Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

All the Rage

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

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I’ve been sitting here staring at a blank screen, trying desperately to figure out the words to convey the depth and urgency of my love for this book. Let’s start with: if I have anything to be grateful to the former occupier of the White House for, it is the uptick in feminist rage literature. I suppose credit where credit is due. Because we’ve been mad, I’ve been angry my whole damn life, but it’s just now I’m finding books that mirror my own simmering […]

“…with understanding, all things were possible.”

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

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Riddle me this: what do you create when you combine a violin prodigy, “the Queen of Hell”, and an alien doughnut maker? If you are Ryka Aoki, you create a wild, delicious, devastating, hilarious brew. Does it hold together in a tight narrative? Light from Uncommon Stars does not. Does it thrill your senses and grow your heart? It absolutely does. We are first introduced to Katrina Nguyen, a teenage trans girl, as she is running away from a brutal home, carrying her beloved violin. […]

A WWI novel both predictable and surprising

In Memoriam: A Novel by Alice Winn

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In Memoriam is the story of two young men, students from the prestigious (fictional) British public school Preshute, who go off to fight in the First World War. You can imagine, if you are at all familiar with WWI literature, how this tale is going to go, and yet Winn, in her first novel, manages to create a story that is faithful to the horrors of that conflict while still surprising the reader with its conclusion. Winn, herself the product of a British boarding school, […]

A real witch is the best kind of person

A Hat Full of Sky: A Tiffany Aching Adventure by Terry Pratchett

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This is the second book of Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series. Tiffany is a young witch living on “the Chalk,” a land full of sheep and the fairies known as the Nac Mac Feegle (NMF), or Wee Free Men. In book one, 9-year-old Tiffany teamed up with the NMF to save her brother and the world from the queen of the fairies. Her witchly abilities were evident to other witches like Miss Tick and Mistress Weatherwax, who gifted Tiffany a hat. A witch’s hat is […]

This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

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I know that this novel is a contemporary spin on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. In fact, almost everything written about this book centers around that comparison. I guess that her naming of the main character (also the title of the book) makes that discussion unavoidable. But, I would argue that a lot of Kingsolver novels are Dickensian: following the lives of people who are often dismissed as unintelligent, unapproachable, and strange. People who are held responsible for their own misfortune. People that are kept in […]

It was beautiful, and then somebody else, the rest of the world, made it not beautiful.

Now Is Not The Time To Panic by Kevin Wilson

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I used to spend a month every summer visiting my dad in a household that was absolutely free-range. It was the late 1970s and early 1980s so that wasn’t that unusual, but it was certainly a more unsupervised and fend-for-yourself-until-dinner situation than I experienced with my mother. I have very distinct memories from that time, hanging out across the street with a neighborhood girl my age. Both of her parents worked so we would spend all day in the air conditioning watching MTV, drinking (sometimes […]



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