Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“we all got thick skin, but we still gotta let people in.”

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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Jonny has to get home to the reservation he grew up on for his stepfather’s funeral. What transpires in this book is almost a near stream-of-consciousness retelling of the moments that have brought him to this moment in his life. Without a care for time or linearity, Jonny invites us into his life to show us his memories and to highlight the love he has felt for his family, his friends, and for himself. One thing you should know going in to this book is […]

The son and the rain and the appleseed

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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Jonny’s stepdad has died and he needs to get back to his hometown in time for the funeral. Only problem is that he’s short on cash. Or, as Jonny would frame it, he needs to turn some tricks real quick to get enough cash to hitch back to the rez. Joshua Whitehead is a two spirit Obji-Cree author who, like his main character in the novel, grew up on a reservation in Manitoba before making his way to the big city lights of Winnipeg. Jonny […]

READ. THIS. BOOK. (Johnny Appleseed)

Johnny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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I’m using this as my “They/She/He” square in CBR13Bingo. The thesis of this review is: read this book! I’m going to do my best to describe it to you, but Joshua Whitehead’s words are so much more beautiful than anything I can come up with.  This novel is gorgeous!  Johnny is a young, Two-Spirit teenager living on the “rez” near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. And throughout the novel, Johnny tells of his experiences with becoming. With his supportive mother and his beloved kokum (grandmother), he explores […]

A must read even if it’s not your type of book (which I assumed it wouldn’t be!)

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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This isn’t my type of book–there’s a plot, of sorts, but really the book is Jonny by way of Hunter S. Thompson, an analogy that I am forced to make because, as I noted, stream-of-consciousness/flashback-and-how-the-past-relates-to-the-future books aren’t really my jam and so I don’t know many of them. -But- For all that I never found myself fully enmeshed in this novel, I never found myself checking out either, which is more than I can say for many books that are “my” sort of reads. Whitehead […]

“you girl and you boy and that’s fine with me, but what’s not fine is you selling yourself short”

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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Jonny is an open wound: raw, glistening, spilling over, and beautiful in a way that makes you unable to turn away even though you should. It’s a wound sustained from getting too drunk at a casino and crashing through a plate glass window. It glitters, it throbs, and it is going to be expensive to clean up. He invites us into his life like a tornado introduces itself to a neighborhood. We crash through, turning everything on end at a break-neck pace. Jonny is the […]

One body holds a universe

Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead

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  Home is a feeling. That’s a line in the beautifully written Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, a Two Spirit, Oji-Cree author. But it’s also something of a manifesto for Jonny, an indigiqueer young man whose physical body carries all the love, pain and connections to land and people in his life. Like a beautiful hermit crab, he builds a shell to protect himself from homophobia, from feeling the generations of pain in his family, from loving too much. And that same shell is bedecked with […]



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