Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

I guess I just don’t get the “narrative in verse” sensibility.

SHOUT by Laurie Halse Anderson

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This three (and a half) star rating is entirely personal preference. I just would prefer that this book was in prose instead of verse. I would nearly always prefer a work be in verse if it is possible. Obviously if your aim is to write poems, individually crafted ones with like, a poetic aim or whatever (I have no idea why poets do what they do) that’s not gonna work. But here, this is a memoir, and while there were several “poems” that worked as […]

Boogie fever, I think it’s going around

How Do You Dance? by Thyra Heder

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How Do You Dance? is a modern story about how everyone has their own way of dancing. Some people are graceful, others not so much. Some dance in groups and others alone. But no matter how you dance, just getting out and dancing is the thing to do! Thyra Heder created a clever way to get a child reading as well as a’ movin’ and a’ groovin’! Heder’s book is just a happy book. It is a bout being you and having fun. Along the […]

One of the top most 100 banned books of the decade! (2013)

What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones

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CBR11Bingo – Banned Books Sophie has two lives – the one her mother knows, and the one Sophie hides. The one Mother knows is the sad one. The miserable home life Sophie spends as the only child of two people who hate each other. Her mother is deeply depressed, spending more time with General Hospital than with the family. Her father is cold and distant, unless he and mom are screaming at each other. But in her other life, the one her mother doesn’t need […]

“We should teach our girls that snapping is ok, instead of waiting for someone else to break them.”

Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

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I only learned that Laurie Halse Anderson wrote her modern classic and much challenged novel Speak in response to her own rape as a young teen. But where Melinda came to art to find her voice, Anderson came to writing. Anderson writes in verse that runs the gambit of emotion and holds no punches.  It is a memoir of her full life, opening with a reflection on her father, whose severe PTSD sets the tone for her complicated home (later reflected in her YA fiction The […]

Accessible, exciting historical fiction for the tween set

Lifeboat 12 by Susan Hood

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Almost accidentally, author Susan Hood stumbled upon a historical event that has gone mostly overlooked and it is the basis of her exciting middle grade novel Lifeboat 12.  The book is told in verse format by narrator and actual survivor Ken Sparks, who is thirteen years of age right before London is destroyed in the Blitz. His life in London is troubled by things large in scope (like running to bomb shelters nightly when the alarms go off and living off rations and hand-me-downs) and […]



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