Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Historical middle grade with unions!

The Pecan Sheller by Lupe Ruiz-Flores

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The Pecan Sheller is set during the late 1930s and follows Petra, a thirteen-year-old girl who has to leave school and get a job shelling pecans after her father’s death in order to help her Amá pay the bills and take care of Petra’s younger siblings. While working in the pecan factory, Petra makes new friends, but also is confronted with terrible working conditions and seeing many people get tuberculosis and die. When one of her new friends dies and the factory owners want to […]

“She was a nice girl from a good family.”

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid

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As Head Overseer of the woman’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maria Mandl was the highest-ranked female perpetrator of the Holocaust. In this book, author Eischeid examines how she came to reach this position, and more broadly the role of women in the Nazi killing machine. The architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust that most people are familiar with are male, but female Nazi party members played a major role in running the concentration camps too. Though the vast majority of them managed to slip back into […]

It’s Hard to Think with the Bullets Flying

Protecting the Amish Child by Dana R. Lynn

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When Francesca discovers a dead body and an autistic Amish boy in her front yard, she turns to her late husband’s friend Tanner, an FBI agent, to find out what’s going on and keep them both safe. I discovered later that this is the latest book in a long series of Amish romantic suspense novels centered in the same region, but my lack of familiarity with prior books wasn’t an issue – this works well as a standalone. I enjoyed what we saw of Fran […]

Any Fake Date in A Storm

My Vampire Plus-One by Jenna Levine

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When Amelia impulsively claims to have a boyfriend, it’s only to get her nagging family off her back. But when they demand she produce him for a cousin’s upcoming wedding festivities, Amelia enlists the strange but charming Reggie as a fake date, quite unaware that he is in fact a vampire. This is the second book in the My Vampires series, in which vampires with a confused understanding of humanity and modern times meet classic romcom female leads, which much humor ensuing. While the first […]

Don’t say what the heck at me as if what I said is so absurd, Seth. Yesterday you told me vampires exist. I watched your face grow fifty extra bones and a thousand more teeth.

How to Help a Hungry Werewolf by Charlotte Stein

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Charlotte Stein’s How to Help a Hungry Werewolf is one of the horniest books I have ever read. It is incredibly innocent and filthy at the same time. I laughed and I blushed. I also felt like this book was written just for me, which has made it very difficult to review. Cassie Camberwell doesn’t know she’s a witch until she inherits her grandmother’s house, meets her ex-best friend again, finds a notebook with recipes and brews up a potion. And it turns out that […]

Out of the Mouths of Nursemaids and Travelers

The Watkins Book of English Folktales by Neil Philip

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England has a great culture of letters, but when it comes to folklore, people often don’t think further than Jack and the Beanstalk. In this collection of English folktales though, we can see that the isles have a great tradition of oral storytelling beyond it. In my ongoing pursuit of folklore from around the world, I never really stopped to consider English folktales until this book reminded me that my knowledge of it was in fact pretty scanty. Over the course of about 400 pages, […]



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