Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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When Newcomers Come to Canada from all over the world to stay

Carry on: Poetry by Young Immigrants by Simon Boulerice

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Carry on: Poetry by Young Immigrants was a book I found on a site the store I work at uses for ordering. It might have been just a sample of the poetry, not the completed version, but either way, this book illustrated by Roge Girard is something worth looking into. Told from the point of view of young immigrants, each poem is a snapshot of thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, and observations. We see how cold is experienced for the first time. How the thought […]

A gut-punch of a book filled with the stories we rarely hear

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

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BINGO – REP (BLACKOUT) I feel that is is important at the start of this review to indicate that I am a non-Hispanic white person. Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a recipient of DACA and a journalist (though she eschews that title, more on that later). For The Undocumented Americans Villavicencio set forth to tell the stories of the undocumented immigrants that we don’t often hear about. She purposefully does not write about DREAMers because she “didn’t want to write anything inspirational.” She wanted to […]

“Of all the myriad races of thinking creatures in the world, the two that most delight in telling stories are the flesh-and-blood humans and the long-lived, fiery jinn.”

The Hidden Palace (The Golem & The Jinni, #2) by Helene Wecker

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I’m having a hard time reviewing this one, mostly because I had a hard time deciding what I thought about it. But I’m on the verge of getting hopelessly behind in reviews again, so it’s time to buckle down and figure it out. I was thinking about the book this morning and I think I’ve finally formed some solid opinions, so here we go. This is a book about change in all its forms: death (and grief), destruction, creation, evolution, the way a person changes […]

Family

Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family? by Marisabina Russo

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I had a small roller coaster ride of thoughts and feelings about the graphic memoir, Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family? At first, I thought, “Sounds fun.” Then, “Huh, what’s going on?” And “This is slow reading.” With, “Oh, yeah digging this, getting meaty.” Along with several, “If this was fiction nobody would allow such a stereotype!” And finally, “Well that was a ride. And that afterwards was a good roundup.”   Our narrator, Cookie is “the lucky one” of her […]

Does what it says on the tin!

Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang

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This was good and I liked it, but I didn’t expect it to be so young-skewing. It’s definitely a middle grade book. Older teenagers and adults can read and enjoy it, but it’s not really an all-ages read. Aside from that, it was really well done. I went into this with no background, and it was a fun read that way, but I wish I would have read the historical context/afterword from Yang at the back of the book first. Better yet, I wish they […]

“Maybe it wasn’t about the moving to new places, but about the challenge of staying put.”

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

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This felt like two separate books to me, and one of them I liked much better than the other. The two central characters in this novel are Deming Guo and his mother, Polly, who is a Chinese immigrant (undocumented) from the city of Fuzhou, now living in New York (I loved the specificity of Deming and Polly insisting they speak Fuzhounese, which is a dialect of Min Chinese; this book had great cultural and historical detail like this all throughout). The first third of the […]



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