Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: grief

The Importance of Talking About Our Feelings

Fat, Crazy, and Tired: Tales from the Trenches of Transformation by Van Lathan Jr.

by 1 Comment

I’d never heard of Van Lathan Jr. before faintingviolet asked me to return his memoir to the library for her. As I’m wont to do, I read the first few chapters the night before I returned it, and was hooked and had to take it out for myself. The title (and first few chapters) lead one to believe this book is about diets and food and all the usual struggles people face in trying to get healthy. And part of this memoir is about Lathan […]

Cider Bar Sisters Series Opener

Her Big City Neighbor by Jackie Lau

by Leave a Comment

I started reading this series from the middle. I had recently signed up for Jackie Lau’s reviewer list (which has benefitted me with many books) and the first novella in the Cider Bar Sister series, Her Pretend Christmas Date was released for reviews. I had a great time with that novella and have read the rest as they come (my review of the final in the series, Her Unexpected Roommate, is forthcoming). But I hadn’t gotten around to reading the first two books, a very […]

Heartbreaking work on staggering loss

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

by Leave a Comment

Joan Didion passed away in late December, 2021, which made the beginning of 2022 feel like the right time to read arguably her most famous book, The Year of Magical Thinking. The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir on grief. On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, John Dunne, returned home from visiting their daughter, Quintana, in the hospital, where she was suffering from severe pneumonia. They fell into their usual evening pattern- starting the fire, making dinner- when John had a heart […]

Paul is a Blue Hippo and John is hanging upside down

Paul is Dead by Paola Baron

by Leave a Comment

Paul is Dead. How many Beatles fans know that story? Paul McCartney died at the height of Beatlemania and was replaced with a copy. And Paola Baron explores that idea in Paul is Dead, a speculation fiction graphic novel that causes questions of fame, reality, and self to have more questions than answers. I do not want to know what Baron or illustrator Ernesto Carbonetti were smoking when they created this realistically abstract, realistic-surrealism book, because John Lennon was not the only one having an […]

The Three S-s: spooky, sad, and a little bit sexy

The Wild Hunt by Emma Seckel

by 7 Comments

Honestly, what else could you need? If you are our Heroine Leigh Wells, you need quite a bit. You’ve been called back to your ancestral island home, far flung from the wild shores of Scotland. World War Two did not hit your home directly, but it stole many young men and sent very few back home. The few that returned are not who they once were. The island is not what it once was. The Sluagh (sloo-ah) still return every October, but every year they […]

Science & Nature & Grief & Love

With a Butterfly’s Wings by Pilar Lopez Avila

by Leave a Comment

This is a sweet, but also somber, story of a grandmother and granddaughter and how they interact while observing the world around them.  It is a picture book of how a grandmother teaches a grandchild how to view the world, explore the world, and to appreciate nature and the animals and plants that reside in it. This is a poem and love letter. On the pages of With a Butterfly’s Wings we see how secrets, appreciation and love are passed along and how even when […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo