Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

About Manimama

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I'll read anything if it stands still long enough

Manimama's Reviews:

If ever there was a book that I needed to talk to someone about, this would be it

Blue Hours by Daphne Kalotay

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I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher. This has not influenced my review. Blue Hours is a book in three parts. It is part relationship drama, part international hostage drama, and part infuriating. The story begins in New York City with Mim, a recent college graduate trying to make it as a writer. She lives with several roommates and works in a retail clothing store. She is both too frugal to eat anything but liverwurst at the deli for lunch everyday […]

Charming Kid’s Adventure

The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Westover

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Nicholas Benedict is 9 years old and a very unusual child. He is afflicted with narcolepsy, which means that when he becomes excited or emotionally stressed, he falls asleep instantaneously wherever he is or whatever he is doing. He is extremely intelligent and observant, which is grating to the adults he is around. And Nicholas is an orphan, on his way to his newest orphanage, Rothschild’s End,  as this book opens. Nicholas arrives at a train station to meet Mr. Collum, the director of his […]

Enduring a hundred humiliations, I can only cry in vain

Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung

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  As immigrants from China arrived by boat to San Francisco in the early 1900s, they were detained at Angel Island to await determination of their immigration application. Men and women were separated and held for weeks to months at a time while awaiting entry in to the United States or deportation back to China. The progressively stricter immigration laws during that time were aimed at keeping Chinese immigrants out of the country. With no contact with their families, no freedom to wander the island, […]

A Satisfying Follow up

On The Come Up by Angie Thomas

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  I adored Angie Thomas’s debut, The Hate U Give. I recommended it to nearly every person I encountered in the last year and have never been disappointed by their reactions. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Thomas’s second book was an option in my Book of the Month Club membership. On The Come Up follows Bri, a sixteen year-old girl living in the Garden Heights neighborhood that is familiar to readers of The Hate U Give. The action takes place about a year […]

None of these are turning out quite right

Edward's Menagerie by Kerry Lord

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But- this is a book of crochet patterns! Can you really have read this book? The answer here is a resounding yes, because none of my attempts at making these animals is turning out right! I have read this entire thing several times and it has not seemed to help much. I so far have a lamb that looks a bit horse-like, and a cat that looks like a fox, and now a Dorset sheep that is near completion and looks closest to the pictures […]

Winston Churchill was a real one

Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard

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  I should start this review by saying that I knew next to nothing about Winston Churchill before reading this book. I knew even less about the Boer War. That being said, Winston Churchill was a real badass. Other good descriptors would be, “arrogant”, “obnoxious”, “tenacious”, and “remarkably lucky”. He contained multitudes. This book profiles Churchill’s life during early war campaigns and through the end of the Boer War. He was interested in war not because of the righteousness of the cause but because he […]



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