Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Life is always happening and has happened and will happen

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

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One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman? Who? You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why […]

“For four years we spied and we worked damn hard and we saved people’s lives and we made a difference and nobody cared too much that we were women. And then it all ended.”

The Three Lives of Alix St. Pierre by Natasha Lester

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Ex-OSS agent Alix St. Pierre seeks a fresh start in Paris as the PR agent for the freshly established House of Dior, but her actions and enemies from during the war continue to dog her steps. This was the oldest NetGalley ARC on my shelf, so it’s with a real sense of satisfaction that I’m crossing it off the list. And it was fun to see yet another fresh perspective on World War Two, that of a female OSS agent, and better yet to see […]

Love, Kindness, Danger

The Girl Who Sang: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope and Survival by Estelle Nadel, Bethany Strout and Sammy Savos

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“There are very few survivors left, and I want the world to know that there was a Holocaust” The Girl Who Sang: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope and Survival is a short graphic novel, but has a lot packed in. Estelle Nadel, Bethany Strout and Sammy Savos created an informative, quick story about how one girl survived during wartime, a girl who was lost and how she found her voice when all seemed to be the end of the world.  There are uncomplicated illustrations supporting […]

The real Mary Poppins

Song After Song: The Musical Life of Julie Andrews by Julie Hedlund

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Who has not watched Disney’s 1960s Mary Poppins? Or Sound of Music? And who of us did not want to sing like Julie Andrews? Well, even though it sounds like she popped out of the womb doing these kind of things, her life was anything but simple. First, her mother traveled (she was a piano player) and was away a lot. Second, her parents would divorce, and she would eventually be sent to live with her mother and stepfather in war torn London. And then […]

Emotional Historical YA

Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall

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Yup, I cried, but no one is surprised. Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken is a story of resistance and making joy during dark times, as well as family and love. It is a story that examines when safety stops being enough and it’s time to resist and push back against harmful regimes. It is also the story of a group of friends navigating their friendship and society when it’s not safe to be Jewish, it’s not safe to be queer, it’s not safe to be […]

A story needed to be (but never should have had to be) told

Between Shades of Gray: The Graphic Novel by Andrew Donkin

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Between Shades of Gray: The Graphic Novel is a wow book! Adapted by Andrew Donkin, the Ruta Sepetys novel comes to life in a graphic novel format. The story of one family shows another side of world history, and how in World War II, the Soviet Union was not just fighting Germany, but its own people as well. It might not be for everyone as there is much in the way of concepts and content that might be difficult, even for adults. A little-known piece […]



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