Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A family saga that isn’t so Black and White

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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Desiree and Stella Vignes are twin Black girls who grow up in 1940s Louisiana. They are from a very, very small town that has valued lighter skin for generations, and Desiree and Stella are very light. Wanted to escape their small town, Deisree and Stella run away from home to New Orleans to try and find their own paths in life away from what their community has decided for them. It is there that Stella decides to run away from her sister and begin passing […]

The Perks of No Longer Being a Teenager

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

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Oh, this book. I treated it like a sacred text back in high school. I gave it regular re-reads through the beginning of college, but then I let it fade into the background. It used to be my “Fall” book (despite it covering an entire school year) and while I continued to think back on fondly, I started to replace that nostalgia drip with the character-created playlists from within the book. It’s been years since I last picked it up, but Ride’s “Vapour Trail” creeps […]

You gotta do what makes you Happy

Super Powereds: Year 1 by Drew Hayes, read by Kyle McCarley

Super Powereds: Year 2 by Drew Hayes, read by Kyle McCarley

Corpies by Drew Hayes, read by Kyle McCarley

Super Powereds: Year 3 by Drew Hayes, read by Kyle McCarley

Super Powereds: Year 4 by Drew Hayes, read by Kyle McCarley

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I saw somewhere that re-reading or re-watching things we’ve enjoyed in the past is great for anxiety, because you’ve already experienced it.  You know exactly what’s going to happen.  And a pandemic is full of anxiety, so a lot of us have discovered this comfort!*     Someone on Facebook was asking for recommendations for an audiobook to listen in the car with her 13- and 15-year-old sons, so I recommended Super Powereds: Year 1 by Drew Hayes.  I remembered that the story was fantastic and […]

cbr12bingo – Fresh Start

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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I have a confession to make: I judged this book by its cover. I remember the frenzy of press around this book, the series, and the *mysterious* author. I also remember seeing the cover and being completely uninterested. It is, in my opinion, a dreadful cover. It looks like it was cobbled together to act as a prop. It looks like a poorly thought out passion project. I still think the cover is awful, but I am glad that I changed my mind around shunning […]

cbr12bingo – Yellow (and the close of a ten-part series)

Stop in the Name of Pants! by Louise Rennison

Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me? by Louise Rennison

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Well friends, we have come to the end of my re-adventures with the misadventures of Miss Georgia Nicolson! I thought, incorrectly of course, that it would be a fight to finish this series. I bought it during an “online shopping under the influence” session, and I thought that it would be a bit of a laugh down memory lane- but one that ended far short of the destination. When the ten-book set bounced onto my porch one morning, my first thought was “what have I […]

“He breathed in my face the coffee he’d just drunk, mingled with the odor of his gums.”

A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

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1970s Naples: a thirteen year old girl of privilege is suddenly removed from her seaside home and returned to a cramped and dirty apartment outside the city.  The key word here is “returned”; our heroine has been sent “home” to a place that she never knew. She spent her entire life living with her glamorous mother and policeman father, only to have that reality shattered in one afternoon when the man she knew as her father bundles her and all of her belongings into the […]



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