Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“First I’m going to have a little drinkie, and then I’m going to execute the whole bally lot of you.”

Dangerous Days in Elizabethan England by Terry Deary

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The third book in Deary’s Dangerous Days series takes a quick jaunt around the Elizabethan era, peeking behind the jewelled skirts of the Queen to see the smallpox scars and filth-encrusted streets underneath. Given what a huge influence Elizabeth’s family and upbringing would have had on her psychology, the first half of the book focuses on them from her birth on – her psychopath father declaring her a bastard and having her mother beheaded, her sickly brother dying soon into his rule, her bloodthirsty sister […]

You pick your prince, and you know what he is

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CBR10Bingo: Award Winner Although the Man Booker Prize lists have long been a reliable source for new reading material, 2009 winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel never really appealed to me. I rarely read historical fiction, assuming it will either be stuffy and stilted and old-fashioned, or fluffy and cutesy and and old-fashioned. And while I may never become a huge fan of the genre, I can at least try to keep an open mind, particularly when it comes to reading more works by women. […]

Divorced, beheaded and died; divorced, beheaded, survived

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There would appear to have been two big dangers to the health of women in the 16th century. One of them was childbirth – if you didn’t die during, it was highly likely that you would do so in the immediate aftermath, mostly thanks to puerperal fever (a uterine infection caused by, shudder, tearing and a total ignorance of hygiene on the part of Tudor midwives – and the other was marrying Henry VIII. This is the story of the six unlucky ladies to have […]



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