ARC – Cannonball Read 17

“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

February 6, 2025 by Pooja Leave a Comment

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 […]

“The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

January 26, 2025 by Pooja Leave a Comment

In the midst of the Peloponnesian War, more than 7000 Athenian prisoners of war are left to rot in Syracuse’s quarries – except a select few whom unemployed Syracusan potters Lampo and Gelon decide will be perfect to mount a pair of plays by the great tragic playwright Euripides. You might have to reread that premise. It’s a pretty whacky one, though some mild trawling of Wikipedia later revealed to me that allegedly some Athenian prisoners in Sicily did buy their freedom by reciting Euripides […]

For Everything There is a Season

Late Bloomer by Mazey Eddings

January 25, 2025 by Pooja Leave a Comment

Hounded by fairweather friends after winning the lottery, Opal impulsively buys a flower farm amid cottagecore visions of opening her own studio. But there is already someone living at the Thistle and Bloom – thorny farmer Pepper, who has no clue that her home has been sold out from under her, and is certainly not happy to learn about it. Firstly, take a good look at that cover. It is so pretty that I returned to it multiple times over the course of reading this […]

Oh What Tangled Webs We Weave

It Started With a Secret by Tif Marcelo

January 13, 2025 by Pooja Leave a Comment

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

January 12, 2025 by Pooja 2 Comments

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 […]

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

Mistress of Life and Death by Susan J. Eischeid

December 27, 2024 by Pooja Leave a Comment

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 […]

Help Our Mission