Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Grateful for Soccer

Morgan Plays Soccer by Anne Rockwell

Look and Be Grateful by Tomie dePaola

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I cannot think of two more opposite books than Morgan Plays Soccer by Anne Rockwell (illustrated by Paul Meisel) and Look and Be Grateful by Tomie dePaola. Actually  I probably could if I really thought about it, but right now out of the books I have read and are reviewing here, I can’t. You see Morgan is about a new kid who gets himself involved in playing soccer. With only a soccer jersey as his connection to the game. But he learns it is fun, […]

Friends stick together

Sloth & Moth: A Better-Together Friendship by Helen Taylor

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Lately (and I have probably mentioned this before), I am finding books that I think are not the books for me so I pass them by without giving them a huge chance. I did this with Sloth & Moth: A Better-Together Friendship by Helen Taylor and illustrated by Gavin Scott. It was not because it was an online reader copy (the book is due mid April 2026) or even the cover was not grabbing me. I just was not in the mood to read another […]

Christmas in Toronto

A Little Holiday Fling by Farah Heron

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Farah Heron’s A Little Holiday Fling is a lovely secularly Christmas romance. As a secular Christmas celebrator, I appreciated both Ruby’s position of finding joy and fun in the season and Rashid’s frustration with the consumerism and the hegemony of it all. Ruby and Rashid are both Muslim and they’ve grown up in Canada and the UK respectively, so they have a complex relationship with the dominant religious holiday. A Little Holiday Fling deals lightly and gently with some heavy topics, giving depth to the characters […]

In Old New York

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

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  With the revival of the Tony-Award winning musical just recently opening on Broadway (I have tickets for later this week!) I thought it was a good time to refresh my memory of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, Ragtime. I first read the novel at the suggestion of my father somewhere around 20 years ago, so I had no recollection of the plot and characters at all, really. The plot is a bit hard to summarize. Doctorow takes a sort-of panoramic approach to American life from […]

Monsters and nightmares

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

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CBR17Bingo: “Purple” – for the purple on the cover I’ve read all the Hunger Games books, so when I heard there was a new one out, I knew I didn’t have a choice. I put a hold on Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (2025) and read it as soon as it became available. Sunrise is a prequel to the trilogy that made Collins famous. It focuses on Haymitch Abernathy, who in later books is the drunk and disillusioned “mentor” to Katniss and Peeta. The book takes place […]

Imagine Douglas Adams on Cocaine

Space Oddity by Catherynne M. Valente

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In Space Opera, we met Decibel Jones, former frontman for British glam band Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, and followed him as he was conscripted into a mission to prove humanity’s sentience – and thus save them from extermination – by placing anything but last in the Metagalactic Grand Prix. Think Eurovision, but in space! Spoiler alert, Decibel Jones succeeded, with the help of a time-traveling red panda and the resulting appearance of a younger version of his long-dead drummer, Mira Wonderful Star. As […]



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