Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Fans of Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles will also enjoy this new novel

The Kingdom by Jess Rothenberg

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The Kingdom is an amusement park far in the future.  It is a complete fantasy land, and can make any dream come true.  (It’s Disney on steroids.) To help with that, there are Fantasists, who are half human, half android hybrids.  There are seven ‘princesses,’ and they have been developed to be perfect. They are designed to learn and grow, and of course things start to go wrong.   The girls have strict rules and schedules, for their safety, they’re told.  They cannot access the internet […]

One of my top recommendations right now!

Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly

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This is a Cinderella retelling focusing on one of the ugly stepsisters.  There is magic in this story, but also a lot of realism. We start with Isabelle, the younger of the stepsisters, getting ready to reluctantly cut off her toes to fit into the glass slipper.  Her older sister, Octavia, has already cut off her heel and was caught out, so now it’s Isabelle’s turn to try to secure their future. As expected, it doesn’t turn out well. The tale of Cinderella has a […]

No Human Being is Illegal

Illegal by Eoin Colfer

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“You, who are so-called illegal aliens, must know that no human being is illegal.  That is a contradiction in terms.  Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal?  How can a human being be illegal?”  Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor So starts this graphic novel geared toward tween/teen readers (I would suggest ages 10 and over).  As a lawyer formerly working in immigration defense, and in light of the […]

Officially the weirdest book i have read in the past 8 years.

The Obsoletes by Simion Mills

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CBR11 Bingo — Youths! Until last week, I always thought that the weirdest book I would read during the Cannonball Read era would be Grasshopper Jungle. What could be stranger than a gigantic praying mantis army that wipes out civilization while a few teens figure out the truths about their sexuality in an underground bunker while dancing to the Rolling Stones? Well, I’m here to tell you that I found something stranger. This book is much, much weirder. Darryl and Kanga are twin brothers who live […]

Youths

Confessions of an average boy by Mark Hill

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Pretty sure I bought this due to enjoying Hill’s work on Cracked but I’m hard pressed to remember which articles inspired adding this to the “I’ll buy you when I have money” Amazon black hole, in part because it stayed there a LONG time.  And at first I was really wondering what the heck I was thinking.  Not to be that guy, but it’s self published and that alone made me skeptical. The actual story doesn’t invite too much promise either. Our protagonist is kind […]

That’s how it goes though. The drug dealers in my neighborhood aren’t struggling. Everybody else is.

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

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CBR 11 Bingo – Youths This is the second novel by Angie Thomas, the author of The Hate U Give. I have to imagine even if she keeps writing and publishing novels, it’ll be awhile before she outpaces the magnitude of that first novel. The thing is, I think this one is better for a few reasons. That’s not to say I really had much criticism for the first novel, only that this one is more fully realized and I would argue is more clearly […]



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