Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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The Past Is Not Through With Us

Shadow of a Tiger by Dennis Lynds (Michael Collins)

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The influence of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series is what originally drove me to this series. Dan Fortune can kind of be seen as Archer’s east coast counterpart, only he’s missing an arm and we know more about his personal life. In this one, Dennis Lynds (writing under the nom de plume “Michael Collins”) treads familiar territory for both he and his influencer: exploring the dirty deeds of a family. A recurring theme in many of these stories is the past often catches up to us. […]

Be she Rachel or Catherine, one girl learns to survive and be free while all the while, in hiding

Catherine’s War by Julia Billet

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Catherine’s War is a Holocaust story with a twist. This time a young, French-Jewish girl, Rachel, goes into hiding but does it in the open. She (and other children) do not stay in any one place too long (usually not by choice). They sometimes are only one step ahead of the Nazis at any point. Julia Billet created (and Ivanka Hahnenberger translated), Rachel, our narrator. Rachel goes to the progressive Sèvres Children’s Home where children of both faiths learn in a non-traditional setting. We see […]

Finding Home(s)

Monsieur Mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French by John von Sothen

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Our library provides free copies of BookPage, which is a great little advert magazine for finding new and upcoming books. I highly recommend it if you’re trying to find something new to shake up your queue. Knowledge of Monsiuer Mediocre came to me via that magazine, and after a few months of waiting for an interlibrary loan to arrive it finally came last week! I’m happy to say this book was worth the wait. Jancee Dunn writes in her blurb on this one, this book is […]

New character, old story

White Bird by R. J. Palacio

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There are two ways to look at this book: the cynical way and the not so cynical. First, cynical. You could just say this is a retelling of the Anne Frank story. However, (SPOILER) with two main plot differences: Sara (the Anne character) is hiding alone and not with her family/other families and she survives the ordeal. Finally, the not so cynical way allows you to see that White Bird by R. J. Palacio was inspired by all the stories of World War II and […]

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon

A Dream of Flight: Alberto Santos-Dumont's Race Around the Eiffel Tower by Rob Polivka

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#cbr11bingo #TrueStory A Dream of Flight: Alberto Santos-Dumont’s Race Around the Eiffel Tower is one of those powerful books that gives you a piece of history you might not be familiar with. Though not an all-encompassing/text-book look, it is a complete and general look at the history of flight in its early years. And it also gives you the story of one person who did much to get it to what we know as aviation today. Years before the Wright Brothers, a young Brazilian man-made history […]



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