Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Nothing was worse than someone wanting you to talk when the words you needed to say hadn’t even been invented yet.”

Far From the Tree by Benway, Robin

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cbr11bingo – Award Winner! Grace’s steady life is shattered during her high school junior year when she becomes pregnant. Her previously reliable boyfriend dumps her and removes himself from any rights to the child, and her parents are on eggshells around her.  She decides to give the baby up for adoption, which in some ways makes sense: she herself was adopted by her parents, and maybe her baby, who she nicknames Peach (the size the baby was when she realized she was pregnant), will be […]

True Story that is reminiscent of Handmaid’s Tale

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler

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Cbr11bingo True Story This book was recommended to me by a friend who was adopted and it is an amazing and powerful book. It’s the kind of book that breaks your heart and makes you angry. When we talk of “choice” and women, we generally think of the choice to have an abortion, but this book reveals a different kind of choice that was denied to countless young women and girls in the decades between WWII and Roe v. Wade — the choice to keep […]

Read “The Primal Wound” Instead

Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up by Nancy Newton Verrier

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A few months ago I reviewed The Primal Wound, Nancy Newton Verrier’s book about the unavoidable impact that separation from the biological family (especially mothers) places on adoptees. I mentioned that while the book was a bit dated since it was written in the early 1990s, there was a lot of value in it because it articulated and normalized things that many adoptees feel. One of the primary complaints of Verrier’s first book is that it of lays out a problem without a solution. (This wasn’t […]

A lovely book with a beautiful cover

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

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4.5 stars Because tradition dicatates it, each year on a certain day, the council of elders in the Protectorate take an infant and leave it in the woods as a sacrifice to the witch. Bad things will happen to the settlement if they don’t (although no one is really clear what dire consequences there will be, because there has never been a time when they didn’t place a child in the woods). Normally, the grieving family whose child has been selected meekly go along with […]

A Thought-Provoking Read for Members of the Adoption Triad

The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child by Nancy Newton Verrier

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As the title of this book about adoptees indicates, author Nancy Newton Verrier views adoption as a process that wounds adoptees on a fundamental level. Her central theory based on research and personal experience is that severing the connection between a mother and child leaves a wound which profoundly impacts sense of self, including self-worth and self-esteem. She has a strong message for adoptees: What adoptees need to know is that their experience was real. Adoption isn’t a concept to be learned, a theory to […]

Don’t hide your light under a bushel, darling.

Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling

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(Title quote is from Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage) Aven Green has a pretty great life as a middle schooler in Kansas.  She plays on the soccer team, has a wonderful group of friends, is a creative writer, and plays the guitar. She also has no arms. She was born without them, though if anyone asks about it (and boy do they), she always has a wild tale to tell them about where they went and how. But her life is about to be upended: her […]



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