Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Beauty & Cruelty

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

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After the herculean doorstop that was Brandon Sanderson’s Way of Kings, I needed a fast, fun, and gripping read. So I turned to Holly Black, whose Folk of the Air trilogy I gobbled up in about 72 hours over Thanksgiving break. The Darkest Part of the Forest did not disappoint, and I blew through it in a day. Written a few years before Folk of the Air, it was fun to see how Black was playing around with the themes and premises that she later expanded […]

You know life is cruel, life is never kind

Neighborhood Watch by Joseph A. Turkot

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It’s the fall of 1995 in a small, sleepy town in suburban America. A young boy named Brandon disappears while walking home from school. The people of the town assume he’ll come back on his own account, but his classmates, Jake and Colin, become less sure. They set out to discover what has happened to Brandon, but as more and more boys vanish from the neighborhood they inadvertently end up putting their own lives at risk.  Though it has been written from the perspective of […]

A platter of insights topped with a sprinkle of advice and a drizzle of judgement

The Art of Growing Up by John Marsden

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This book starts with a powerful chapter about young children and teens who are troubled and how we treat them differently as soon as they become young adults – losing our compassion and expecting them to act like the rest of us rational beings when really it isn’t possible after the dysfunctional upbringing they’ve endured. After reading this I thought the whole book was going be similar – a real challenge to my way of thinking. The rest was…… ok. Some of the writing I […]

Never say never

Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong by Prudence Shen

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Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong had been on the radar for a while. I was not completely convinced until a few weeks ago when I saw it sitting next to another book at the library that I wanted. I figured it was a sign to get it them. I went home and read it. Prudence Shen’s story is decent. It is a solid story about friendship and being a teen with issues. It has its stereotypical moments (the nasty cheerleaders, the basketball jock trying to […]

“…Let me assure you, Lula – nobody’s normal.”

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I was so reluctant to start this book. The cover just screams “twee” and “manic pixie dream girl” but someone here, who knows who, had written a sufficiently glowing review that it made it to my TBR list and well – there are rules. Once it’s on the TBR, I have to at least try it. But believe me, I wouldn’t have otherwise. And man would I have missed out. Weird Girl and What’s His Name is such a sweet, tender, funny book. The pace […]

She had me at Dolly Parton.

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Dumplin’, whose real name is Willowdean, is a smart, kind, capable, funny, and fat (her term) 16-year-old in small-town Texas. Being sixteen is sucky enough, am I right?!, but the “fat” part causes even more trouble than one would expect for Dumplin’ since her mom is the local pageant queen-turned-pageant director, still living on her own pageant days, staying thin to fit in a 30-year-old dress. She was herself once Miss Teen Blue Bonnet and you better believe that’s a big effin’ deal in Clover […]



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