Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Old friendships and older bones

Madame Badobedah and the Old Bones by Sophie Dahl

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Madame Badobedah and the Old Bones has great potential to be your child’s favorite story. The feel is as if Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking met My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. Sophie Dahl made a clever and interestingly classical feeling book. The story is sweet and funny as we follow a young girl who lives with her parents in the hotel they run, and is  friends with an elderly lady, Madame Boadobedah, who also lives there. The girl, Mable, is narrating […]

Move over Tiny Rex! The Big Predators are in town!

Mega-Predators of the Past by Melissa Stewart

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“Dinosaurs? What is that? Something you put ointment on?” You will say after reading, Mega-Predators of the Past. Those (as the book says, but honestly, I agree with) scene stealing dinosaurs are nothing compared to the real predators of history. From the smallest (great scorpions and griffenflies (a really large dragonfly-like being) at 28 inches) to the largest (the over 100-foot blue whale) you will see the great creatures. Melissa Stewart gives us as it was. Or, in the case of the blue whale, how […]

One for Next Year

The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher

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The Christmasaurus is exactly what you expect from a Christmas story about a dinosaur who is blue, one of the kind, and lives at the North Pole. I mean I have seen candy canes less sweetly sugary than this Tom Fletcher story! That does not make it a bad book, just predictable for the adult reader. Christmasaurus wants to fly. Of course, the lessons (one a year for almost four years) do not seem to stick. But one Christmas Eve Santa came to say, Christmasaurus […]

She found dinosaurs in her backyard

A Dinosaur Named Ruth: How Ruth Mason Discovered Fossils in Her Own Backyard by Julia Lyon

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I do not know if I would call a dinosaur Ruth, but since Ruth Mason discovered so many of them, I guess one named Ruth is not so bad. And in A Dinosaur Named Ruth: How Ruth Mason Discovered Fossils in Her Own Backyard we see how she found so many goodies that would make up Ruth and many many more dinosaurs. It was 1905 and a girl named Ruth found strange rocks on her family’s land. Over the years, she keeps finding more, but […]

Nothing will tricera-top this pun.

The Dinosaur Expert by Margaret McNamara

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The Dinosaur Expert is a nice girl power book dealing with a subject that girls are not usually associated with when it comes to the sciences: Dinosaurs. The only real issue I have with Margaret McNamara’s picture book is the cliché it is a boy that tells our heroine, Kimmy, “girls can’t be scientists.” I think just once, I want the surprise of another girl saying this. Just to mix things up. Part of the Mr. Tiffin’s Classroom series, this book deals with the science […]

They say it with love

How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah? by Jane Yolen

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The illustrations of the cover tell you that this is another Jane Yolen and Mark Teague collaboration. And the cute lovely dinosaur on said cover shows you it is part of their How Do Dinosaurs…? series. The title tells you that this is How Do Dinosaurs Say Happy Chanukah? The format is familiar: the narrator asks does the dinosaur do X? (Something naughty or mischievous). And then you see what you should be doing to celebrate the holiday. The board book format makes it perfect […]



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