Mailbox Monday — January 24

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, the weekly meme created by Marcia from 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’s host is Rose City Reader.

This is a pretty full mailbox, two week’s worth, with a couple of review copies, a couple of gifts, and a handful of unrequested books.  Here’s what I added to my shelves:

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake, from Penguin for an upcoming blog tour

In 1940, Iris James is the postmistress in coastal Franklin, Massachusetts.  Iris knows more about the townspeople than she will ever say — for example, that Emma Trask has come to marry the town’s doctor, and that Harry Vale watches the ocean for U-boats.  Iris believes her job is to deliver secrets.  Yet one days she does the unthinkable:  slips a letter into her pocket, reads it, and doesn’t deliver it.

Meanwhile, Frankie Bard broadcasts from overseas with Edward R. Murrow.  Her dispatches beg listeners to pay heed as the Nazis bomb London nightly.  Most of the townspeople of Franklin think the war can’t touch them.  But Iris and Emma and Frankie know better…

The Postmistress is a tale of two worlds — one shattered by violence, the other willfully naive — and of two women whose jobs are to deliver the news, yet who find themselves unable to do so.  Through their eyes, and the eyes of everyday people caught in history’s tide, it examines how we tell each other stories, and how we bear the fact of war as we live ordinary lives.  (publisher’s summary)

The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, from Graywolf Press for the February BOOK CLUB hosted by Jen and Nicole

As 1944 comes to a close, nine-year-old Raj is unaware of the war devastating the rest of the world.  He lives in Mauritius, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, where survival is a daily struggle for his family.  After a brutal beating lands Raj in the hospital of a prison camp, he meets David, a boy his own age.  David is a refugee, one of a group of Jewish exiles now indefinitely detained in Mauritius.  When a massive storm on the island brings chaos and confusion to the camp.  Raj is determined to help David escape.

Nathacha Appanah’s deeply moving novel, beautifully translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, sheds light on a fascinating and unexplored corner of World War II history.  (publisher’s summary)

Red Gold by Alan Furst, which Serena snagged for me at the library sale (thank you!)

Autumn 1941:  In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the war is about the change.  German tanks are rolling toward Moscow.  Stalin has issued a decree:  All partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines — from Kiev to Brittany.  Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet menace as predators from the dark edge of war — arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins — emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld.  In their midst is Jean Casson, once a well-to-do film producer, now a target of the Gestapo living on a few francs a day.  As the occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission:  running guns to combat units of the French Communist Party.  Reprisals are brutal.  At last the real resistance has begun.  Red Gold masterfully re-creates the shadow world of French resistance in the darkest days of World War II.  (publisher’s summary)

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti, from Serena, who had an extra copy (thank you!)

Twelve-year-old Ren is missing his left hand.  How it was lost is one of the mysteries that Ren has been trying to solve his entire life — as well as who his parents are and why he was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony’s Orphanage for boys.  When a young man named Benjamin Nab appears, claiming to be Ren’s long-lost brother, his convincing tale of how Ren lost his hand persuades the monks at the orphanage to release the boy and gives Ren some hope.  But is Benjamin really who he says he is?  As Ren is introduced to a life of hardscrabble adventure filled with outrageous scam artists, grave robbers, and petty thieves, he begins to suspect that Benjamin holds the key not only to his future but his past as well.  (publisher’s summary)

The Pain Merchants by Janice Hardy, unrequested from HarperCollins Children’s Books UK (the U.S. version is called The Shifter); The Girl is really excited about this one

In a dystopian world crippled by war, orphans Nya and Tali try to make a living.  They are Takers, and can pull pain from people’s bodies and move it into their own.  This ability wins Tali an apprenticeship at the powerful Healers’ League.  But Nya’s unique pain-shifting skills are flawed, dark and deadly dangerous.

Now something sinister is happening at the Healers’ League and apprentices are missing.  Suddenly Nya’s talent is in great demand from the pain merchants and trackers hunting her across the city…  (publisher’s summary)

Withering Tights:  The Misadventures of Tallulah Casey by Louise Rennison, unrequested from HarperCollins Children’s Books UK

Missing Georgia Nicholson?  Then meet Tallulah, future star of the performing arts!  Expect shenanigans, snogging and stage-hogging from the Queen of Teen Louise Rennison!

Alright, so it’s not Hollywood.  It’s somewhere in Up North, and the hills are alive with the sounds of squirrels and cheese making…  But Dother Hall Performing Arts College is about to open its doors to the rabble for summer school, and Tallulah and her besties plan to take the stage by storm!  That is, once they get over the brilliance of six weeks of parent-free life, and the “mixed” students of the course.  Because “mixed” can only mean one thing…boys!

Once her mates arrive and they get practicing their choruses of “Fame,” the beardy villagers will have to wake up from Dickens’ times and rejoin the modern world.  Just because the dales don’t have streetlights (or streets) doesn’t mean they can’t find a spotlight for Tallulah!  (from the press release, since the publisher’s summary on the back of the book said very little)

Paris Was Ours:  Thirty-Two Writers Reflect on the City of Light edited by Penelope Rowlands, unrequested from Algonquin Books

Paris is “the world capital of memory and desire,” concludes one of the writers in this intimate and insightful collection of memoirs of the city.  Few places can draw in as many diverse souls and then mark them as profoundly as Paris does.  These thirty-two writers describe how they were seduced by the city that Francine du Plessix Gray has called “that siren, Paris,” and how, afterward, nothing was the same.

Cuban novelist Zoé Valdés, who “yearned to seem as melancholy as Catherine Deneuve,” documents her arrival from her impoverished native island and her subsequent transformation on the Paris art scene.  Diane Johnson relates how fashion consciousness in the French capital “steals in on you like fog.”  Joe Queenan, living in Paris as a student, loses his glasses, can’t afford a new pair, and is reduced to asking bespectacled young women on dates to the Comédie-Française — just so he can borrow theirs.

Paris is unforgiving, unabashed, and unlike any other city in the world.  Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni remembers being slapped, at age thirteen, by a Frenchman at the château de Versailles.  For stepping on the grass!  The outré cross-dressers of the Bois de Boulogne cause Stacy Schiff to alter her jogging route when her children are in tow.  After observing entwined lovers on every bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, Judith Thurman contemplates the rules of conduct for displays of affection.  (There are none, she determines.)  And Mark Gaito is sure that “to be a writer you must come back to Paris.”

In her introduction, editor Penelope Rowlands speaks for most of the writers in this enthralling collection when she professes, “We hated Paris and loved it all at once.”  These personal essays, more than half of which have never been published before, show intrepid men and women encountering a magnetic yet uncompromising place, one that changes them indelibly.  As these memoirs prove, again and again, Paris stays with you forever.  (publisher’s summary)

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow, unrequested from Algonquin Books

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, a biracial girl must cope with society’s ideas of race and class in this acclaimed novel, winner of the Bellwether Prize for fiction addressing issues of social justice.  (publisher’s summary)

Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt, unrequested from Algonquin Books

Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway.  The survivor of the fatal accident is left to pick up the pieces not only of her own life but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman left behind.  As these three lives intersect, the book asks, how well do we really know those we love and how do we open our hearts to forgive the unforgivable?  (publisher’s summary)

What books did you add to your shelves recently?

Disclosure: I am an Amazon associate.

© 2011 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.