Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A really long review about two books but I think worth the read

Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang

Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi

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The graphic novels below have little in common. Or so I thought at first. While I was reading Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi I kept thinking that it would pair nicely with Ash’s Cabin by Jan Wang. I think that was because they both deal with identity, but nothing else. It was while writing this review I found more similarities.  Saving Sunshine is about twins who are punished for their behavior by being in forced proximity. Ash’s Cabin is about a nonbinary child coming of […]

To boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before!

The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush

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CBR 15 Bingo – Strange Worlds: The titular six (and I) jet off to the strange worlds of NASA and outer space in this book. It was many years after the inception of NASA and the space flight program that women were allowed to become astronauts. Though not all of these initial six women are household names today, they all worked to advance both space exploration and women’s rights in their own ways. It rather surprises me that I’m not very interested in space exploration – […]

For my young reader, at least, it was a huge success

Hidden Figures: Young Readers' Edition by Margot Lee Shetterly

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I’ve been struggling all summer to find a book to read with my 8 year old. He’s a smart kid, but he’s not really all that interested in the things I remember being into as a kid. I keep trying books I grew up on, and he’s not really been interested in any of them. That may be a maturity thing, though. I didn’t really get into reading until I was in middle school. But he loves math. At the end of last year, he […]

This isn’t too Sirius

Maple’s Theory of Fun by Kate McMillan

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I was looking at an online review site that I can easily use, and I saw this brightly done  cartoon cover.  It was as if Lizzy McGuire and Diary of a Wimpy Kid had a book. It was Maple’s Theory of Fun. At first, I thought it was going to be about a girl trying to show us how to have fun. A “how to” so to speak, but then all crap breaks loose. Well, it is about how to do that, but the girl […]

“The real villain is love: an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay. And it will forever go unpunished.”

Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

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This book was a really fun time and I liked it a lot, but I did feel there were a couple of things that didn’t fully work, so no five stars on this one. While Ali (we have met so I can call her Ali) is so good at dialogue and at characters, and character interaction, there were a couple of tropes and individual incidents that happened that made me stop reading and think to myself, really? But they didn’t hurt the overall story for […]

“Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.”

Hidden Figures by Margo Lee Shetterly

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I wanted to like this book a whole lot more than I did. It was just okay. Very informative; kind of dull. I feel like a big jerk saying I liked the movie better, but I liked the movie better. I know this is an unfair comparison because the movie takes just a portion of the information in here and dramatizes it, but it’s the best bit, and the compelling narrative and much easier to follow cast of characters just makes for better story. Yes, […]



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