Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Nerdy lesbian romance

How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow

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How to Excavate a Heart is a book that hit so many good and familiar notes for me. Shani has just finished her first semester at college where she also got her first girlfriend, who broke up with her just before the start of winter break. Luckily Shani got accepted to an internship that the Smithsonian museum of natural history where she’ll work under her idol on coelacanth fossils, giving her distance from home and something to put her focus towards that isn’t her broken […]

Queer Historical Murder Mystery

Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen

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I don’t know how to feel about this book, but also it was utterly compelling and hard to put down. When Andy is caught with his pants down in a gay bar, he feels like his whole life is over – he’s lost his job with the San Francisco police department, lost his housing, and knew the cops who caught him intended to spread his truth so he’d never get a job again. But before he can follow through on ending things, Pearl offers him […]

Emotional Historical YA

Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall

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Yup, I cried, but no one is surprised. Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken is a story of resistance and making joy during dark times, as well as family and love. It is a story that examines when safety stops being enough and it’s time to resist and push back against harmful regimes. It is also the story of a group of friends navigating their friendship and society when it’s not safe to be Jewish, it’s not safe to be queer, it’s not safe to be […]

down to the wire (as always) – BOOK CLUB TIME!

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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Why did I wait so long to read these two? This isn’t just a question of Book Club procrastination; this is a “what was I thinking?” moment! I had heard good things about both, I was enraged as ever when they (and others) showed up on lists of challenged and banned books, and they were both available on scribd! Also- why did I treat these books like homework? “oh man, I have to read these before I can move on to other things”- at the […]

A complex, beautiful fantasy sequel

The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri

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[Review contains potential spoilers for Jasmine Throne, book 1 of The Burning Kingdoms trilogy] I finished Oleander Sword and now I don’t know what to do with myself. How dare it end there?! Where’s the next book?! I need to know what’s going to happen next!! Oleander Sword picks up a year after the events of Jasmine Throne. Bhumika and Priya are Elders of Ahiranya and trying to lead their country into a prosperous future, but are having to deal with the politics of the […]

An emotional story of family and love

This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed

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This Way Out is beautiful, emotional, and such a great story of Amar figuring out how to reconcile being gay with being Muslim, being Bangladeshi while loving a white Englishman. This Way Out opens with Amar telling his family via WhatsApp that he’s engaged and his fiancée is a man, but then he hides from the responses from his siblings because he doesn’t actually feel ready for what their response will be. His family’s reaction is complicated and because he’s still coping with grief of […]



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