Mailbox Monday — February 20

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, the weekly meme created by Marcia from A girl and her books (formerly The Printed Page) where book lovers share the titles they received for review, purchased, or otherwise obtained over the past week. Mailbox Monday currently is on tour, and this month, it is being hosted by Metroreader.

Here’s what I received:

A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear, from HarperCollins for an upcoming blog tour (Amazon/IndieBound)

In the summer of 1932, the career of psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs takes an exciting new turn when she accepts an undercover assignment from the British Secret Service.  Sent to pose as a junior lecturer at a private college in Cambridge, she will monitor any activities “not in the interests of His Majesty’s government.”

When the college’s controversial pacifist founder, Greville Liddicote, is murdered, however, Maisie is directed to stand back as her colleagues in Scotland Yard spearhead the investigation.  But she soon discovers that the circumstances of Liddicote’s death appear inextricably linked to the suspicious comings and goings of faculty members and students under her surveillance.  To unravel this web, the investigator must overcome a reluctant Secret Service, discover shameful hidden truths about Britain’s conduct during the Great War, and face off against the rising power of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — the Nazi Party — as the storm clouds of World War II gather on the horizon.  (publisher’s summary)

Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear, a surprise from HarperCollins (Amazon/IndieBound)

Early April, 1933.  To the costermongers of Covent Garden — peddlers selling fruits and vegetables on the streets of London — Eddie Pettit was kindness itself.  A little “slow,” he was a gentle soul, more boy than man, with a gift for calming the most challenging horse.  His recent death in a violent accident has shocked his friends and neighbors.  They believe Eddie was the victim of foul play, but the police won’t investigate.  Their only hope of finding the truth is Maisie Dobbs.

Maisie has known these men from childhood, when her father, Frankie, worked alongside them.  Determined to do right by Eddie, she plunges into the investigation.  The search for answers begins amid the working-class streets of Lambeth, where Eddie lived.  But before long, Maisie is following threads of intrigue to a powerful press baron, a “has-been” politician lingering in the hinterlands of power named Winston Churchill, and to the doorstep of a writer who is also the husband of her dearest friend, Priscilla.

The story of a London affected by the march to war years before the first shot is fired, and of an innocent victim caught in the shadow of power, Elegy for Eddie is one of Jacqueline Winspear’s most poignant and affecting novels yet in her superb bestselling series.  (publisher’s summary)

A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Alvarez, unsolicited from Algonquin (Amazon/IndieBound)

**I recently started purging my shelves of unsolicited review copies that I don’t plan on reading because they don’t interest me.  From here on out, I will let you know when that’s the case, though I will continue to spotlight these books here.  This book will be finding a home with my husband’s co-worker, who loves to read as much as I do.**

Julia Alvarez has been called “a one-woman cultural collision” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and that has never been truer than in this new book, a story about three of Alvarez’s most personal relationships — with her parents, with her husband, and with a young Haitian boy known as Piti.  A teenager when Julia first met him in 2001, Piti crossed the border into the Dominican Republic to find work.  Julia, impressed by his courage and charmed by his smile, has over the years come to think of him as a son, even promising to be at his wedding someday.  When Piti calls in 2009, Julia’s promise is tested.

To Alvarez, much admired for her ability to lead readers deep inside her native Dominican culture, “Haiti is like a sister I’ve never gotten to know.”  And so we follow her across the border into what was once the richest of all the French colonies and now teeters on the edge of the abyss — first for the celebration of a wedding and a year later to find Piti’s loved ones in the devastation of the earthquake.

As in all of Alvarez’s books, a strong message is packed inside an intimate, beguiling story, this time about the nature of poverty and of wealth, of human love and of human frailty, of history and of the way we live now.  (publisher’s summary)

The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker by Janet Groth, unsolicited from Algonquin (Amazon/IndieBound)

**This book also will be going to my husband’s co-worker.**

If Mad Men were set at the offices of The New Yorker magazine and told from the point of view of the receptionist, it would mirror Janet Groth’s seductive and entertaining look back at her twenty-one years (1957-1978) at that legendary institution.

Thanks to a successful interview with a painfully shy E.B. White, a beautiful nineteen-year-old hazel-eyed Midwesterner landed a job as receptionist at The New Yorker.  There she stayed for two decades, becoming the general office factotum — watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the eighteenth floor.  And although she dreamed of becoming a writer herself, she never advanced at the magazine.

This memoir of a particular time and place is as much about why that was so as it is about Groth’s fascinating relationships with poet John Berryman (who proposed marriage), essayist Joseph Mitchell (who took her to lunch every Friday), and playwright Muriel Spark (who invited her to Christmas dinner in Tuscany), as well as E.J. Kahn Jr., Calvin Trillin, Renata Adler, Peter De Vries, Charles Addams, and many other New Yorker contributors and bohemian denizens of Greenwich Village in its heyday.

During those single-in-the-city years, Groth tried on many identities — Nice Girl, Sex Pot, Dumb Blonde, World Traveler, Doctoral Candidate — but eventually she would have to leave The New Yorker to find her true self.  (publisher’s summary)

What books did you add to your shelves recently?

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© 2012 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.