Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Nothings Need to Be Heard

Real by Carol Cujec & Peyton Goddard

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It’s not often these days that I read a book and sit with it afterwards wishing there was a way to force every person on the planet to read it, but Real is that book for me. We follow Charity Woods, a non-verbal teenager with Autism who struggles to get people to believe that she is intelligent and can hack it in a mainstream classroom. From the very first paragraph of the book,  “My name is Charity. I am thirteen years old. Actually, thirteen years […]

a perfect blast of nostalgia from the paranormal past…until the last 30 pages blows it all up

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

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A losing field hockey team is sweating themselves half to death. They are being pummeled by every other group on campus; a collection of high school teams from allover New England living the exciting existence of a pre-college summer program. They haul their broken bodies back to the dorms of the UNH campus, exhausted physically and spiritually. The goalie is DONE with this exhaustion. She wants, needs, and expects more for both herself and her beloved team. She, like many teen girls before and after, […]

a sweet and familiar coming-of-age story that sidestepped my biggest worries

Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau

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Let me start out with a BIG sigh of relief: WHEW!!!! That was a CLOSE one! In a story where a 14 year old girl is introduced to sex, drugs, and rock and roll things could have gone quickly and irreparably off the rails- especially with blurbs on the jacket comparing Mary Jane to Daisy Jones and the Six and Almost Famous! Don’t get me wrong: I loved Almost Famous as a teen, but it does not treat it’s female characters with much kindness. I found Daisy Jones to be […]

“Everyone’s just pretending they have it together, because they don’t realize everyone else is pretending to have it together. None of our dumbasses actually have it together.”

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

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The one where a buttoned up graduate student gets drunk gay married in Vegas and her life is turned upside down. This is a very good debut not completely to my tastes. Mostly it just felt overwritten in parts. There were many instances of sentences where you could just lop off the last part of it and the impact would have been much greater. And the excessive poetic repetition really got to me. I was particularly annoyed every time Grace mentioned that Yuki and/or her […]

“you girl and you boy and that’s fine with me, but what’s not fine is you selling yourself short”

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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Jonny is an open wound: raw, glistening, spilling over, and beautiful in a way that makes you unable to turn away even though you should. It’s a wound sustained from getting too drunk at a casino and crashing through a plate glass window. It glitters, it throbs, and it is going to be expensive to clean up. He invites us into his life like a tornado introduces itself to a neighborhood. We crash through, turning everything on end at a break-neck pace. Jonny is the […]

“Everything that happened next was only possible because my mother was absent. It wasn’t that she left the house much, it was that a part of her had abandoned her body and now resisted coming back.”

How to Order the Universe by María José Ferrada

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A precocious child, a beat-up Renault, traveling salesmen and the uneasy promise of ghosts populate this tiny but mighty book. M, our narrator, has struck a deal with her father. They haunt the dusty roads of Pinochet’s Chile as a sales-duo, using M’s charms to sway shop owners towards buy more nails, hammers, and other hardware than her father could sell on his own. If the person in charge focused on my pupils, instead of encountering me, he or she encountered every possible form of […]



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