Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“I knew beyond any doubt that there was genuine value to be found in my story.”

Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation by Hannah Gadsby

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I feel like this is going to be a tough one for me to review, because my relationship with the content that Hannah Gadsby creates is so personal to me and has been frankly crucial to how I am coming to understand myself that it’s a bit difficult to try to take that out of the equation and look at Ten Steps to Nanette on its own. I’ve likely watched Nanette half a dozen times in the past couple of years (and once again in […]

Protect Molly at all costs

The Maid by Nita Prose

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  I don’t often take recommendations; generally, I prefer to find my books more organically, especially since my tastes are a bit all over the place, even more than with other types of media. You might think me weird, finicky, or downright contrarian, but it’s not like I try to be. I just know what I like when I actually see it; I give most potential books a first sentence/paragraph/page test, seeing if they grab my attention right out of the gates, because they probably […]

“From that point of understanding, you begin to move on, no matter what.”

How to Be Ace by Rebecca Burgess

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This is another winner from Jessica Kingsley Publishers, which I’ve become increasingly aware of in the last year as a great specialty publisher. How to Be Ace is both a good coming of age memoir and a great primer of what asexuality is and how the social pressures to have sex and find a romantic partner can be very damaging. It also covers OCD, anxiety, and touches a bit on autism, so it manages to cover a lot of ground in 208 pages. I’d been following Burgess’s […]

The book I recommend to everyone, especially teachers

Real by Carol Cujec and Peyton Goddard

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Real By Carol Cujec and Peyton Goddard   Wow.  I’m struggling on where to put this for Bingo, because it definitely belongs in Rep, but it also needs to be taught in classrooms.   I got this as an ARC, passed it on to my coworker who orders books for my library, then placed it on a shelf of ARCs to be either read later or used for craft projects.  Months later I went through said shelf to look for craft books (we’re making folded […]

Not pure fluff, but very, very good.

The Heart Principle (The Kiss Quotient, #3) by Helen Hoang

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I liked the first two books in this series, but this one is on another level. It’s very personal and you can tell, even before you get to the end and the author’s note where she straight out says that the book is half memoir. With this book, she was Working Through Some Shit. However, just because you write what you know as an author doesn’t mean that you will write something good or compelling, but Hoang has definitely managed to do that, and I […]

Nothings Need to Be Heard

Real by Carol Cujec & Peyton Goddard

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It’s not often these days that I read a book and sit with it afterwards wishing there was a way to force every person on the planet to read it, but Real is that book for me. We follow Charity Woods, a non-verbal teenager with Autism who struggles to get people to believe that she is intelligent and can hack it in a mainstream classroom. From the very first paragraph of the book,  “My name is Charity. I am thirteen years old. Actually, thirteen years […]



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