Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Life has thrown a lot at me recently, so here are all the reviews I forgot to write!

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The Miraculous by Jess Redman

The Tea Dragon Festival by K. O'Neill

An Exchange of Gifts by Anne McCaffrey

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

The Sandman: Act I by Neil Gaiman

The Princess Spy by Larry Loftis

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The Bear and the Nightingale By Katherine Arden (Warning – the review of this book contains f-bombs!) I know this was supposed to be based on a fairy tale, and some parts seemed very fairy tale-like (especially the story the nanny told toward the beginning with the girls in the snow) but I did not correlate them to any story I already knew.  I appreciated the involvement of the Russian household spirits, and how the village did quite well combining their religion and their culture […]

Two books about fat girls

Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

Faith: Taking Flight by Julie Murphy

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Dumplin’ By Julie Murphy   I’ve been meaning to read Dumplin’ for a while.  As a fat girl myself, it only seemed appropriate to read about another fat girl joining a beauty pageant.  But the story is so much more than that!   Willowdean Dixon is the daughter of a former Miss Teen Blue Bonnet Pageant winner, one who never really left the pageant behind.  Willowdean’s mother runs the pageant every year, turning their lives into a pageant hurricane zone.  But it never really bothered […]

The book I recommend to everyone, especially teachers

Real by Carol Cujec and Peyton Goddard

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Real By Carol Cujec and Peyton Goddard   Wow.  I’m struggling on where to put this for Bingo, because it definitely belongs in Rep, but it also needs to be taught in classrooms.   I got this as an ARC, passed it on to my coworker who orders books for my library, then placed it on a shelf of ARCs to be either read later or used for craft projects.  Months later I went through said shelf to look for craft books (we’re making folded […]

This was a miss for me.

The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali by Sabina Khan

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This was ruined for me by the writing style :\ I feel like it actually walks the line between being written in a style that just wasn’t for me, and actually being poorly put together. Which is a shame! Because this premise has real meat to it. The titular Rukhsana Ali is a Bengali-American teenager, the daughter of Bengali immigrants, and also identifies as a lesbian. She has a girlfriend she’s in love with who is white, and they plan to go away to California […]

Drunk on mediocrity

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

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Ugh. The cover for this one was so pretty, and I kept seeing it on bookstore shelves, so when I finally was able to snap up a library copy I was really excited. The back cover promises a woman apothecary in the 1700s who helps other women kill all the Bad Men who were oppressing them? Yes please! Alas, this was a lot of promise without the delivery and I was mostly disappointed. FYI that there are some spoilers in my review below. Penner’s novel […]

Beautiful, thoughtful, heartbreaking

Atonement by Ian McEwan

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My white whale!  I have been trying and failing to read Atonement for about three years, so I am excited to say that not only have I finished it, but I really enjoyed it! The other times I have started reading, I have remained stuck in the book’s opening section, which covers the course of one summer day in the 1935 at the country house of the Tallis family. The Tallis’ youngest child, Briony, is a precocious creative sort who has written a play she […]



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