Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Don’t Stop Me Now (I Want) Somebody To Love, and you’re it Freddie

Freddie & Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody by Mike Dawson

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Do have a band that just followed you throughout your life? Did you eat, sleep and breath that band? Did you also tease your little sister merciless about her “boy bands” and their breakups? Well Mike does in Freddie & Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody. The story Mike Dawson tells us is how the band, Queen and mostly Freddie Mercury, made an impact on his life. It colored almost every big moment of his life (from the first time he heard them, from the time […]

Sweet but not sickly so

Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuire

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Beneath the Sugar Sky is the third instalment in the Wayward Children series from Seanan McGuire, letting us visit other worlds in this incredibly diverse and imagination universe. Children have long disappeared through doorways and tumbled down holes in the ground and into adventure, and sometimes those children come back. Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children gives those children a place where they can be themselves, away from prying eyes and worried parents who’d prefer their children were just their old selves again.  In this […]

Small poetry book; big punch

Crown Nobel by Bianca Phipps

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Maybe Crown Nobel was too short. Or maybe I was not the right reader for Bianca Phipps’ poetry collection. As there was something about this that was off for me. I knew what they were saying, but sometimes I was not sure what the theme of the poem was. It felt at times that the language was abstract. Or there were pieces missing in the story. However, it was an experience that I am glad I took. Phipps deals with serious subjects. But despite those […]

Dad was a fungi…

What Goes Up by Christine Hepperman

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What Goes Up by Christine Hepperman is about the why and how a night that was one huge mistake came about. It is written in a prose poetry format. I will leave it up to you if you think the actions of the narrator fit the “crime” that started it all. (This is not a Mystery Book, but the narrator does treat the events that she learns of to justify her own actions as if “two wrongs make a right”). Our main character shows you […]

What the flying monkeys did I just read?

Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

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There no traditional action in Big Girl, Small Town. Yet, you are drawn into the book from page one. Michelle Gallen made me fall in love with a fictional character. She made me see myself in her. She made me want to root for this character who (on the surface) is not an overly likable person. Or at least, not at first. You watch as Majella (our heroine) live her life. Or what passes for living in a Northern Ireland town after “The Troubles” have […]

“It is very important to approach all unpleasant tasks in life as a performance art piece, especially if you are a teenager.”

Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country & Other Stories by Chavisa Woods

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Goth or not, country or not, if you have ever been a teenager then SOMETHING in this collection of stories will speak to you. Maybe you’ve never befriended a drug addict squatting in a mausoleum, and maybe you’ve never had a bad trip at a MENSA party hosted by your girlfriend’s parents, but there are definitely some teenage feelings rolling dark and deep in all of us! Chavis Woods has labeled and celebrated that feeling of “something more”; most notably in the titular story, “Things […]



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