Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

What’s in a name?

The Swifts A Dictionary of Scoundrels by Beth Lincoln

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Cbr15bingo Dwelling, illustrations by Claire Powell This is a really fun work of kids lit (ages 8-12) that involves a murder mystery set in a very old ancestral home. Swift manor is a house full of secret passages and rooms, a place that has evolved over time along with the highly unusual Swift family. Each member of the family, at birth, is given a name chosen at random from the family Dictionary. Names seem to turn out to be strangely fitting for each member; is […]

Cute illustrations make me happy, Part 2

The Atlas of Amazing Birds by Matt Sewell

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CBR15 BINGO: Picture This, because the illustrations are the best part Last year, when I reviewed Penguins and Other Seabirds, I discovered that Matt Sewell has published other collections of his delightful bird illustrations, and I longed to get my hands on some of them. To my delight, I received The Atlas of Amazing Birds for Christmas last year. As with Penguins and Other Seabirds, Sewell’s Atlas of Amazing Birds features small snippets–a paragraph or two at most–about each species along with a beautiful watercolor illustration, […]

Nostalgia Baking but for Whom?

Baking Yesteryear by B. Dylan Hollis

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Bingo 10: Nostalgia The title Baking of Yesteryear kind of explains the fit for the Nostalgia category; this is what it sounds like, a cookbook of baking starts from each decade of the twentieth century up to the 80s. I’m guessing that the reason the 90s get left out is because that might be the decade the author was born; I could probably look that up, but why bother? Overall, this is kind of fun, but I also kind of wish there was a little […]

WHen zombies may not be just zombies and the body and soul connection is not what anyone seems to think

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

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Bingo 9: Strange Worlds Nona the Ninth takes place in an apocalyptic city but there are references to space travel and planets and other not-Earth realms (namely The River, but that might be a little spoiler-y); this novel definitely fits the strange part of Strange Worlds and by the final third or so starts to really get more into the worlds part. Nona seems to be around 12 or so, but really has maybe only existed for about 6 months, at least that’s as far […]

How we got here (to the summer of strikes)

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood by Maureen Ryan

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CBR Bingo Square: Politics I read Maureen Ryan’s piece in Variety about the hellish writers room of Lost back in the spring, an excerpt lifted from this book as advance publicity, and it did the job of making me very curious about what else she had to say about power politics in Hollywood, particularly as it pertains to people who are not in front of the camera. Ryan does also have plenty to say about how actors are treated (see her discussion of Sleepy Hollow and all that went […]

monsters and miracles in Mexico

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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CBR Bingo Square: In the Wild I do love a good retelling, and early sci-fi seems especially ripe for the revisionist takes, given how centered they are on white male protagonists, and how absent the perspectives of women and POC are. So the idea of Moreno-Garcia’s follow-up to Mexican Gothic being a retelling of The Island of Doctor Moreau was a very appealing one, especially with moving the action to the Yucatan peninsula and engaging with Mexico’s history of indigenous resistance. Carlota, the eponymous daughter, is one of […]



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