Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

How I spent my Christmas vacation

Greenglass House by Kate Milford

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CBR12 Bingo: Repeat (Green) This is the perfect book to read, snug under a blanket in front of the fireplace, while the snow piles up outside. Greenglass House is the story of Milo, the 12-year-old son of innkeepers, who is excited to have his busy parents to himself during his winter vacation, when their inn is usually empty. But on the first night of vacation, first one mysterious stranger, than another, shows up at their door until Greenglass House (the inn) is teeming with strange […]

Annie with Blonde Curls

Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

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This is the second time I’ve read a book this year and not known until the end that it was based on a true story. Just like my experience with Grace is Gone, I got to the end of Before We Were Yours to find A Note From the Author about the real life story of Georgia Tann. Tann is considered the “Mother of Modern Adoption,” which sounds like a really beautiful moniker, and in many ways, her work benefited children throughout the world. However, the dark […]

Dear Diary; nature has gone haywire

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

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A young Native American woman learns that she is pregnant in a time of miracles and disaster; nature has gone haywire. Evolution has sped up, gone sideways, and/or stopped all together. Times are trying. It is a particularly frightening time to be a single person with an unplanned pregnancy- especially when religious-esque government agents are collecting and imprisoning pregnant women. Our narrator, Cedar, gives us her story through the pages of her diary. She is keeping accounts of her body and the world around her […]

An Honest and Gracious Look at the Complexities of Adoption

All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung

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From now on, when people ask what being adopted is like, I’ll just smile and tell them to read this book. It’s all in here. The simultaneous emotions of feeling special because you were chosen by a family and worthless because your parents didn’t want you. The confusion of not knowing who exactly you are, or whether you should feel thankful that you were taken in or annoyed that human right was even in question. Who are your “real” parents, if there is such a […]

“Nothing was worse than someone wanting you to talk when the words you needed to say hadn’t even been invented yet.”

Far From the Tree by Benway, Robin

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cbr11bingo – Award Winner! Grace’s steady life is shattered during her high school junior year when she becomes pregnant. Her previously reliable boyfriend dumps her and removes himself from any rights to the child, and her parents are on eggshells around her.  She decides to give the baby up for adoption, which in some ways makes sense: she herself was adopted by her parents, and maybe her baby, who she nicknames Peach (the size the baby was when she realized she was pregnant), will be […]

True Story that is reminiscent of Handmaid’s Tale

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler

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Cbr11bingo True Story This book was recommended to me by a friend who was adopted and it is an amazing and powerful book. It’s the kind of book that breaks your heart and makes you angry. When we talk of “choice” and women, we generally think of the choice to have an abortion, but this book reveals a different kind of choice that was denied to countless young women and girls in the decades between WWII and Roe v. Wade — the choice to keep […]



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