Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Every Time Something Doesn’t Happen, It Means Something Else Can”

What If A Fish by Anika Fajardo

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While I’m not usually a reader of middle-grade fiction, this debut novel came across my Facebook feed, as one of my cohorts from my MFA program was its editor! I bought it immediately and was so charmed by this adorable story. What if A Fish follows Little Eddie Aguado, an eleven-year-old Colombian American who feels neither Colombian or American. As he struggles to find his place in the world, he comes across a fishing medal owned by his late-father that sets him on an adventure […]

Lyrical historical coming of age fiction

Red Dove, Listen to the Wind by Sonia Antaki

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Thirteen year old Red Dove lives in interesting times for the Lakota people. Shortly after the Battle of the Greasy Grass (Battle of Little Big Horn), her people have fallen on hard times. Food has become scarce, and the Lakota have learned that they cannot trust the people who have settled on their lands to live peacefully. In a moment of weakness, Red Dove’s mother agrees to send her children to a local Catholic school, hoping that the children will at least find regular meals […]

I learned something when I didn’t expect to!

Dare to Disappoint by Özge Samanci

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I was browsing the high school graphic novel section where I substitute, looking for something to read during a prep period, when I stumbled upon this.  I had never heard of it before, but the entire section had some good stuff in it, so I picked it up. It looked cute and clever, so I started reading it.  I didn’t expect to learn things! This is a graphic memoir, taking place in the early ‘80s in Turkey.  Özge is about 10 years older than me, […]

Extremely solid second book; I liked it better than the first. #CBRBingo – Own Voices

The Bride Test (The Kiss Quotient, #2) by Helen Hoang

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I liked this quite a bit, maybe even more than the first one. It still featured miscommunication as one of the central conflicts, but with one of the characters being autistic, and the other being from another country, I feel like here it’s actually justified, and it didn’t really bother me. (It still bothered me a little in The Kiss Quotient, even though Stella was on the spectrum as well. Also, that book featured a couple of other tropes that didn’t sit well with me, […]

It Is the Innocence Which Constitutes the Crime

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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This book consists of two letters, one that is addressed to Baldwin’s nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and a longer one that he calls ‘A Letter from a Region in My Mind’. They concern themselves with the history and the state of race relations in the US in the 1960s, both from a very personal and a more general perspective. I put this on my TBR when I read an article in my local newspaper earlier this year, in which they […]



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