Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Ardent reader of pretty much anything, including the backs of shampoo bottles. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: Pooja's Quick Questions interview.)

Pooja's Reviews:

“Before you sentence the guilty, at least listen through to the end of the story.”

Memoirs of a French Courtesan: Volume 1: Rebellion by Celeste Mogador, Kristen Hall-Geisler (translator)

Memoirs of a French Courtesan: Volume 2: Spectacle by Celeste Mogador, Kristen Hall-Geisler (translator)

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Memoirs of a French Courtesan: Volume 1: Rebellion – 4 stars Before she was the famed courtesan Mogador, Céleste was a young girl with a troubled childhood running with her mother from an abusive stepfather. Sex workers were an integral part of Paris’s bohemian society in the 19th century, but one of the first of them to put her own story down for herself was Céleste Mogador. Having heard plenty on the subject in operas and Les Mis, I was interested in hearing one of […]

Oh What Tangled Webs We Weave

It Started With a Secret by Tif Marcelo

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When Jared goes to the town of Peak in search of answers about his father’s family, the last thing he expects is to spend a night with Matilda, the prickly manager of their B&B. There is a lot of story packed into this fairly short book – Reconnecting with your roots! Family drama! Age gap! Forbidden workplace romance! – but author Marcelo does a decent job of giving all of it plenty of page time, even if it means some of them are a bit […]

The World Gone Mad

Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor by Steve Kemper

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The attack on Pearl Harbor was shocking and unexpected to the American public and government, but for Joseph C Grew, the American ambassador to Japan, it was the only logical outcome to a decade’s worth of missed opportunities for peace. For all the many times we rehashed World War Two in school, I never learned much about what led Japan to side with the Axis, and why they seemingly so suddenly launched into war with the United States – Pearl Harbor always arrived as a […]

It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn

The Legacy of Arniston House by T.L. Huchu

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After defecting to English magic (and higher pay), ghost-talker Ropa is ready to pack up her grandmother and leave Edinburgh behind entirely. But as tensions mount in the city and a mysterious enemy becomes more visible, Ropa’s grandmother is murdered – and Ropa is considered the primary suspect. In the fourth book of the Edinburgh Nights series, author Huchu really begins to weave together the broader conflict brewing in the world of Scottish magic and Ropa’s personal journey, bringing to fruition many of the things […]

“She was a nice girl from a good family.”

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid

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As Head Overseer of the woman’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Maria Mandl was the highest-ranked female perpetrator of the Holocaust. In this book, author Eischeid examines how she came to reach this position, and more broadly the role of women in the Nazi killing machine. The architects and perpetrators of the Holocaust that most people are familiar with are male, but female Nazi party members played a major role in running the concentration camps too. Though the vast majority of them managed to slip back into […]

It’s Hard to Think with the Bullets Flying

Protecting the Amish Child by Dana R. Lynn

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When Francesca discovers a dead body and an autistic Amish boy in her front yard, she turns to her late husband’s friend Tanner, an FBI agent, to find out what’s going on and keep them both safe. I discovered later that this is the latest book in a long series of Amish romantic suspense novels centered in the same region, but my lack of familiarity with prior books wasn’t an issue – this works well as a standalone. I enjoyed what we saw of Fran […]



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