Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Sure, why not take your mortally wounded lover and shove her into an ancient machine of uncertain effectiveness? What could go wrong?”

Blood of the Chosen: Burningblade & Silvereye Book Two by Django Wexler

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Wexler continues writing excellent sci-fantasy.  I love the melding of energy swords and healing magics.  A highly, technically advanced civilization that has fallen.  Magic is held in the hands of a few, tech is tightly controlled and scrounged from remnants of the previous age.  Life is very different depending on where you live, within the Republic, in the splinter kingdoms, or outside on the fringes. Blood of the Chosen picks up immediately after the events of  Ashes of the Sun.  A potentially humanity ending calamity […]

Socio-Emotional Skills FTW

Garrett Bear: Learning From Failure by K Tang

Ava's Triumph by Mary E Miller & Linda Woo

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I’ve talked before about the kind of work picture books do – Kids learn everything from the alphabet to the existence of other galaxies from the books we read to them as young children. They’re essential tools for helping kids to have names for, & understanding of, everything inside & outside of their own experiences.  But one of the greatest tasks reading with young children undertakes is helping them build their social & emotional vocabulary. We can use picture books to explain all of intangible […]

Strong writing as expected but I might have enjoyed it more 38 years ago

Shallows by Tim Winton

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Continuing with my project to read all of Tim Winton’s novels this year, I have just finished Shallows, first published in 1984. As usual for his works, the location and geography feature strongly and I was happily thrown into an immediate sense of place along the south coast of Western Australia. In the small town of Angelus, everyone knows everyone and the inhabitants have been there for generations. It’s the late 1970s and when some Greenies have arrived to protest whaling, the historic economic driver […]

Around the world redux. This time, plants!

Around the World in 80 Plants by Jonathan Drori, Illustrated by Lucille Clerc

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Back in 2019, I read Jonathan Drori’s Around the World in 80 Trees and was as shocked as anybody that I could truly love a book about trees. But love it I did, so much so that when I heard Drori had written a follow-up book about plants, I rushed to get my hands on a copy. Around the World in 80 Plants follows the same format as its forerunner: Walking roughly in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps, Drori takes a trip around the world, starting in […]

Vir2ous if O4ly Long

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

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It’s the mid eighties, the land of Stranger Things nostalgia, and eight year old Victoria ‘Vic’ McQueen (aka The Brat) has just discovered something interesting: if she hops on her bike and cycles through to a certain spot in the woods by the river, a magic bridge will appear. Whenever something has been lost all Vic has to do is cross the bridge and she will end up where the lost object is. But something else is lost as well: across the country, young children […]

So far behind.

Wheels No Wheels by Shannon McNeill

My Lala by Thomas King, Ill by Charlene Chua

Baby Squeaks by Anne Hunter

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Guys, you wouldn’t believe how many books I’ve read but haven’t reviewed yet this year. Particularly NetGalley books, which means I can’t request new ones, which is unacceptable. So let’s do some mental spring cleaning, & get these books reviewed.   Wheels, No Wheels by Shannon McNeill is a silly-nonsense book that I would have easily incorporated into my pre-k transportation unit lesson plans. Starts with a very simple breakdown of things like “A tractor has wheels. A llama has no wheels.” and quickly devolves […]



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