Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Feeling lost after loss

The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass

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When you’ve been a children’s librarian for years, it is easy to get burnt out on the material. For me, that also meant I got cocky. Can any kids book really hook me anymore as a bitter adult who has READ IT ALL? Are there any GOOD STORIES LEFT? Yes, of course, to both of those things. THE LOST LIBRARY by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass proved just that. The last day of fifth grade is approaching, and Evan is pretty nervous about moving up […]

Lightning Round

Tonguebreaker by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Batman Earth One, Vol. 3 by Geoff Johns

Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer

Antartica: Journeys to the South Pole by Walter Dean Myers

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

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A few reviews of shorter books that I read quickly over the weekend and didn’t have extra time to flesh out… Tonguebreaker ***** Coming to terms with a society that doesn’t want you based on your body…and creating your own space instead…has to be a challenging thing. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha bares her soul to the world in this collection of poems and one-act plays. Her use of language to lecture gripped me and her exploration of what it means to live in this world, to […]

Then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore.

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When You Reach Me won the Newbery Medal in 2010, and it kind of let me wondering if 2009 was just a bad year for published children’s novels. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine novel but I don’t think it holds up the way other Newbery winners have in the past. It is very strong on the nostalgia factor though, which makes me wonder if that is one of the reasons it won. Nostalgia for the Medal awarders obviously, not the children who read […]

“People don’t want to think about it.’ ‘I can see why,’ I said. ‘It makes my head hurt.’”

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I downloaded this after reading Ellesfena’s review, and enjoyed it immensely. It’s an odd little book, but comes together beautifully at the end. I literally got goosebumps at the big reveal, when everything finally made sense. “I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you’re gone and there’s no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that […]

Everything in its Right Place

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Miranda is a sixth-grader, living in New York City. Her best friend is a neighbor boy named Sal, and they spend almost all their time together. When the book opens, Miranda and Sal are starting to part ways for reasons that she doesn’t fully understand. Her mother is auditioning for a game show, and there’s a crazy homeless guy on her corner that scares her. Suddenly she starts getting anonymous notes from someone who seems to know things about her that shouldn’t be possible. This […]

Homage to Madeleine L’Engle

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The new school year has just bgun for my two middle schoolers, and this novel by Rebecca Stead is just the sort of thing you would want to put into the hands of kids that age. Stead’s 2010 Newberry winner is an homage to Madeleine L’Engle and her classic novel A Wrinkle in Time. As in that novel, our heroine, 12-year-old Miranda, finds herself grappling with the concept of time travel, but unlike Meg Murry, she will not be the traveller. Earthbound Miranda has to […]



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