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ABOUT THE BOOK
NO SPOILERSSixteen-year-old Carmela Tofana has spent her whole life waiting outside the back room of Tofana Apothecary, the seventeenth-century Rome shop where her mother Giulia mixes tinctures, tonics, and love potions for the neighborhood while Carmela is kept firmly in the front, sweeping floors and minding customers. On her sixteenth birthday, Giulia finally makes good on an old promise and brings Carmela into the back room to apprentice alongside the sharp-tongued midwife Maria and the quiet, exacting Laura. Carmela expects to learn how to blend remedies and calm nervous customers, but the deeper she gets into her mother's world, the more she senses that Tofana Apothecary holds a far more dangerous secret than herbs and oils, one tied to the desperate, often bruised women who keep showing up at the counter asking for something Giulia won't name in front of her. Woven between Carmela's chapters are short verse portraits of other Romans, a cobbler, a novitiate, a woman scrubbing laundry, whose ordinary lives brush up against the apothecary without ever stepping fully into Carmela's story.
Free Battle of the Books questions for Everything Is Poison
SPOILERSEvery one of these has the same answer, and that is the point. In a real battle the question is read aloud with a dozen other books in play, and students have a few seconds to place it. Here is what a battle might ask about Everything Is Poison. Use them as a quiz, a trivia round, or BOTB practice.
Where in the book they come from
- Early in the book
In what book does a girl warn the other children that a playmate's mother will turn them into toads?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Poison by Joy McCullough
In a flashback to Carmela's early childhood, Violetta Raso announces that Carmela's mother is a witch, and every child in the street picks Violetta's side. That single moment is why Carmela grows up friendless and why she still resents Violetta ten years later.
- First half
In what book does a girl duck behind a saint's statue whose arm rests casually on a skull?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Poison by Joy McCullough
Carmela is trespassing on the grounds of San Girolamo when an unfamiliar priest appears and follows a black cat into a shed, and she has to disappear fast. The skull sitting at her eye level is a grim joke, since she is there to hide an ingredient meant to end a life.
- First half
In what book does a shy woman know a customer needs mint tea because his new wife cooks badly?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Poison by Joy McCullough
A nervous young man asks for something for chronic stomach upset and swears it has nothing to do with his wife. Laura silently sets a mint blend on the counter, and only afterward tells Carmela that she knows the man's bride is a terrible cook.
- Second half
In what book does a priest report that a condemned prisoner has named the shop's owner?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Poison by Joy McCullough
Father Piero comes from Castel Sant'Angelo to say that Patrizia Moretti is being held there until her execution and gave Giulia's name with guards listening. This is the news that forces Giulia to run.
- Second half
In what book does a lady's maid weep because her mistress is marrying and moving to Florence without her?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Poison by Joy McCullough
One of the verse sections belongs to a servant who has traveled to Venice, Greece, and France at her lady's side and assumed she always would. She is told she will be left behind in Rome, and she cries herself to sleep.
- Near the end
In what book does a shopkeeper turn blue flower tea bright magenta to convince a child she is magic?
✓ Answer
Everything Is Poison by Joy McCullough
Little Serafina says she has a secret about Carmela, so Carmela steeps butterfly pea flowers and stirs in citric acid to change the color while the girl watches. Serafina runs back in to whisper that her friends say Carmela is magic, and Carmela hands her a vial and tells her it will make her magic too.
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