Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Read “The Primal Wound” Instead

Coming Home to Self: The Adopted Child Grows Up by Nancy Newton Verrier

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A few months ago I reviewed The Primal Wound, Nancy Newton Verrier’s book about the unavoidable impact that separation from the biological family (especially mothers) places on adoptees. I mentioned that while the book was a bit dated since it was written in the early 1990s, there was a lot of value in it because it articulated and normalized things that many adoptees feel. One of the primary complaints of Verrier’s first book is that it of lays out a problem without a solution. (This wasn’t […]

A lovely book with a beautiful cover

The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

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4.5 stars Because tradition dicatates it, each year on a certain day, the council of elders in the Protectorate take an infant and leave it in the woods as a sacrifice to the witch. Bad things will happen to the settlement if they don’t (although no one is really clear what dire consequences there will be, because there has never been a time when they didn’t place a child in the woods). Normally, the grieving family whose child has been selected meekly go along with […]

A Thought-Provoking Read for Members of the Adoption Triad

The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child by Nancy Newton Verrier

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As the title of this book about adoptees indicates, author Nancy Newton Verrier views adoption as a process that wounds adoptees on a fundamental level. Her central theory based on research and personal experience is that severing the connection between a mother and child leaves a wound which profoundly impacts sense of self, including self-worth and self-esteem. She has a strong message for adoptees: What adoptees need to know is that their experience was real. Adoption isn’t a concept to be learned, a theory to […]

Don’t hide your light under a bushel, darling.

Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling

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(Title quote is from Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage) Aven Green has a pretty great life as a middle schooler in Kansas.  She plays on the soccer team, has a wonderful group of friends, is a creative writer, and plays the guitar. She also has no arms. She was born without them, though if anyone asks about it (and boy do they), she always has a wild tale to tell them about where they went and how. But her life is about to be upended: her […]

“I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.”

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I basically read this all in one sitting last Saturday morning. It’s a relative short book at around 220 pages, but I think I would have wanted to read it fast even if it were 400. Nichole Chung, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s read her other work (I’ve mostly done so on The (dearly departed) Toast), is a very good writer. In fact, she started writing about adoption years before this book was published; I remember reading several of her articles about it and thinking at […]

Little Boxes on the hillside, Little Boxes all the same

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I meant to read Everything I Never Told You ages ago but I think I had read too many novels about family secrets and suburbia at the time and kept putting it off for later.  I always meant to get around to it, but with the whole Reese Witherspoon book club and optioning of Little Fires Everywhere, I decided to start with Ng’s follow up. The novel, set in 1998, begins in early summer in suburban Shaker Heights, outside Cleveland, Ohio.  Ng hints at previous […]



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