Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

From a Hawk Tuah Boy Again

The Change by K. A. Applegate

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How many Hawk Tuah jokes do I get to make for this reading challenge? Anyway, Book 13 of the Animorphs is narrated by Tobias, our boy who accidentally stayed in his hawk morph too long, and is now permanently stuck in a hawk’s body. It has its ups and downs, and lately he’s really been missing his human form, and feeling like he is a useless member of the Animorphs because he can’t morph. He meets a pair of Hork-Bajir, dinosaur-like aliens who make up […]

Childhood Nostalgia / American Propaganda

The Kachina Doll Mystery by Carolyn Keene

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

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I devoured both the Nancy Drew and Little House books when I was in elementary school, so it feels a little odd to read them in such close succession now. I still enjoy them, but I’ve rather lost the cuddly feeling since then. It’s more obvious to adult me that the books were written in the expectation of reaching a certain sort of child, and that child did not look like me. The Kachina Doll Mystery – 3 stars When Nancy Drew is summoned to […]

To help create a more empathetic society, this should be mandatory reading for middle grade readers (and everyone else, honestly)

Melissa by Alex Gino

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CBR15 Bingo: Bodies, Bodies – When Melissa was born everyone assumed she was a boy because of her body. Melissa is a girl but no one else knows she is, as it was assumed at birth she was a boy.  As a result, she was given the name of George.  Melissa is her secret name, admitted only to herself.  We are introduced to Melissa while her 4th grade classroom is reading Charlotte’s Web.  Melissa is moved to tears when Charlotte dies and the boys in […]

The Schoolhouse Blizzard

Maddy and the Monstrous Storm by Julie Gilbert

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Maddy  is new to the prairie, but when she and her classmates are trapped in their schoolhouse by a ferocious blizzard, she must lead them all to safety. I’d first heard of the Schoolhouse Blizzard a year or two ago, when I read Melanie Benjamin’s The Children’s Blizzard, which similarly followed a schoolteacher and a group of schoolchildren who were trapped by the snow and had to fight to survive. This book covers the same topic and themes, but in a way that is more accessible […]

“A tender, lovingly crafted book about growth, longing, grief, and renewal that I want to read over and over again” (quote from Carey Pietsch)

The Tea Dragon Tapestry by K. O'Neill

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Never has a blurb on a cover so encapsulated my feelings about a book but Carey Pietsch, artist for The Adventure Zone books, has summed up The Tea Dragon Tapestry so succinctly that everything you need to know about it is right there.  If you’ve read the previous two Tea Dragon books you must read this lovely conclusion to the trilogy.  If you’ve never heard about tea dragons and the quote intrigues you, here are my reviews for the first two books, The Tea Dragon Society and The […]

Life has thrown a lot at me recently, so here are all the reviews I forgot to write!

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The Miraculous by Jess Redman

The Tea Dragon Festival by K. O'Neill

An Exchange of Gifts by Anne McCaffrey

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

The Sandman: Act I by Neil Gaiman

The Princess Spy by Larry Loftis

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The Bear and the Nightingale By Katherine Arden (Warning – the review of this book contains f-bombs!) I know this was supposed to be based on a fairy tale, and some parts seemed very fairy tale-like (especially the story the nanny told toward the beginning with the girls in the snow) but I did not correlate them to any story I already knew.  I appreciated the involvement of the Russian household spirits, and how the village did quite well combining their religion and their culture […]



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