Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

“That look was the absolute truth. I know it the way you know things sometimes, bone-deep as loneliness, right in the living room of the heart.”

Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom by Nina Varela

by Leave a Comment

As I mentioned in my review of The Carrefour Curse there are two tasks in the 2024 Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books. Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom is my selection for task 6: read a middle grade book with an LGBTQIA main character. Right off the bat, this is a good book, in fact Nina Varela can write better than most authors I’ve come across in the past year or more. I just wish Middle Grades was an audience […]

snapshot of a sculpture

Galatea by Madeline Miller

by 2 Comments

We’ve heard his story countless times; it’s been a well-trod myth since Ancient Greece. We read Metamorphoses, we studied Pygmalion, we sung along to My Fair Lady, and we mourned the short life of (the terribly named but very good) Selfie. With Madeline Miller, Pygmalion strikes again. He strikes the marble into a statue, the statue becomes a woman, Galatea strikes out on her own, and Pygmalion strikes her down. Galatea is convalescing (read: held captive) in a hospital by the sea. She is cut off from her daughter, […]

Greed Is In

Dear Money by Martha McPhee

by Leave a Comment

Read as part of CBR11 Bingo: Re-telling of a classic. The book was inspired by “Pygmalion.” This book is a mess but it is a very entertaining mess. It’s basically The Big Short filtered through the lens of a needy, greedy Manhattan mom. Perhaps because of my enduring love for Manhattan, I never seem to tire of New York City tales. Even ones that are as bleak and insufferable as this one. I found myself relating to India more than I would have liked. Sure, she has […]

A pleasant surprise

by Leave a Comment

I know I’ve seen My Fair Lady at least once before, but it was ages ago and probably when I was still in high school. My response to it was middling. The costumes and musical numbers left an impression, the story itself didn’t. I probably would never have picked up Pygmalion if it hadn’t been something easy to get my hands on and worked for a book challenge I’ve been doing with a friend this year. For plays, I prefer reading along with dramatized audio […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo