Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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About Pooja

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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:

Dorothy Dingle: the Perfect Mother

The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman by Gennifer Choldenko

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After his mother has been gone for a week, eleven-year-old Hank and his toddler sister Boo are forced to seek out the stranger listed as their emergency contact. But with Lou Ann’s help comes social workers and a new school, and Hank worries he might have made a huge mistake. I don’t read much middle grade nowadays, but I was intrigued by this book because I haven’t read any middle grade book dealing with foster care and parentification before. The author’s note about her own […]

A History of Royal Intermarriage and its Consequences

Royal Inbreeding and Other Maladies by Juliana Cummings

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Royalty was supposed to rule by divine right and meant to preserve their bloodline, but in their zeal to do so lay the seeds of the madness and maladies that plagued many royal houses. It’s always fun to read about mad royals. Removed by time and societal changes, they don’t feel real enough to be sorry for, and so you can fully indulge in ogling at the bizarre stories without shame. And with unlimited money and power at their disposal, there’s a lot of bizarre […]

RIP Celestin you would have loved r/Brochet

Bitter Promise by Ila Dell Youngblood

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Though Micaela falls in love with pirate’s son Dominique, she agrees to marry Celestin, the man she’s been betrothed to since she was a child. I went into this book expecting a historical romance – I was not aware that the Baroness Pontalba was a real person with a lengthy Wikipedia entry, and so that the story does not necessarily have a happy ending. In that light the way this book is written, with plenty of emphasis on the more mundane up ands downs of […]

“Was there no hope? the tigress seemed to be asking her. Will I always remain here? Will I never return home?”

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

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When Lucrezia, the third daughter of the Duke of Florence, is wed to Alfonso d’Este, she’s not sure what to expect – but whatever it was, it was certainly not that he was going to want her dead before they’d been married a year. I haven’t read Maggie O’Farrell’s work before, but she’s been on my radar after the success of Hamnet, and so when I saw The Marriage Portrait offered as a ‘lucky day’ loan from my library, I snapped it up. Hurrah for […]

An Adulterous Fiction in King Henry’s Court

The Tudors in Love: Passion and Politics in the Age of England's Most Famous Dynasty by Sarah Gristwood

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The various romantic travails of the Tudor dynasty have been well-covered in dramatic novels and shows in the centuries since they lived and died, but they too may have been influenced by earlier literature and tradition, specifically the idea of courtly love. In a market flooded with books concerning Tudor marriages, it’s hard for new releases to stand above the crowd. The Tudors in Love tries to carve its niche with the theme of courtly love, that fashionable alleged holdover from Arthurian times, and how […]

The Story at All Costs

Off the Air by Christina Estes

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When controversial talk show host Larry Lemmon dies under mysterious circumstances, local reporter Jolene pursues the story – and gets in over her head in the case itself. At some point, like most people who enjoy writing, I considered journalism as a career path, though I quickly realized I was nowhere near as persistent and unafraid of failure as the job requires. This book, written by a long-time reporter, only reinforced this. The mystery interested me off the bat – the poisoning of far-right radio […]



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