Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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:

The Past Is a Different Country

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris

American Monsters by Adam Jortner

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CBR17 Bingo: Favorite – Both books are history books about fairly specialized, off beat topics – my favorite kind. The World of the Shining Prince by Ivan Morris – 5 stars For about a century about a millennium ago, a strange era flourished in Japan where a series of boy emperors were ruled by their in-laws (who were also their grandparents, cousins, and aunts), beauty was virtue, and the failure to catch the vaguest conversational allusion to a poem spelled social ruin. This book is […]

“This is how it works, with people who wield abuse like a knife and convince us they’re cutting us with love.”

The Ones We Burn by Rebecca Mix

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CBR17 Bingo: O – The title starts with O. When Ranka is sent south to fulfill a treaty between humans and witches by wedding the crown prince, she goes only so that she can try to bring the system down from the inside. But as she gets to know Galen and his twin sister, the brilliant and beautiful Princess Aramis, she begins to realize that the truth about the conflict between their people may be different than what she’s always believed. What I really enjoyed […]

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly

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CBR17 Bingo: Rec’d – I picked up this book after a recommendation by the true crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, which used this book as a source for its series on the Black Death. The impact of the Black Death upon medieval Europe was astounding in its scale, but the effects it had on an individual level can get buried under the sheer number of the dead. In this book, author Kelly skillfully excavates them. The Black Death is one of those things […]

It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.

Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge

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CBR17 Bingo: School – Literacy is considered dangerous in this world, but Mosca wants to keep learning what she can, which is why she goes with Eponymous Clent and searches out the secret school. Real life provides her a different kind of schooling. Armed with just her ability to read and her murderous pet goose, twelve-year-old Mosca Mye hitches her fortune to that of the smooth-talking conman Eponymous Clent and gets herself tangled up in an adventure that could change the world she lives it, […]

“The Caravan of life is moving by, Quick! to your places in the passing show.”

Caravan by Dorothy Gilman

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CBR17 Bingo: Culture – Caressa encounters and immerses herself in multiple cultures during her wanderings through the Sahara, including the Tuareg and the Hausa. By the age of sixteen Caressa has been a carnie, a Boston schoolgirl, and the wife of an anthropologist – but in her years in the Sahara desert, she will go on to become a widow, a sorceress, a slave, and much more. The trouble with this book is that the description is rather misleading. There’s a little magic, and a […]

“For I was indeed a student of human nature, as every orphan and hooker and unwanted kid must be.”

Vera by Carol Edgarian

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CBR 17 Bingo: Family – Central to Vera’s story is a desire for a family in which she can truly belong, and her outside status with both her birth mother and her foster family. Vera has always lived under the shadow of a great secret – though raised as the younger daughter in a Swedish household, she is actually the daughter of San Francisco’s greatest madams. In the aftermath of the great earthquake of 1906, these worlds come tumbling together. I remember it was a […]



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