Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Magically Heartwarming

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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Crystalclear recommended The Magic Fish to me for it’s fairytales and the beautiful illustrations. And she couldn’t have been more right. Trung Le Nguyen weaves a heartwarming story of Tien and his mother, two Vietnamese immigrants living in the US who are trying to navigate language, culture, and coming of age while battling loneliness and family duty. Tien’s mother asks him to read her fairytales to help her with her English, and as they unfold, they remind her of how the fairytales are different in Vietetamese […]

“Doing something even though I was scared felt kind of amazing.”

Just Roll With It by Veronica Agarwal and Lee Durfey-Lavoie

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I really loved this book and I hope it ends up getting the recognition it deserves. Just Roll With It follows Maggie during her first year of middle school as she makes new friends and gets involved with the D&D/role playing club. The main reason I got this book is that it’s a realistic and careful portrayal of OCD and anxiety, which made it a very relatable read. Both of the creators have struggled with mental health and I think it really adds to the realism […]

“Sure, why not take your mortally wounded lover and shove her into an ancient machine of uncertain effectiveness? What could go wrong?”

Blood of the Chosen: Burningblade & Silvereye Book Two by Django Wexler

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Wexler continues writing excellent sci-fantasy.  I love the melding of energy swords and healing magics.  A highly, technically advanced civilization that has fallen.  Magic is held in the hands of a few, tech is tightly controlled and scrounged from remnants of the previous age.  Life is very different depending on where you live, within the Republic, in the splinter kingdoms, or outside on the fringes. Blood of the Chosen picks up immediately after the events of  Ashes of the Sun.  A potentially humanity ending calamity […]

Fallen highly advanced civilization, tech magic vs. bio magic, and two siblings on opposite sides of the divide.

Ashes of the Sun: Burningblade & Silvereye Book One by Django Wexler

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More than 400 years ago there were two powerful entities, the Chosen and those who are now called ghouls.  The Chosen wielded a magical power called deiat.  With deiat they powered technological marvels like sky fortresses and more mundane blaster pistols.  The ghouls channeled a biological magic called dhak.  With dhak they could do amazing feats of healing and creation of bio constructs for any application.  Dhak could also be twisted to create horrible monsters, plaguespawn, as creatures and humans could be hybridized.  400 hundreds […]

I Wish I Could Read Japanese

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

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One of my friends brought Kitchen back from her study-abroad to Japan in the mid 00s. I was woefully non-diverse in my reading at the time, so my first read of this book in 2008 was mostly vague and unaware. It left no impression. I didn’t even remember I owned it until re-shelving a bunch of books from packing boxes this spring. An MFA and six years of CBR diverse reading under my belt later, this read was a vastly different experience, the most striking of […]

In which a shocking shift in tone and genre works wonderfully

Dream Boy by Jim Grimsley

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Nathan and his family move around a lot. They have currently found themselves in a rented farmhouse in a small, rural North Carolina community in the 1950s. The family that Nathan’s parents are renting from live in the main house on property. They have a son, Roy, who is a senior at the same high school that Nathan will go to as an underclassman; Roy even drives the local school bus. Very small town. Where Nathan is school-focused and shy, Roy is outgoing and more […]



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