Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Good mothers are a gift…

The Changeling by Victor Lavalle

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In my long standing tradition of judging a book by the cover, I grabbed this book based on both title AND cover. The premise sounded interesting: a dark fairy tale take on postpartum depression. In the end, I found a trippy book full of all kinds of weirdness that was more than the sum of its parts. The protagonist, Apollo, is the child of a Ugandan refugee and a New York parole officer. Raised by a single mother after his father disappears, Apollo becomes interested […]

Revisiting a favourite from my early teens

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie

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When out golfing one afternoon, young Mr Bobby Derwent finds a handsome stranger at the bottom of a cliff, near death. While his golfing companion goes to get help, Bobby sits with the stranger, who soon expires, but not before uttering: “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” While looking for signs of identification, Bobby finds the photograph of a very beautiful woman in the dead man’s pockets, but nothing else to give him a sign of the man’s identity. The local inquest rules the man’s death […]

The Situation is a lot more nuanced than that…

The Mindfulness Solution for Intense Emotions: Take Control of Borderline Personality Disorder with DBT by Cedar R. Koons

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I went to a talk, not too long ago, with a philosopher who had written his thesis on body awareness. He wrote his entire thesis without any sort of movement and he was advised by the leading expert who also rarely moved or was aware of his body in any way. The philosopher has since rectified this and now he’s all about practicing what he preaches. This book is for people diagnosed with Borderline Personality disorder or people who suffer from emotional intensity “Emotional intensity […]

Wonderful mental health discussion in super hero comic aimed at young girls

DC Super Hero Girls: Out of the Bottle by Shea Fontana (author), Marchelo DiChiara (illustrator), Agnes Garbowska (illustrator)

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For those unfamiliar with the DC Super Hero Girls franchise the concept is that many classic DC comics characters are teenagers attending Super Hero High School, focusing on the female supers.  Another neat twist is that villains aren’t villains yet, they might be morally flexible but they are still overall more good than bad.  My eleven and seven year old daughters have been fans for several years now.  They have watched the animated shows and movies, and read two of the chapter books, but only […]

Now Hear This

The Poet X: A Novel by Elizabeth Acevedo

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The Poet X is a novel written in verse and the recipient of many prestigious awards including the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. In this impressive debut work, Elizabeth Acevedo demonstrates with passion and heart both the power and the vital necessity of being heard, especially when you are a young woman of color. And conversely, the novel shows the terrible destructive power of being silenced, ignored and relegated to an object, a mere physical body subject to the rules and punishments of […]

…Nearly every American hungers to move

Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

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John Steinbeck is 58 and he feels like he’s lost touch with America. He used to know his country, even write books about it, but now he’s unsure. The only sensible thing to do, of course, it to buy a customized truck and set out on a ginormous road trip across America ‘where the people are’ and get to know them all again. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I […]



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