Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Twist on a Classic Fairy Tale

Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel by Megan Morrison

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This is a review by the almost 11 year old in LanierHgts’ house, Lala. This book is the retelling of the Rapunzel story, more from the fairy tale than from the Disney movie, although it has some elements from the movie, like when Rapunzel adopts a frog (in the movie she has a chameleon).  It starts in the tower and then ventures beyond.  Rapunzel gets lured out of her tower by Jack (as in Jack and the Beanstalk), who is trying to fulfill a deal […]

Hurt People Hurt People

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

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Read as part of CBR12 Bingo: No money. This was a library book. I wasn’t gonna read Mary L. Trump’s book as I assumed it would be the kind of armchair psychoanalysis I detest and find harmful. But it was on Scribd and a short listen via audio so I “read” it and am glad I did. Mostly, I am reminded that our childhood rearing dictates so much of who we will become, for better and for worse. It really seems like Donald Trump was […]

One Ring To Rule Them All…..

The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien

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My first encounter with the enormous doorstop that is Tolkien’s classic was when I was ten and my dad read it to me as a bedtime story. I blame him, and these books for my obsession with fantasy and the ridiculous amount of Pinterest boards I’ve dedicated to LOTR and Hobbit fan art.  Even so, sitting down to re-read the doorstop is a commitment I’m not usually ready to make, so for a long time, the movies have kept my obsessions alive. But pandemic lock […]

Snow Dice

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

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For my first CBR Bingo read, I choose the ‘UnCannon’ card (a book not written by an old white man) and eagerly started Suzanne Collin’s Hunger Games prequel: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The book follows the final teenage years of the future President Snow’s life. Remember him? The evil villain who taunted and terrorised young Katniss Everdeen in the original Hunger Games trilogy? This book attempts to answer the question that nobody asked: what was Coriolanus Snow like as a young man? Well, for […]

Was It Really Friendship?

Mrs. Lincoln & Mrs. Keckley: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave by Jennifer Fleischner

Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave & Four Years in the White House by Elizabeth Keckley

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  While noodling on the internet one day, I came across an article about Mary Lincoln’s personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. A former slave from Maryland who’d bought her own freedom, Keckley was a master mantua-maker who got herself the coveted position of dressmaker to the president’s wife. There was a little link at the bottom of the article about Keckley’s memoir, and it was too enticing to pass up. Happily, even though it was published in 1868, my library had a copy of it! The […]

The least orange-y orange, maybe ever

Orange by Ichigo Takano

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Bingo Review 8: Orange This is a review of a book titled Orange. Actually the full title is Orange: The Complete Collection 2. In terms of genre, it’s part 2 of a manga story told in two 2-inch thick volumes. The basic story is that there’s a set of 5 high school friends who take a new student into their group to become an even 3 girls and 3 guys. They all become bestest buddies, but one day one of the girls, Naho, gets a […]



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