Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The girl you really are

The October Girl Volume One by Matthew Dow Smith

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When I was reading The October Girl Volume One by Matthew Dow Smith I was not sure what I was going to write about. Therefore, the day I wrote this I was thinking how I read and finished other books after, even publishing reviews. And here I was still mulling over a fairly on the surface, easy story. A book that should not have given me any trouble writing about. Things hit me in an odd way. The story is somewhat familiar (a lost princess, […]

Freshly squished (from frozen)

The Lemonade War Book 1 by Jacqueline Davies

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While reading The Lemonade War Book 1 by Jacqueline Davies I did not think I would write it up here. It came out in the early 2000s. How could it still be relevant? Wouldn’t everyone have already read it? Therefore, I didn’t make arrangements to post. Then I was sitting at my work desk (a few days after finishing) and it had been mixing itself inside me, like mixing bugs and lemonade. Or: it was not sitting right. Why not talk about an almost 25 […]

Take a trip to the market

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Mari and the Great Market Swap came up on my online reader site. It had a nice cover. It was bright, interesting, but was not saying READ ME NOW. I thought about it. I went to do other things. I read other things. The next day I said, “Well, it’s still there. Might as well give Janelle Springer-Willms’s book a go.” And I did. Now, while it might not be a WOW read, it is a strong cozy read. It did not shock or blow […]

This book ruined my productivity

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen

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Bingo Row 5 – arts What if Harriet Tubman somehow came back from the past to the modern world? What would she do? Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert by Bob the Drag Queen says that Harriet Tubman would be the MC in a hip-hop band with some people she led to freedom and a stoned Benjamin Lay. The book is told in the first person by Darnell, Harriet Tubman’s producer. He works with Harriet to put her stories to music. They gossip about Frederick Douglass […]

“Me, I don’t have a name. I lost it in battle, like the knight who lost his shield.”

The Coin: A Novel by Yasmin Zaher

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Cbr17bingo Migrant (bingo) The main character has moved from her native Palestine to the US  The Coin is narrated by an unnamed main character, a woman maybe in her 30s who left Palestine for New York City but has an uncomfortable relationship with the city and its people. She is telling her story to someone. Is she talking to another unnamed person? To us? To herself? The narrator is fascinating, intelligent woman of wealth and taste, but she also a few neuroses that make her […]

“Saul of my pody, put you are wrang there my friend. It is your fat Englishmen that eat up our Scots cattle, puir things.” Got that?

Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott

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cbr17bingo Culture Rather an odd duck, this one.  Some legal jibber-jabber in the frontpiece seems to indicate that this book was not intended to be sold in the US, yet I bought it at the UCLA bookstore.  Hmm.  Anyway. First, let me digress.  I grew up in a small town with a small library, and there really was no other source of books for me other than that, and my Mom’s Book-of-the-Month Club, when she could afford it.  So imagine my thrill, when I started […]



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