Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The shade of a tree is sweeter shared

The Shade Tree by Suzy Lee

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CBR15Passport country   If you like folktales and legends, The Shade Tree is a great one to add to your collection. It takes a classic Korean folktale and updates it, while keeping a classic feeling. Suzy Lee’s story shows how a traveler tricks a rich man into selling him something that in the end, probably cannot be owned, but due to perception and the entitlement, the rich man thinks if he wants, he can own. And though he might have wealth he is lacking in […]

Up, Up and Talking Cats

The Stupendous Switcheroo: New Powers Every 24 Hours by Mary Winn Heider

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Superheroes and not so superheroes come together for hijinks, secrets, maybe some friendships and one rad bath (and I don’t mean cool) in The Stupendous Switcheroo: New Powers Every 24 Hours by Mary Winn Heider. This is a fun book for reluctant and readers alike. Both illustrations (by Chad Sell who seems to be known for cartoon like imagery (or at least by me, but his is the author/illustrator to the Cardboard Kingdom graphic novel series) that are colorful, round, and bubbly, silly and familiar […]

The universal language of unconditional love

Quiet Time with My Seeya by Dinalie Dabarera

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CBR15Passport country When you see a title like, Quiet Time with My Seeya (or at least me), I assume that you will get an outlined story. Meaning: Step one: Grandparent is coming. Or child goes to grandparent. Step two: Child is bored, and grandparent makes magic. Or the child knows grandparent makes magic. Step three: They have lots of fun, maybe learning something new, but always a happy generational story.   There is nothing wrong with this story format. It is a good format and I like […]

There Isn’t an Adequate Title To Tell You How Much I Loathed this Book

The People Next Door by Keri Beevis

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First let me start by stating the title of the book…(glances at another tab), right, right…it’s The People Next Door. As I have been reading this book I’ve been exclaiming to my friends, “I really hate it!” and then they will ask what it’s called and I have given a general plethora of wrong names such as The Next Door Neighbors, Neighbors, The People Who Live Next Door and finally I just started calling it The People Vs. Larry Flint because that was the only title that I […]

JG Ballard

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

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“Wars came early to Shaghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.” This a roman a clef more or less by J.G. Ballard, or even something close to a kind of autofiction or memoir/novel based on his experiences as an adolescent living in Shanghai, the son of British colonial figures, at the start of World War II, and eventually his time in […]

Graham Greene

A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene

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“Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job.” This is an early Graham Greene novel, and is probably most correctly labeled one of his “entertainments”. But like all the rest of the entertainments, there’s too much skill, talent, irony, and brain working here to find that an adequate label. Other entertainments like Our Man in Havana, are actually among my favorite of his books despite the incisiveness of The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, or The Heart of the […]



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