Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Read this, it’s Important

I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver

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I have to admit I was a little surprised to see a Pride display at the local Barnes and Noble that still had a copy of I Wish You All The Best. Also for the record, I really dislike the use of the word “important” to designate something genuinely meaningful that everyone should seek out, but this might be one of those titles which actually deserves that term in that sense. If you can’t imagine the struggle of someone who wants to come out but […]

Rainbow Rowell may have ruined me, but I’m not mad

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera

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Last year was really the first time I read any YA books as an adult, aside from the first Harry Potter book my dad bought me for Christmas twenty years ago. Maybe I’ve just had a string of bad luck. Maybe I’m too much of a literary fiction snob (GAC) to get the same kind of enjoyment out of YA. Or maybe Rainbow Rowell, and to a lesser degree, Becky Albertalli, spoiled me for everyone else since their books resonated so deeply with me. I […]

Sometimes you can do everything right and things will still go wrong

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

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This won’t be a long review. I don’t have anything substantive to add to what’s already been written and said about Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, and I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to say anything at all. As a middle-aged, middle-class white guy from the very white Deep Midwest, I’m several degrees of separation from this book’s intended audience, but that’s exactly why it’s an important read for people like me. Starr lives in a rough neighborhood where everyone knows her because […]

And when Eleanor smiled, something broke inside of him. Something always did.

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CBR10Bingo: Home Sweet Home Growing up in Nebraska, Willa Cather was required reading. I loved loved loved My Ántonia in junior high, but I soured on her after reading O Pioneers! and hating the bummer of a preachy ending. When I first saw the Home Sweet Home square, I thought I might have to give one of her other books a try until I remembered I have a new favorite Nebraska author, thanks to CBR: Rainbow Rowell!  Eleanor & Park went right to my wishlist […]

Pobody’s nerfect?

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CBR10Bingo: Cannonballer Says I’ve tried to branch out more into other genres and new authors with my reading this year, and some of the bigger gaps in my library include YA and lesbian lit. Just my luck, then, that MrsLangdonAlger posted a review for not one but two YA coming out novels with female protagonists: Ask the Passengers by A.S. King and It’s Not Like It’s a Secret by Misa Sugiura. I’ve had an eye out for both books for a few months now, finally […]

This book wasn’t written for me, and I feel fine

Dreadnought by April Daniels

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Roger Ebert used to talk about how important emotional response was to him as a critic, often more important than the technical and artistic merits. Even the most technically and artistically exquisite film could be a hollow and unsatisfying experience if he didn’t connect emotionally, and the opposite could also be true: sometimes, without any other explanation, a seeming piece of trash could be surprisingly fun simply because it connected to something ineffable inside him. So when the whole “Brie Larson commits white genocide against […]



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