Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Mary was a little ogre, little ogre, little ogre ….

How to Be a Proper Ogre by Kelly Dipucchio and Janie Bynum

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The book How to Be a Proper Ogre by Kelly Dipucchio and Janie Bynum (as illustrator) will come out in June 2026. I read it via an online reader. At first I was not sure I would like the book. I mean it was pretty obvious that the ogre baby that was going to be born (note: mom, dad, other readers of the book you might have to explain babies do not come out of the muddy swamp, but ogre babies do) and they were […]

The new familar

The Princess and the Grain of Rice by Tina Cho

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When I first started working at the bookstore, I decided I was going to collect Cinderella stories from around the world. I found so many I had to stop. There were just too many. Then I decided that I would read as many fairy tales as I could and only collect the ones that really hit the spot.  And what book hits a spot better than a Princess and the Pea story? Or more accurately  The Princess and the Grain of Rice. However, this time […]

That Rumpelstiltskin is my name

Rumpelstiltskin by Mac Barnett and Carson Ellis

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Do you like fairy or folk tales? Do you like pure telling of said fairy tales with a small change? And do you like Rumpelstiltskin? Or at least the story, it is a little hard to like Rumpelstitskin. And if you answered yes to any of the above, you should read Mac Barnett’s version of the story. It is the story we know: king meets a miller, who brags about how awesome his daughter is, the king is greedy and wants the spun gold, the […]

Do you let your children read Stephen King?

Hansel and Gretel by Stephen King and Maurice Sendak

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You might have heard that Stephen King took Maurice Sendak’s illustrations and sent them out into the world as a picture book called  Hansel and Gretel. Here is the story of how I finally read it:  One Saturday I needed a change of scenery and took a few hours to browse my local library. I sat at a table (in a too tall chair), read half of an adult graphic novel (while charging my phone, and after breaking a fingernail trying to get said book), […]

Out of the Mouths of Nursemaids and Travelers

The Watkins Book of English Folktales by Neil Philip

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England has a great culture of letters, but when it comes to folklore, people often don’t think further than Jack and the Beanstalk. In this collection of English folktales though, we can see that the isles have a great tradition of oral storytelling beyond it. In my ongoing pursuit of folklore from around the world, I never really stopped to consider English folktales until this book reminded me that my knowledge of it was in fact pretty scanty. Over the course of about 400 pages, […]

Fairy Tales: a genre by and for “we the people”

Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book by Angela Carter

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I picked up this fairy tale collection in Tim’s Books, a tiny off-the-path used bookstore in Provincetown, because it had Angela Carter’s name on it, and I’ve been dedicating my book-buying to hoarding collections by the best fairy tale scholars, especially the feminist ones. It has, as you can see, a delightfully dated cover, but its ideas are very radical and timeless. The book is a selection of fairy tales and folktales chosen by Carter (author of the brilliant The Bloody Chamber), highlighting some of the […]



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