Mailbox Monday — June 30

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, the weekly meme where book lovers share the titles they received for review, purchased, or otherwise obtained over the past week.  It is now being hosted at the Mailbox Monday blog.

Here’s what I added to the shelves over the past few weeks:

For review:

Maisie Dobbs (Tenth Anniversary Edition) by Jacqueline Winspear — from Soho Crime

Maisie Dobbs got her start as a maid in an aristocratic London household when she was thirteen.  Her employer, suffragette Lady Rowan Compton, soon became her patron, taking the remarkably bright youngster under her wing.  Lady Rowan’s friend, Maurice Blanche, often retained as an investigator by the European elite, recognized Maisie’s intuitive gifts and helped her earn admission to the prestigious Girton College in Cambridge, where Maisie planned to complete her education.

The outbreak of war changed everything.  Maisie trained as a nurse, then left for France to serve at the Front, where she found — and lost — an important part of herself.  Ten years after the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie sets out on her own as a private investigator, one who has learned that coincidences are meaningful, and truth elusive.  Her very first case involves suspected infidelity but reveals something different.

In the aftermath of the Great War, a former officer has founded a working farm known as The Retreat, that acts as convalescent refuge for ex-soldiers too shattered to resume normal life.  When Fate brings Maisie a second case involving The Retreat, she must finally confront the ghost that has haunted her for over a decade.  (publisher’s summary)

Accidentally Yours by Robin Helm — from Indie Jane

Two worlds…

Two centuries…

Two men who love the same woman…

Two prayers fervent enough to shift time…

Endless questions and possibilities…

What would a man give for a second chance at love?

What would he sacrifice to keep it?

What if the proud, arrogant Fitzwilliam Darcy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice never changed his disastrous proposal to Elizabeth Bennet at Hunsford?  What if the humbled man who successfully courted her was not the same Mr. Darcy?

In Accidentally Yours, Book 1 of the Yours by Design Christian Fantasy romance series, the lives of two men are turned upside down when both of them fall in love with the same woman.  (publisher’s summary)

Gift:

Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 edited with an introduction by Fred Marchant — from Fred Marchant, who was my English professor back in the day at Suffolk University

“I stand and dream another world instead,” wrote William Stafford in 1942.

The other world he dreamed of was one of peace and freedom.  Twenty-eight years old and a conscientious objector during World War II, he was assigned under penalty of law to work in Civilian Public Service camps, an internal exile within his own country.  In this remarkable collection of poems, many of them never before published or long out of print, the first decade of Stafford’s writing life is for the first time made available to readers.  Edited by poet Fred Marchant, one of the first Marine officers honorably discharged as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, Another World Instead tells the story of a committed pacifist living in a time of war and a writer beginning a major life in American poetry.  (publisher’s summary)

Free ebooks:

Pride and Prejudice, Retold in Limericks by Séamus O’Leprechaun

Séamus O’Leprechaun retells Jane Austen’s famous novel using the ancient and honourable artform of the limerick! The classics will never be the same again… (publisher’s summary)

Fateful by Cheri Schmidt

A huge fan of Jane Austen, Danielle hopes to find her own Mr. Darcy when she leaves Colorado to attend art school in London. Of course she knows it’s silly to wish for that, naive even. But she’s met enough males who lacked respect for women, a growing trend it seemed. And at nineteen…well…. However, on only her second night there she gets lost and is threatened by a stalker who proves to be immune to her martial arts training. Before she is completely overpowered, she is then saved by Ethan Deveroux.

While Danielle does find the romance she seeks in Ethan, he’s no Mr. Darcy. Her hero is held by a spell which fractures their chance at a happy ending. During the day Ethan is closer to mortal than immortal and can date her like any other man. Yet, as the sun sets, the powerful magic of an ancient curse returns and the evil of that spell is revealed. When that magic begins, Danielle’s fairytale romance ends because Ethan Deveroux is a vampire. (publisher’s summary)

What books did you add to your shelves recently?

© 2014 Anna Horner of Diary of an Eccentric. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish content without permission.

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