Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Hair is not just a decoration

My Powerful Hair by Carole Lindstrom

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My Powerful Hair is a lovely story. Granted, I was looking for a more factual and less poetic story abut the meaning and importance of what the title meant, but it turned out just fine. All that information is given as a young child talks about how growing her hair out and why it is short to start with, is important to not just her, but her family and culture of her people. The culture of this child and her people unfold onto the pages […]

I promise there is pudding under the whipped cream (I needed a snack break)

Trickster: Native American Tales, A Graphic Collection by Matt Dembicki,

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I would like to compare the newer edition (2021) of Trickster: Native American Tales, A Graphic Collection to the one I read (2010) as some of the text used does not reflect modern expressions or what is considered politically correct. However, the afterwards of the editor Matt Dembicki, shows the process of working with the authors, storytellers and artists and the care taken to represent the people. This is a good book to teach how cultures express themselves (language flow fits cultural influences), plus how […]

The Last Days of the Free Comanche

Ride the Wind by Lucia St. Clair Robson

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Captured in a raid, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker is adopted by a Comanche couple and becomes integrated into the tribe, given the name Naduah, and eventually grows up to marry a Comanche chief. I love long lush historical fiction, especially older ones that lean more heavily into sprawling plots than most modern books. Ride the Wind delivered on all these fronts, and told a fascinating true story to boot. I enjoyed the style of writing, which was somewhat purple at times but created a vivid sense of […]

Finding Home

Yossel’s Journey by Kathryn Lasky

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Yossel’s Journey seems like, at first blush, that it will be a typical Jewish family immigrates to America. And while the characters of Kathryn Lasky’s latest picture book (due in September 2022), leave Russia due to the pogroms of the 1880s, and stop for a spell in New York where things are familiar (houses brush up against each other, you can smell the food your neighbors are cooking), they do not stay. They travel by wagon to the Southwest where they run a trading store, […]

Burn, Baby, Burn

Tales of Burning Love by Louise Erdrich

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Once upon a time, I signed up for my first CBR. I had a lofty plan of reading all of Louise Erdrich’s books in order. Why did I feel like I needed a theme? Who knows. All I know is that I fell down on book one, and it took me until last year to get back up. My recollection was that I was reading Tales of Burning Love at the time, and my stumble was going back to the beginning of her bibliography. I […]

“The thing to keep in mind is that laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power.”

Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog

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Like many, my formal education didn’t contain much indigenous history, and certainly almost none about modern indigenous history. Reading Women task 8 was read a memoir by an Indigenous, First Nations, Native, or Aboriginal Woman which helped move Lakota Woman up my TBR (I had added it in 2015 for a similar Read Harder task but I read Rabbit-Proof Fence instead). It certainly didn’t hurt that it was also the Indigenous Reading Circle’s choice for November (the group that inspired the Reading Women task). Lakota […]



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