Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“When you get older, you may never have anyone sing to you personally again, but go all over the world and I bet you can’t find one baby that has never been sung to.”

The Good Times Are Killing Me by Lynda Barry

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Lynda Barry’s other near-perfect YA novel, The Good Times Are Killing Me, marks my completing re-reading her non comics work, as I read and reviewed Cruddy last year. I do think Cruddy is a singular work of genius, but this novel is a close second and one that I find deeply moving and beautiful. It’s a short book, only 131 pages, but Barry manages to pack a lot of emotion and layered, thoughtful commentary on growing up, friendship, systemic societal racism, and the power of […]

“She was right, it would just be another box. It was going to be just another box for him, too, but he’d figured it out. You didn’t get out of one box without getting into another, and you didn’t get out of one box without getting into another, and you didn’t get out without it costing you. “

The Runner (Tillerman Cycle #4) by Cynthia Voigt

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The fourth in the series, this book follows Dicey’s uncle and Samuel’s namesake Bullet (with the moniker he had given himself) in his final year of high school. At this point in family history, the eldest brother has already gotten out of the house, and Liza (Dicey and sibling’s mother) has also left, leaving Bullet behind to fend for himself. He cares little for school, little for anyone really, aside from Patrice who he works for crabbing and oystering. With the onset of the Vietnam […]

Varied Love in Space

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

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Bingo Review 5: Cannonballer Says Still going totally out of order from the plan, and there is/was a written out plan, but this time it’s because of the timing of something coming into my local library. Anyways, I decided to request The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet because it had been an option for the June 2020 bookclub (also apparently in 2018) and some of the discussion comments made it sound interesting. It’s gotten somewhat mixed reviews by Cannonballers, but at least one […]

Get out your drapes and rumba

Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots by Margarita Engle

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Get out your drapes and start to jump, leap and swing to the beat! You will Rumba the night away! Jazz Owls: A Novel of the Zoot Suit Riots by Margarita Engle is a prose poetry book that reads like a novel. Each character (and there are several, some named and some just their occupation) has a story to tell about California in the early years of the Untied States time in World War Two. American born sisters, 16-year-old Marisela and 14-year-old Lorena just want […]

Mirrors that don’t reflect reality

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I received Boy, Snow, Bird from an earlier CBR book exchange, but it had been collecting dust for a few years. I finally had a reason to pick it back up when my Mocha Girls Read book club selected it for a fairytale’s retold theme. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel is a VERY loose version of Snow White set in the 1950s. Boy Novak runs away to a small town to escape her abusive father. She meets a man named Arturo who isn’t quite a prince, but he […]

You know your love keeps on lifting me, lifting me higher and higher

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CBR10Bingo: Fahrenheit 451 (BINGO!) When I named Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as one of my three desert island books earlier this year, I realized two things: (1) I’ve only read it once, and that was about 15 years ago, and (2) I haven’t even owned a copy for half that time, having lost track of my original through several big moves (I blame my ex). I bought a fresh copy this spring, and when CBR10Bingo rolled around, I had this book in mind for […]



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