Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Great Documentary Photography of American Teenagers

It's Complicated: The American Teenager by Robin Bowman

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I really enjoyed this book of portraits and interviews with American teenagers. The portraits were taken over the course of four years, and each one has a short chunk of the interview Bowman did with her subjects. I love this kind of blend of photo and explanatory text instead a book of just solely photographs, so this was right up my alley. I also am always rooting for teenagers, as I feel that they are unfairly denigrated in our culture, so it was nice to […]

Different tune, same story

Battle of the Bands by Eric Smith and Lauren Gibaldi

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There’s a thing that happens when you totally crush out on someone. It’s like you can feel your heartbeat in every part of your body. There’s a euphoric kind of excitement mixed with sadness and terror. It’s hard to explain, but it happens in an instant and then just explodes and grows from there, consuming your every waking thought and sometimes your dreams. You can’t escape from it. It takes over and runs the controls that make you . . . you. Suddenly, you aren’t […]

Coming of Age When Your Parents Are in the CIA

Passport by Sophia Glock

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CBR14Bingo: Gaslight (I wouldn’t say her parents purposefully gaslight her, but they keep a lot of information from her and live in a cloud of secrecy that she never fully gets answers about) This is a well done book in a technical sense — the art is accomplished and clear, I like the use of a muted and restrained color palette, the story has a clear arc — but there’s something hollow about it that didn’t click for me. I think it might be because […]

“When the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?”

Cruddy by Lynda Barry

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Lynda Barry is best known for her comics work, but I also really love her two illustrated novels (Cruddy and The Good Times Are Killing Me), which it seems to me are somewhat overlooked (or maybe I was too young when they came out to notice their cultural impact). All her work deals with outsider teens who are dealing with abusive parents and societal alienation with no one to help them. Cruddy is a very bleak, blackly comic novel. I like the journal-type format that it uses, as […]

“You deserve happiness:” Thoughtful and Resonant Work from Sarah Winifred Searle

The Greatest Thing by Sarah Winifred Searle

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Another preordered gift to myself that turned out to be quite the treat! Sarah Winifred Searle is an artist whose work I’ve been following for a while and so I was very excited to see that she had a YA graphic novel coming out. The book lived up to my expectations and I really enjoyed it. The Greatest Thing is about Winifred, who’s about to start sophomore year after her two best friends left for private school. She’s afraid that she won’t make any new friends […]

“It is very important to approach all unpleasant tasks in life as a performance art piece, especially if you are a teenager.”

Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country & Other Stories by Chavisa Woods

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Goth or not, country or not, if you have ever been a teenager then SOMETHING in this collection of stories will speak to you. Maybe you’ve never befriended a drug addict squatting in a mausoleum, and maybe you’ve never had a bad trip at a MENSA party hosted by your girlfriend’s parents, but there are definitely some teenage feelings rolling dark and deep in all of us! Chavis Woods has labeled and celebrated that feeling of “something more”; most notably in the titular story, “Things […]



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