Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Time to tell a tale

The Moon from Dehradun: A Story of Partition by Shirin Shamsi

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cbr14bingo Time Level 2      Picture book are interesting. If you have a fiction story, well, that can go into any format (picture book, novel, verse). But if you have a non-fiction story or based on a true story and/or event, a picture book is not always my “go to” thought for a subject.  After all, picture books are usually aimed at ages five to eight, therefore, how do you talk about the displacement of Indian and Pakistani peoples when the two peoples have […]

An emotional story of family and love

This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed

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This Way Out is beautiful, emotional, and such a great story of Amar figuring out how to reconcile being gay with being Muslim, being Bangladeshi while loving a white Englishman. This Way Out opens with Amar telling his family via WhatsApp that he’s engaged and his fiancée is a man, but then he hides from the responses from his siblings because he doesn’t actually feel ready for what their response will be. His family’s reaction is complicated and because he’s still coping with grief of […]

Perfect hijabs, perfect story

Hana’s Hundreds of Hijabs by Razeena Omar Gutta

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When you have a hobby, you know it can sometimes get out of hand, shall we say? And Hana’s hobby in Hana’s Hundreds of Hijabs is fashion! It is making hijabs sparkle and shine with the goodies she finds in her grandmother’s jewelry box and things found at her aunt’s hair salon. But things are getting out of control and are taking over nooks and crannies she did not know the family home had! When she learns about a way to share her talents, and […]

Heritage and pride

Yo Soy Muslim: A Father’s Letter to His Daughter by Mark Gonzales

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Yo Soy Muslim: A Father’s Letter to His Daughter caught my eye in an email newsletter. I was not sure I was going to like it. The cover with the young girl with large lips and larger eyes, and the father with the oddly shaped head, where awkward at first glance. But then there was the story. It may not be my favorite story, it might not become a classic, but it is a lovely story, a poem, with unique illustrations to send the message. […]

“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 […]

a #cannonbookclub favorite RETURNS!

It All Comes Back to You by Farah Naz Rishi

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Last year, during our The Future is Queer book club event, we were introduced to the sweet and complicated world of Farah Naz Rishi with her debut novel, I Hope You Get This Message. She returns next week with a decidedly different but still warmly familiar follow up: It All Comes Back to You. IHYGTM sits firmly on the edge of an apocalypse; aliens have made contact with Earth and time is quickly slipping away. It All Comes Back to You is firmly planted in another […]



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