Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

The Giver by Lois Lowry

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Cannonball Read Bingo Square: Minds I have owned a copy of The Giver for quite a while and it has sat collecting dust on our bookshelf reserved for the classics. My kiddo, on a whim, picked it up and when my 13-year-old picks up something that is a classic, I generally take that as an opportunity to revisit it. (See also, failed attempt to get him to read “A Wrinkle in Time.”) When I picked it up to reread, I soon began to wonder if […]

Dark secrets

The Giver: Graphic Novel by Lois Lowry

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#cbr11bingo #Award I have never read the novel, The Giver by Lois Lowry, but thought I knew the story. I had read the second book, Gathering Blue and read about and talked about The Giver. Plus, I figured I know the authors style as well. It is sweet and “happy edgy.” You know good things can happen, even when bad things are going on. Yet, when I read The Giver: Graphic Novel I was blown away. This is not just due to the story (I […]

Familiar and Strange

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

Messenger by Lois Lowry

Son by Lois Lowry

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I was 11 when The Giver was published, and I remember my 7th grade English teacher, the next year, reading it aloud to my class. It was my first exposure to dystopian fiction and I ate it up. Everyone in my class had their own copy so we could follow along, and within a few years my copy was completely dog-eared and tattered, as I read and reread. At some point, having moved on to more sophisticated dystopias as I got older, it ended up […]

A Child’s Introduction to Pure Evil

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

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I live two blocks away from a stellar children’s book store. It’s a habit of mine to visit several times a month. I enjoy keeping tabs on what the kids are reading these days (graphic novels) and which titles have staying power. The pale blue cover of Number the Stars is always on display in the middle reader section. The fact that Lois Lowry, an author born in 1937, still has books occupying prime shelf space is an amazing feat—but not surprising to me, given […]

“There could be love.”

The Giver (Graphic Novel) by Lowry, Lois; Russell, P. Craig

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I read The Giver for my sixth grade language arts class.  Sixth grade is apparently the year that our school decided we were ready to be ruined by literature. Between this, Bridge to Terebithia, and Where the Red Fern Grows, I don’t know how I had the will to read anymore. I guess that’s the amazing thing about well-written literature. It rips your heart in two and yet you keep going back for more! If you are one of the few people who haven’t visited this […]

He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

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Less – 3/5 Stars This is the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize this year, and I do like it. But it’s almost like Andrew Sean Greer tricked or taunted the Pulitizer Committee into giving him the prize since this is a novel about a slightly failed or at least merely moderately successful writer putzing around while others around him remind him of his own mediocrity or middlingness but doing things like winning the Pulitzer Prize. The novel begins with Less, the eponymous protagonist, being […]



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