Cannonball Read 16

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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She wrote the words to the stories

What I Must Tell the World : How: Lorraine Hansberry Found Her Voice by Jay Leslie

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Not only was Lorraine Hansberry a pioneer for many groups (women, playwrights, writers,  women of color, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community) she was a pioneer for reality. She told it as it was and that is amazingly told in this picture book, What I Must Tell the World : How: Lorraine Hansberry Found Her Voice. Jay Leslie tells the story of Hansberry from a young girl who would see first hand the prejudices of her time, but also would see the courage, the […]

Black AF History: Boring…AF? (Or Maybe Just Hard To Read)

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot

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I will come right out of the gate and say I approached this book the wrong way. I thought it was going to be more of a straight-through read, and it’s definitely something to read in chunks instead. Otherwise everything gets overwhelming and your brain just…shuts down. So perhaps for someone who didn’t try to power through it in a few weeks, or maybe even for someone who listened to the audiobook in its entirety, this book wasn’t…Boring AF. But I definitely found myself wandering […]

Follow the rules. Get Revenge.

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds and Danica Novgorodoff

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I was not sure I was going to like the graphic novel version of Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds. It started out oddly, slow, and frankly a tad uninteresting. (Semi-spoiler) even the death of one character was not grabbing. It was not until the main character seeks revenge did things get intriguing. The way the character is going to/getting revenge, the way they are slowly building to a climax (that makes the information come to light, showing the foreshadowing), the way the other characters […]

Long review for a short, interesting book

I’m a Wild Seed by Sharon Lee de la Cruz

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The graphic novel I’m a Wild Seed was a book I really wanted to enjoy. After all, it is part of a new (to me) publisher where I have enjoyed and respected their message in other books read. But, while I appreciate everything Sharon Lee de la Cruz said and created, their story did not resonate with me a hundred percent. I am starting off with, I thought de la Cruz identified as They, but the author biography (and praise of the book) does say […]

When Langston Found Langston

Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome

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Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome is an interesting look at the late 1940s, Chicago, growing up and literature that was way too short. I would have enjoyed more of the history of the time and seen a bigger connection to the two people called Langston. Still, I enjoyed what I read but, like I said, there needed to be more: more of the history of the times (Why were the black families moving north? Why were the soldiers were coming back? Even the fact that […]

Took a “year” to read, but a lifetime for the poet to live

The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde

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I was given The Black Unicorn: Poems by Audre Lorde a few years ago as a Cannonball book exchange gift. Like so many of my books, it was misplaced for a bit (I am not the most organized person to be frank), but recently found it hidden among other lost souls. I started reading this collection of poetry from 1978 (my edition revised in 1995) in 2020 and finished last night (January 3, 2021). Took a whole year! (Okay, year jokes over). Why did this […]



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