Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


An Important Middle Grade in Verse

Please Pay Attention by Jamie Sumner

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Gosh, Please Pay Attention is a book that hurts in the best way. Bea is a sixth-grader with cerebral palsy who is Buddies with Josie, a kindergartner with anxiety, and best friends with Rani. Max is the school nurse, and also her foster mom who gave her her name because Bea’s neonatal room was decorated with Peter Rabbit before Max brought her home. Bea loves to draw and even gets in trouble for drawing places she shouldn’t, like her bedroom wall and classroom desk. But […]

Painting makes her fly

Woodpecker Girl by I-Tsun Chiang and Chingyen Liu

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A while back I found a book from Reycraft Books that (at the time) was a future publication. And since I enjoyed it and the person I was dealing with was so delightful to work with (I had asked for a reader copy and we conversed via email for a bit), I have found myself wanting to read more Reycraft Books. I found the title Woodpecker Girl in my research. Locating an online sample of the book, I realized that was not enough. I said, Pretty Please Library Loan Please, to […]

“I wanted the children I taught to know that they, too, could be worthy of featuring in a novel.”

Mine for Keeps by Jean Little

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This book is a delight. Jean Little was a Canadian author who wrote over 50 children’s books, and her books often center on disabled characters. Little herself was legally blind from birth, and I think that the delicacy and realism of her novels really come through as a result of her own experiences. Mine for Keeps was her first children’s novel, which I just found out when doing research for this review, but it doesn’t seem like it’s uncertain or unpolished at all. It’s very confident […]

Cerebral palsy, the sexiest of the palsies.

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Firstly, whether or not you end up reading Zach Anner’s book, it’s definitely worth a trip over to YouTube to check out some of his videos. (Might I recommend this one, this one, and this one?) The guy is goofy and slyly funny. It’s always a happy day when one of his videos shows up in my inbox. He’s the kind of guy who decides to create a video series where all he does is give people virtual high-fives. Often he’ll make a joke that […]

A precious window into the life of a disabled child

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Draper sets out to address social prejudices against those among us with disabilities, by enabling the reader to view the world through the eyes of 11-year-old Melody, a victim of cerebral palsy. Melody is confined to a wheelchair, unable to walk or even sit upright, cannot feed herself, has uncontrollable spasms of her arms and legs, and occasionally drools in public. Worst of all, however, is that she has a mind that functions at top speed, a photographic memory, a thirst for knowledge, a need […]



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