Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Just a wholesome good time. And chickens.

Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake

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Skunk and Badger By Amy Timberlake   This was the book I chose as a “read aloud book club” for summer reading. I advertised it as a nice way to chill out, maybe with the family, and basically listen to a live audiobook via Zoom.  I basically had one family, with some of their friends popping in for a bit of the second session.  I picked it first for the length, because I could read the whole thing in a few sessions.  Then the theme […]

Kind of scary if you think too much about it

Life Ever After by Carla Grauls

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Life Ever After By Carla Grauls   I picked this up for free at some point as an Audible Original, and I thought it would work for the Machinery Bingo square.  It’s short, less than 2 hours, and I wanted to “get it over with” to move on to other things.  At first, I thought it was all going to be some spoken word commentary on society or something like that.  The opening does feel very spoken word.  But then we move into the main […]

How others see you and how you see yourself can be very different

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

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Stargirl Jerry Spinelli   I didn’t read Jerry Spinielli growing up, which I guess might seem odd because he was writing books for my age group.  I read one of his middle grade books a few years ago, but this was the first one aimed at teens.  I’d heard about it, and there’s a movie now, so I figured I would give it a shot.   I’m not sure when this book is supposed to take place.  We know where, the fictional town of Mica, […]

Worth the hype!

The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen

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The Magic Fish By Trung Le Nguyen   I knew this book had won awards going in, but I wasn’t really sure what to expect.  Whatever awards this got, it most definitely deserved!   Going in, I knew that it was about a Vietnamese boy, Tíển, struggling to find the words to come out to his parents, while bonding with them over fairy tales.  But it is so much more than that.  It is a story about family and immigration and survival.  It’s about acceptance […]

Classic Book + Angsty Teen = Not Worth It

The "Wonderful" Wizard of Futher-Mucking Oz by Matt Youngmark

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The “Wonderful” Wizard of Futher-Mucking Oz By Matt Youngmark   I’ve had this in my TBR Amazon cart for a while, and lo and behold, on Prime Day it was on sale!  Used, but that’s ok.  (Even more ok – it’s signed by the author!)   This is not the most original of books.  A foul-mouthed teenager gets transported into a book and must play out the story in order to escape it and theoretically go home.  Our foul-mouthed teenager is Arabella Grimsbro, our book […]

Tech-free? Either a nightmare or a dream!

Unplugged by Gordon Korman

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Unplugged By Gordon Korman   Not gonna lie, I picked this up because there was a cute little lizard on the cover holding a power cord in its mouth.   Jett Baranov is the son of the emperor of the technological world.  Well, not really.  But his father owns a technology company that’s bigger than Google and Apple combined.  His mother works as a famous orthodontist for Orthodontists Without Borders and is often out of the country.  With a mostly absent mother, a work-obsessed father, […]



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