Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Connecting a community one sock at a time

Magnolia Wu Unfolds it All by Chanel Miller

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Magnolia Wu is almost ten. She spends a lot of time at her parent’s establishment, the Bing Qi Ling Bubbles Laundromat. Her loneliness leads to lots of creative thinking: on one wall is her bulletin board of lost socks, lone socks left behind by customers. While new friend and California transplant Iris is visiting, a customer xenophobically Karens out on Magnolia’s mom, and Magnolia nearly throws out her sock wall in a fit of anger. But Iris proposes they start the NYC Sock Detective project, […]

Miss for me, hit for you?

Where Black Stars Rise by Nadia Shammas

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CBR16SweetChallenge #Exciting (excited to read, excited to share with others becuase this needs to be read/known about) The concept of mental health and representation of a not usually talked about community had great potential. However, the execution of Where Black Stars Rise did not work for me. Things were too abstract and messy for my eyes to focus and my “reader eye” lost the flow of things. I was not always sure where I was, who was who and what was what. For the right […]

When Newcomers Come to Canada from all over the world to stay

Carry on: Poetry by Young Immigrants by Simon Boulerice

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Carry on: Poetry by Young Immigrants was a book I found on a site the store I work at uses for ordering. It might have been just a sample of the poetry, not the completed version, but either way, this book illustrated by Roge Girard is something worth looking into. Told from the point of view of young immigrants, each poem is a snapshot of thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, and observations. We see how cold is experienced for the first time. How the thought […]

A gut-punch of a book filled with the stories we rarely hear

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

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BINGO – REP (BLACKOUT) I feel that is is important at the start of this review to indicate that I am a non-Hispanic white person. Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is a recipient of DACA and a journalist (though she eschews that title, more on that later). For The Undocumented Americans Villavicencio set forth to tell the stories of the undocumented immigrants that we don’t often hear about. She purposefully does not write about DREAMers because she “didn’t want to write anything inspirational.” She wanted to […]

“Of all the myriad races of thinking creatures in the world, the two that most delight in telling stories are the flesh-and-blood humans and the long-lived, fiery jinn.”

The Hidden Palace (The Golem & The Jinni, #2) by Helene Wecker

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I’m having a hard time reviewing this one, mostly because I had a hard time deciding what I thought about it. But I’m on the verge of getting hopelessly behind in reviews again, so it’s time to buckle down and figure it out. I was thinking about the book this morning and I think I’ve finally formed some solid opinions, so here we go. This is a book about change in all its forms: death (and grief), destruction, creation, evolution, the way a person changes […]

Family

Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family? by Marisabina Russo

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I had a small roller coaster ride of thoughts and feelings about the graphic memoir, Why Is Everybody Yelling? Growing Up in My Immigrant Family? At first, I thought, “Sounds fun.” Then, “Huh, what’s going on?” And “This is slow reading.” With, “Oh, yeah digging this, getting meaty.” Along with several, “If this was fiction nobody would allow such a stereotype!” And finally, “Well that was a ride. And that afterwards was a good roundup.”   Our narrator, Cookie is “the lucky one” of her […]



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