Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Botany, Bears and Beaver Ponds

Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey

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This is a lovely, sad, beautifully written book. I feel bad for everyone who rated it one star on Goodreads just because it wasn’t a faithful retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Because if you read it for what it is, instead of what it isn’t, it’s really quite wonderful. Ivey touches on themes of motherhood, love, personal freedom, mental health and the natural world, all in a dark fairy tale setting. Single mom Birdie does the best that she can for her daughter, Emaleen, […]

Any mom who misses a chance to dress her kid up like a hotdog sounds like a psychopath to me.

Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

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He’s looking to validate himself through someone else. She hasn’t caught on because she doesn’t know who she is. ― Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age CBR17 Bingo: TBR For the past week, I’ve tried to think of an appropriate metaphor for what this reading experience was like for me. In terms of amusement park metaphors, it was like a rollercoaster with the slow climb to the top, each click of the chain ramping up the tension until you’re yanked up and over, all of […]

Woman, Mother, Interpreter, Spy

A Woman of Intelligence by Karin Tanabe

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I knew early on this was not going to be the book I expected and I mean that in a complimentary sense. I thought this would be a cozy-esque female housewife in the 50s using her wiles to navigate Manhattan cocktail parties and deduce who may or may not be a Soviet sympathizer. There’s nothing cozy about this, however. It’s a raw, intriguing look at the perils of motherhood for women in the 1950s, with a spy story tacked on in the background. The espionage […]

Mom and Me…

I Wish I Could Say "Thank You" by Yukari Takinami

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After reading GentleRain’s review of I Wish I Could Say “Thank You” by Yukari Takinami, I researched and found that while my bookstore could order me a copy, I decided that I would go the interlibrary loan route. I figured I could purchase a copy if I enjoyed it at a later time. And I probably will do that, but instead of keeping it for myself, I will donate it to my local library. I think others might be interested in this not easy to […]

Darkest moments and hope

Finding the Light: A Mother's Journey from Trauma to Healing  by Marian Henley

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I received an email a few days ago, with eight online reader links to books coming out from March 2024 to May 2024. One of those titles was Finding the Light: A Mother’s Journey from Trauma to Healing by Marian Henley. At first I thought it was another older title, as the covers were similar, but then I noticed it was not due early March 2024. Now, I have said my reading for 2024 is to be fun, well there really is nothing fun about this love letter to […]

To be or not to be is a very personal question

I Don’t Want to Be a Mom by Irene Olmo

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When I saw the title of this graphic novel by Irene Olmo, I Don’t Want to Be a Mom I assumed a few things. The first, due to the cover  (which I thought was a young girl who did not want to grow up to be a mom), was that she was a trans man. But then I thought she was a lesbian and had some wrong idea they do not become mothers. Or even that she was asexual, had a bad mother herself, or […]



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