Cannonball Read 11

Sticking it to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

“We don’t know the people who live across the street or on either side of us.”

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

by Leave a Comment

cbr11bingo – Classics!  Zuri Benitez is of the rambling Benitez family. They live in Brooklyn – in Bushwick – in a one bedroom apartment where she and her four siblings share the living room as their bedroom, where block parties are regular and boisterous, and where she and her family and the neighborhood take care of each other. This is why Zuri views the new family across the street with suspicion. When a developer bought the property and revamped it into a flashy new home, the girls placed bets as to who’d move in – rich white folk trying out […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "“We don’t know the people who live across the street or on either side of us.”"

7/22/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:48 |

Poetry for the non-fan

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

by Leave a Comment

(Trigger warning: this review will mention rape several times, though not in any graphic or descriptive way.) This is my annual foray into poetry thanks to my local library’s adult summer reading bingo challenge. Poetry is not at all my bag. I read one book a year and that’s it. As a friend of mine is fond of saying: I’m not trying to yuk anyone’s yum. But my joy as a reader comes from diving into a good story that will leave me challenged and, many times, guessing as to how it will unfold. Poetry doesn’t do that. If I’m […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Poetry for the non-fan"

7/1/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:50 |

A middle-class, middle-aged poet of middling success

The Anthologist by Nicholson Bakker

by Leave a Comment

Nicholson Bakker apparently tends to write slow, thoughtful and literary texts- I say ‘apparently’ because I know this now, but not, unfortunately, when I started reading, and my expectations made for a disappointing reading experience.  Instead of ‘contemplative literary novel’, I was primed for ‘book-themed thriller’, largely because I’d picked up The Book Thief and The Thirteenth Tale around the same time as The Anthologist, and both of those books are thriller-esque.  All of which makes this review hard to write as an objective assessment of Bakker’s book- my dashed expectations are a very particular frame of reference.  In short, […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "A middle-class, middle-aged poet of middling success"

5/9/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:21 |

“We should teach our girls that snapping is ok, instead of waiting for someone else to break them.”

Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

by Leave a Comment

I only learned that Laurie Halse Anderson wrote her modern classic and much challenged novel Speak in response to her own rape as a young teen. But where Melinda came to art to find her voice, Anderson came to writing. Anderson writes in verse that runs the gambit of emotion and holds no punches.  It is a memoir of her full life, opening with a reflection on her father, whose severe PTSD sets the tone for her complicated home (later reflected in her YA fiction The Knife of Impossible Memory). Her rape by a classmate as a middle-school student left her […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

  • Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "“We should teach our girls that snapping is ok, instead of waiting for someone else to break them.”"

4/26/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:27 |

Pretty Poems from a Local Artist

Nature's Secrecy: Collected Poems by Amiyo Basu

by Leave a Comment

Several years ago I reviewed David Byrne’s How Music Works. One of the most interesting things in Byrne’s book is how differently we experience music today than we did prior to the phonograph. Until that time, music was localized and live by necessity. Every version of a song you heard was likely an interpretation, a cover; there was no “definitive” album version of a song. Additionally, musical styles were also more local because it wasn’t feasible to keep up with artists or a favorite genre outside of where you lived. And vice versa. After reading that book, I became much more […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Pretty Poems from a Local Artist"

4/20/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:14 |

National Poetry Month- what doesn’t kill you still hurts

Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall

by Leave a Comment

When it comes to reading poetry, I tend to stick with the classic epic poems like Beowulf and The Odyssey or more contemporary YA poetry-as-novel (The Poet X, Brown Girl Dreaming). I can’t remember a time outside of a classroom when I read a poetry collection. So for the CBR book exchange last December, one of my suggestions for whomever was buying for me was a book of poems, and Cannonballer Bonnie sent me this slim but stunning and provocative collection by contemporary award-winning poet Traci Brimhall. I feel somewhat at a loss as to how to review poems, but […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "National Poetry Month- what doesn’t kill you still hurts"

4/19/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:18 |

Now Hear This

The Poet X: A Novel by Elizabeth Acevedo

by 3 Comments

The Poet X is a novel written in verse and the recipient of many prestigious awards including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In this impressive debut work, Elizabeth Acevedo demonstrates with passion and heart both the power and the vital necessity of being heard, especially when you are a young woman of color. And conversely, the novel shows the terrible destructive power of being silenced, ignored and relegated to an object, a mere physical body subject to the rules and punishments of others.  The Poet X is Xiomara Batista, the first generation daughter of immigrant parents from […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Now Hear This"

3/11/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:12 |

Enduring a hundred humiliations, I can only cry in vain

Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung

by 1 Comment

  As immigrants from China arrived by boat to San Francisco in the early 1900s, they were detained at Angel Island to await determination of their immigration application. Men and women were separated and held for weeks to months at a time while awaiting entry in to the United States or deportation back to China. The progressively stricter immigration laws during that time were aimed at keeping Chinese immigrants out of the country. With no contact with their families, no freedom to wander the island, and nearly nothing at all to do, some immigrants began carving poems in to the […]

Help Support Cannonball Read

Buy the following on Amazon and help our mission to stick it to cancer, one book at a time:

We pay for our website first, and then all proceeds above and beyond those fees are donated to the American Cancer Society in AlabamaPink's name. Find out how else you can help support our mission.

Share the post "Enduring a hundred humiliations, I can only cry in vain"

3/2/2019 | 's CBR11 Review No:13 |


Follow CBR on Instagram

Shop on Amazon and Support CBR

Buy Original Cannonballer Prisco's book and help CBR!

Ad Partner