Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fantasy Book With Much Unexpectedness

Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi

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Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi is a fantasy book for ages 9-12. Set in a magical place called Ferenwood, this book follows 12-year-old Alice Alexis Queensmeadow a girl deprived of many things. In Ferenwood, everything relies on color, because color means magic. But Alice is severely lacking in color. Her skin and hair are both white. Other than her clothes, the only color on her body is the pale pink of her cheeks and the slight honey of her eyes. It is Ferenwood tradition for all […]

Immigrant Story Written in Verse

Red, White, and Whole by Rajani LaRocca

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“No matter where I go, America or India, I don’t quite fit.” Red, White, and Whole by Rajani LaRocca is a middle grade novel written in verse about a 1st generation Indian immigrant  Reha. Reha is a 13-year-old girl living in the Boston area in the 1980s. Reha feels like she is stuck between two worlds, school where she is the only Indian American and spends time with her friend Rachel, and the weekends where she has her family, holidays, traditions, and her friend Sunny. Reha […]

Big Ideas and Big Friends

Big Dreams, Small Fish by Paula Cohen

Gibberish by Young Vo

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Culture is an interesting subject. And when you come from one and go to a different one, things get interesting.  The publisher Levine Querido has stories that are about cultures we may/may not be familiar with. In the process of reading them, there is a lot to learn about how we are not only different, but the same, too. Shirley is a child with big ideas, her family are immigrants, they live over their grocery store, and they cannot sell their gefilte fish. Her parents […]

Global and Noble

Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

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Looking for something frothy and fun for Spring Break? Casey McQuiston’s debut novel Red, White and Royal Blue is the perfect light read for those of us who love celebrity gossip and US Weekly magazine. Alex Diaz-Claremont is a college senior at Georgetown University. His best friends are his sister, June, and his ex-girlfriend, Nora. Oh, and he happens to be the son of the President of the United States, Ellen Claremont. After an embarrassing incident at the royal wedding of Prince Phillip involving Phillip’s younger […]

He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

Bad Sister by Charise Mericle Harper

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An interesting story of siblings and how a younger brother showed his older sister a few things. And that is what you are supposed to get from Bad Sister by Charise Mericle Harper. What I got was another poor, put-upon big sister, getting the blame for having an annoying, bratty, spoiled younger sibling (can you guess which one I am with me and my sister?) Seriously though, both Harper and the world see Charise (the character) as “in the wrong” (and she even goes as […]

“I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain.”

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal

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This was one of the books suggested within another book – the bookseller from The Sentence tried to convince her tough-to-please-book-loving customer to read this (or it was included in her list of perfect short books that they agreed on). This was a very short book – at 98 pages, this is less than an afternoon’s worth of reading. Unless you, like the protagonist, prefer to savor your books. Hanra reads his books one sentence at a time, the better to absorb him. Hanra has been […]



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