clement Oubrerie has. It feels like it might be more authentic to what the author probably wanted, with the darker and bleak imagery. However, colors are used to […]

I didn’t love it.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

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I love John Scalzi. From Old Man’s War to Fuzzy Nation to The Dispatchers. I haven’t loved everything he’s done (Zoe’s Tale and the Interdependency series come to mind), but I generally look forward to everything he’s written. I also love kaiju. Or, at least, the idea of kaiju. I was excited to see Pacific Rim when that came out, until I actually saw it. And I loved Godzilla movies when I was a kid. So there was an inevitability to this book when I […]



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