Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“That look was the absolute truth. I know it the way you know things sometimes, bone-deep as loneliness, right in the living room of the heart.”

Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom by Nina Varela

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As I mentioned in my review of The Carrefour Curse there are two tasks in the 2024 Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books. Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom is my selection for task 6: read a middle grade book with an LGBTQIA main character. Right off the bat, this is a good book, in fact Nina Varela can write better than most authors I’ve come across in the past year or more. I just wish Middle Grades was an audience […]

“Children long to be eaten. Everyone knows that.”

XO Orpheus: 50 New Myths by Kate Bernheimer (editor)

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Am I typing this up while wearing a tee featuring the cover of the d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths? YOU KNOW IT! That strange tome of simplified myth and ultra-bright illustration cracked open a need in me when I was very young. I re-read that book countless times, and used it as the entry point into the larger world of mythology. Combined with a Catholic upbringing that was far more focused on the deaths of the saints than on anything else, you could saw I […]

snapshot of a sculpture

Galatea by Madeline Miller

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We’ve heard his story countless times; it’s been a well-trod myth since Ancient Greece. We read Metamorphoses, we studied Pygmalion, we sung along to My Fair Lady, and we mourned the short life of (the terribly named but very good) Selfie. With Madeline Miller, Pygmalion strikes again. He strikes the marble into a statue, the statue becomes a woman, Galatea strikes out on her own, and Pygmalion strikes her down. Galatea is convalescing (read: held captive) in a hospital by the sea. She is cut off from her daughter, […]



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