Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

into the woods to see the troll, to meet the boy, to sell the girl, to trick the teens, to catch the murderer, to erase the memories, to exact revenge…

The Prince and the Troll by Rainbow Rowell

Hazel and Gray by Nic Stone

The Princess Game by Soman Chainani

The Cleaners by Ken Liu

The Wickeds by Gayle Forman

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Back at it again with another Amazon Original Series! My brain is totally fried with year-end nonsense, but this series has given me nice little breaks while going about my day-to-day chores and adventures. I didn’t need any convincing to give this collection a “go”; I love a good fairytale retell or folklore restructure- no one will ever come close to Angela Carter, but I certainly won’t leave them out in the cold! The Prince and the Troll 3/5 I know that YOU know this, but […]

“The door opens with a rusted jingle, and an animatronic Santa insults my moral virtue three times. Ho, ho, ho.”

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I definitely borrowed this book based solely on the presence of a short story by Rainbow Rowell, but I’ve read books by some of these other authors, too — David Levithan and Gayle Forman (Forman’s story in this was one of my favorites). And I know Holly Black’s name (The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, which I will eventually get around to reading, I promise!). Basically, if you like young adult fiction, you’ve probably read at least one of these authors. And you should probably read this, […]

I read twice as many books this year as last year…

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260 books. That’s an average of 5 books a week. I have a full-time job and two kids under the age of 5. I have no idea how I accomplished this… A lot of YA (and I read a bit more this year than I normally do — maybe that’s how I got through so many books) speaks to adults just as well as it does to teenagers. Books like Golden Boy or Lies We Tell Ourselves feel like almost any audience could connect with them. Other YA — The […]

Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

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I’m a sucker for a good YA novel. I’m an even bigger sucker for a good YA novel where there is tragic death or dismemberment or some sort of horrible disease or a dead boyfriend. I cut my teenage teeth on Cynthia Voigt. Izzy, Willy-Nilly had me convinced that if I ever got in the car with someone who had had even one beer, I’d lose my leg, too,or even worse. And I wanted If I Stay to be good. I really, really did. But […]

A YA novel about death and first love

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Sometimes, my YA reads are self-selected, and other times, students encourage me to read books that will help me enter conversations with them. Gayle Forman’s If I Stay falls into the latter category. I didn’t know if I would like the book or not, and I certainly did not plan to see the movie without reading the book first. One of my students chose this for her book report last fall and recommended it to me. So I decided it was high time I pick […]

Just a big pile of blech.

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I was fairly certain that I had already read my least favorite book of CBR7, the horrid pile of stink called Seating Arrangements. But sadly, I was wrong. This was worse. And so disappointing, as I’ve read — and mostly liked — all of Gayle Forman’s previous books. She’s a decent writer, as she proved with If I Stay, and good at developing characters that you want to know more about (proof: the companion book to If I Stay, Where I Went, and the combo […]



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