Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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My heart is wrapped up in you.

The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner

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“If you’re going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.” ― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King While our classmates are getting zongered at the Holiday Inn in Cookeville and getting pregnant, you and I will be playing in the sprinkler and looking up at the stars until your curfew. ― Jeff Zentner, The Serpent King After his father, the magnetic preacher of a full-on “speaking-in-tongues and handling snakes” church is sent to prison, Dillard Early Jr. has the weight of […]

A lot to unpack in this short, supernatural mystery

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass

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There is nothing in this book that I relate to. I am not a 16-year old, gay, black, male. And I definitely don’t see ghosts or ghouls. But Jake is and does. And as extraordinary as he is, he still deals with all the other ordinary things a teenager deals with. So Jake’s life is…complicated…to say the least. Jake’s ordinary life concerns living in the shadow of his big brother, growing apart from friends, and getting to know the cute new student at his school […]

Coming of Age in 1950s Chinatown

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

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I read Last Night at the Telegraph Club for our Cannon Book Club to celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage month. The YA novel is part historical fiction and part romance. It was a powerful story of coming of age and sexual awakening. It’s also a captivating window into what life was like for 1950s Chinese Americans and the LGBTQIA community. We meet shy Chinese-American student Lily Hu who loves studying math and science. She likes to fall into books and loves sci-fi, which I can relate to! When […]

YA POV of the LA riots

The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed

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And with this review of Christina Hammonds Reed’s The Black Kids, I made a bingo just under the wire. I received this for free from my Mocha Girls Read book club as it was our July sponsored book of the month. This YA historical novel is set against the backdrop of the 1992 LA riots. From the get, I was like is it really historical?! But I have to admit it has been some time since that fateful Rodney King verdict. Ashley Bennett lives in […]

Two books I never read in high school

The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

Night by Elie Wiesel

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 November has been a sucky month in a sucky year, and on a recent trip back east for a family situation, I found that the collection of science fiction stories I brought with me for distraction just wasn’t cutting it. Unable to focus, I did the only sane thing and decided to binge-watch seasons 2 and 3 of The Office. After Michael Scott restored the humors in my brain, I raided my sister’s bookcase, where I found a number of books that have been languishing […]

Not a damn turtle in sight

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

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CBR12 BINGO: Orange I keep trying to like young adult fiction, to the point where it might be unfair of me to review the genre, since it’s clearly not my thing. There are exceptions, of course (my recent discovery of Eleanor & Park stands out), but generally all I can expect from YA is a solid character to whom teenagers can relate. Turtles All the Way Down scores in its representation of a teenage girl with severe anxiety and OCD, but the rest of it just […]



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