Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“That look was the absolute truth. I know it the way you know things sometimes, bone-deep as loneliness, right in the living room of the heart.”

Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom by Nina Varela

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As I mentioned in my review of The Carrefour Curse there are two tasks in the 2024 Read Harder Challenge that are specifically about middle grades books. Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom is my selection for task 6: read a middle grade book with an LGBTQIA main character. Right off the bat, this is a good book, in fact Nina Varela can write better than most authors I’ve come across in the past year or more. I just wish Middle Grades was an audience […]

“I have learned that sometimes the simplest things are the hardest things to say. That sometimes there is no word for what you feel, no word in any language.”

Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga

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I read Jasmine Warga’s debut My Heart and Other Black Holes in 2016, and its one of the books that has stayed with me most as it contained some of the truest descriptions of being a teenager that I have ever read. When I was hunting for a book to fulfill the Muslim Middle Grade novel task for the Reading Women challenge and came across Warga’s name I decided that Other Words for Home would be the book I read, without looking any further into […]

The kids are alright

Dress Coded by Carrie Firestone

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I finished this lovely novel and immediately downloaded it to my tween’s Kindle so she could read it, too. (She did not. I regret every time I try to make her read something and she insists on choosing her own reading material. It’s the worst.) Dress Coded opens with Molly Frost interviewing her classmate Olivia for a podcast. Olivia is currently the most hated girl in 8th grade. See, Olivia was busted for a dress code violation and in doing so, lost the entire class […]

More than I was expecting

The Okay Witch by Emma Steinkellner

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Wow.  This packed way more of a punch than I was expecting!  Moth is a 13 year-old girl growing up in a coastal town in Massachusetts.  She feels kind of out of place and doesn’t really have any friends, but she goes along with life anyway.  When learning about the witch hunts that took place in town in the late 1600’s, something strange happens to Moth.  Running home to tell her mother, she learns that she is from a family of witches! Moth wants to […]

Girl, Ghost Best Friend, and Cranky Cat Head to Edinburgh

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I read a bit of YA, but middle grades is not something I usually think to pick up, or even necessarily think of as a distinct genre. But as is often the case in my reading diet of the past few years the Read Harder Challenge had a task that needed sorting. Enter Leedock and her review of City of Ghosts – the perfect book to fulfill the “read the first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series”. Now is when I admit […]

I Wonder About Wonder

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My book club picked Wonder for this month of January and I decided to be a good book club member (for once) and actually read the book I’m supposed to, rather than the books that I want to read.  I read the entire thing in almost one sitting which means that I was avoiding something else in my life (grading and laundry, I stopped to play with some Shopkins and a certain blond 5 year old who wanted me to hang with her). I Wonder […]



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