Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

It was always aliens who had built the pyramids. Nobody could conceive of any Indigenous group erecting anything more complex than a hut.

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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I loved Monstserrat (Momo) and Tristán. I think they are my favorite Silvia Moreno Garcia characters. I loved them individually and especially together. I liked, but did not love the story they were in. And it wasn’t so much the plot, because that’s great, but there were times when I was frustrated with the info dumps. I think we got bogged down in detail too many times. Monserrat and Tristán have been friends since they were children, when Monserrat saved Tristán from bullies. Momo is […]

Dead men might not tell tales, but they can fight Captain America

Captain America: The Ghost Army by Alan Gratz

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When you are tired and really have no brain power, but you want to read, what do you do? I tend to pick up what looks like an easy graphic novel or picture book. This time I picked up a what looked like an easy graphic novel. And while there was not a lot of “Deep Thoughts” to Captain America: The Ghost Army, it was not as “fluffy” as I thought. But then again, I should have realized that Alan Gratz would not write “fluffy […]

I Will Never Stop Loving Love

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

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Wow. Wow. Wow. This book is. Just. Wow. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Holocaust survivors Lale and Gita Sokolov who met and fell in love in the infamous concentration camp. “I tattooed her number on her left hand, and she tattooed her number in my heart,” Lale reminisced in an interview with author Heather Morris. While I write this review in the middle of a global pandemic, I am reminded that I am beyond lucky to be safely quarantined […]

A Different Focus for WWII

Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 by Max Hastings

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This book is on the Army Chief of Staff Reading List so I read it when it became available. I’ve read a lot of WWII both in my life and in over the last few years. As this is professional reading, I suppose the kind way to phrase it is that I am over-saturated with WWII at the moment. I was a history major in college, I’m in the military, and my father was described by John Mulaney this week on SNL – he is […]

If you wonder what the Irish were doing in World War II this might answer it….

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This is the Award Winner. The Dorothy Canfield Fisher award is a Vermont state award that the books are picked by adults (though I am not always sure why they were the pickers as one was a professor at my college who had no English or child background that I knew of) and then voted on by the kids. Of course, the year I did this award the “cool kids” pick won. But that is the perfect lead in to this book. It is 1943. […]

A story of untold heroes

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For the most part, you know what you’re getting when you read a book that takes place during World War II and is set in a location that was occupied by Germany. Even if you find a book or movie that tells an inspirational or uplifting story within that backdrop, it’s always delivered with the requisite edge of horror. How could it not? There is no story to tell from that period in human history that isn’t tainted by the atrocity. I’m not sure if […]



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