Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A winter walk

A Quiet Conversation with the Snow by Lori Colvin

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A Quiet Conversation with the Snow by Lori Colvin and illustrated by Lee Steadman has a few tones and levels to it. The first thing I noticed was the repetition of the images. There is a lot of white and blue. When other colors come out, it is usually red and specifically the red of a male cardinal. This bird is on almost every page, allowing for the listener (and reader) to find it. Sometimes it is obvious and is the center of the back […]

Augustine and his women

Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine's Confessions by Kate Cooper

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Kate Cooper’s Queens of a Fallen World: The Lost Women of Augustine’s Confessions came to my attention via an article on the shortlist for the 2023 Cundill History Prize. (BTW, that’s a good-looking group of books, if you’re a history nerd.) I teach Augustine’s Confessions every spring, but always find it a bit of hard going in a literature class, so anything that might help me out, I try to look at. (Last spring it was Natalie Carnes’s Motherhood: A Confession which is also fantastic.) Cooper’s central idea […]

History is not only about the past.

Obaasan's Boots by Janis Bridger and Lara Jean Okihiro

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It took me months to read Obaasan’s Boots by Janis Bridger and Lara Jean Okihiro because I was reading it via an online reader copy at lunch and when I could sneak it in on my phone (which was not as often as I’d like as there was always something else to read or do when there). This long time reading probably affected the biggest issue I had which was, I was not always sure which cousin was who. Charlotte and Lou are marked by […]

And Now For Something Completely Bonkers

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

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Well, this is certainly one hot mess of a novelette, and it is deliciously illustrated in sketchy (in all meanings of the word) drawings by the novelist herself, a surrealistic painter.  The heroine, nonagenarian vegetarian Marian Leatherby, starts off as quite deaf, but is then gifted with an old school hearing trumpet that lets her hear everything.  But seemingly no one notices it, even though in the drawings it looms over her head like a conning tower.  She has been placed by her children in […]

Different person, same love

Every Day: The Graphic Novel by David Levithan

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When you’ve worked in kids and young adult books as long as I have, you learn some “big names” of the biz. One I knew I never had to read (but probably should because they were good) was David Levithan. I recommended them on repetition alone. Therefore, when the opportunity came to read Every Day: The Graphic Novel I knew the Reading Gods were telling me to go for it. First, a graphic novel (a favorite reading genre for several years now) and second, David […]

Light and dark fantasy

Coral’s Reef volume one by David Lumsdon

Castle Swimmer volume one by Wendy Martin

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I do not know if the (online reader copy) Coral’s Reef volume one by David Lumsdon and Shiei was originally a webcomic, but I know Castle Swimmer volume one by Wendy Martin was. Why I say this is because the two books have some similarities and of course, differences. But they make me think of each other. I read Coral via an online reader copy as said, but read at least volume one on WebToons for Castle. However, it is now going to be in […]



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