Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

CBR15 Bingo: Queer Lives (Bingo)

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

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CBR15 Bingo: Queer Lives In July, the Forever Young Adult Reading Challenge prompt was Banned Books. Since All Boys Aren’t Blue was the second most banned book in America during the 2021-2022 school year, only beaten by Gender Queer, and I’d had the book on my digital bookshelf for a while, it felt like a suitable book to choose. This book was also one of the book club selections last year for the Cannonball book club, when we did banned books (this year we did […]

CBR15 Bingo: Edibles

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

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CBR15 Bingo: Edibles (this book features both a lot of food and quite a few drugs) Lila Macapagal used to live in Chicago and dreamed of opening her own restaurant, but both her business and relationship failed miserably. She’s back in her hometown, helping to run her tita (aunt) Rosie run the family restaurant, where they serve Philipino food. Unfortunately, Lila’s ex-boyfriend is a food critic and seems determined to come back, again and again, to sample the food and write scathing things about the […]

CBR15 Bingo: Picture This

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kokabe

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CBR15 Bingo: Picture This (can also be used for Queer Lives) Official book description: In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to […]

More Memoir-Manifestos, please!

All Boys Aren't Blue by George Matthew Johnson

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CBR Bingo – Bodies, because this book is all about how the author came to accept his identity – his life in his queer, Black body – it’s a letter of acceptance for everyone who might need it, which includes all of us. I loved this memoir – this vulnerable, beating heart of a book – which explores the life of a young, queer Black man growing up in New Jersey. Johnson describes how he came to accept himself even as he struggles with two […]

A rose in the concrete

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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CBR Bingo – Snake, thanks to Officer Cruise and others like him that cannot understand their fear is not more important than the lives they take 16 year old Starr Carter is a master at code-switching. Growing up in Garden Heights, she is used to her community being full of lively characters full of love who look out for one another amidst gun shots and drug deals. When she is at home, she feels slightly isolated from this community, who sees her as an outsider […]

Waiting for the end of the world

I Hope You Get This Message by Farah Naz Rishi

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Official book description: Seven days. Seven days. The Earth might end in seven days.   When news stations start reporting that Earth has been contacted by a planet named Alma, the world is abuzz with rumors that the alien entity is giving mankind only few days to live before they hit the kill switch on civilization.   For high school truant Jesse Hewitt, though, nothing has ever felt permanent. Not the guys he hooks up with. Not the jobs his underpaid mom works so hard […]



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