Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Gorgeous graphic novel with a dragon, a maiden, a warrior, and kites.

The Last Dragon by Jane Yolen (author), Rebecca Guay (art)

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 The Last Dragon is a beautiful book to hold.  Colors are muted and layered, nothing is a single flat shade.  Lighting has been carefully considered, illuminating and glowing as needed each panel.  The “maiden” is an herbalist’s daughter named, Tansy.  She is described as, “no color at all.  She seemed to blend in with her surroundings” and the artist, Rebecca Guay, did an incredible job showing this.  I also love the way Guay drew the dragon, so powerful and ferocious.  It reminds me of a […]

Once there was a mermaid

The Magic Threeof Solatia by Jane Yolen

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Jane Yolen has been called America’s Hans Christian Anderson. It is an apt comparison. Most of her work is either for children or young adults, yet the work has that quality that can also attract adults. There is much going on there. Magic Three of Solatia functions in part as a reply to Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Not the Disney version with its happy ending but the dark original tale. In that one, the prince is, perhaps, not truly deserving of the mermaid’s love. Yolen looks […]

The Emerald Circus is multi-faceted but disappoints

The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen

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When Kindle asked me to rate this out of 5 stars, I had a moment’s pause.  My confession: it took me over six months to make it through this collection of 17 short stories by Jane Yolen. Some I read in a single sitting, desperately flicking through the pages without hesitation. But unfortunately, most of the stories were a hard slog that I struggled to finish. This is my first (and likely, last) Jane Yolen novel. The stories of The Emerald Circus are typically slanted […]

When your teacher is a mummy everything is under wraps

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The writing team of Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple have created numerous gems. Yet, Monster Academy is still in the coal stage. It greatly reminded me of the story Ghoul School by Kevin O’Malley. Had I read Monster Academy first, I would have probably preferred it, yet, I did not. So, if you like Ghoul School (previous reviewed here) you’ll like this (and the reverse is true too, of course). The premise is simple: a “naughty monster” (which of course, means that they […]

A Worthy Follow-Up to a Classic

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I’ll have to admit that I’m somewhat biased here, because Jane Yolen is one of my favorite young adult authors and her two other novels about the Holocaust (the dreamlike Briar Rose and the memorably earnest The Devil’s Arithmetic) are books I found beautiful. I was just browsing my local library’s YA section randomly and saw this book: I didn’t even know she had written another novel about the Holocaust. While Briar Rose transposed its story into a fairy tale and The Devil’s Arithmetic read like […]

How Do Dinosaurs Learn to Read?

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              The dinosaurs of yore are back again with Jane Yolen’s and Mark Teague’s newest collaboration. How Do Dinosaurs Learn to Read? is much of what we have seen before, but this time about reading. Therefore, if you child likes the others, you will like this too!   We will jump and roar and soar and soak and throw and chew and even read books with our dinosaur friends. We will learn the proper and improper ways to handle […]



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