Mailbox Monday

This meme was started by Marcia at The Printed Page and Kristi at The Story Siren. In October Avis at she reads and reads will be hosting for Marcia.

I've been a bit overwhelmed the last couple of weeks so I haven't posted and now I have some catching up to do. I've received five books in the mail since my last MM post:



As part of a Pump up Your Book tour, I will be reviewing Regression by Kathy Bell. From the Pump up Your Book website, the description of Regression reads:

Fourteen-year-old Adya Jordan swears that before her head injury she was a forty-year-old mother of six. Is she going crazy, or did she really live through an entirely different life? 1985 is nothing like she remembers, although her first day of high school certainly is! A typical girl with atypical genes, Adya tries to recapture her old life, hiding her growing conviction that she has done this before. Memories of the man she loved and a family she adored haunt her, even though her future husband doesn’t even know she exists. Accidentally discovering the secretive Three Eleven Corporation might know more about her situation than she does, she is convinced the twenty-eight men heading up the company are responsible for the changes in her world. Adya finds her way into their ranks, journeying to the tropical island headquarters to begin an orientation into their prestigious internship program. The Three Eleven Company controls the development and distribution of Twenty-first Century technology brought with them from the future. Charged with the task of preparing the world for an impending disaster, each member of the team uses his scientific background to create a solution for a problem the planet does not know it is facing. They don’t have time to deal with a feisty young girl poking around. Banished to the frozen Canadian Shield for asking too many questions of CEO Abraham Fairfield, Adya finds the men in the underground city of Sanctum are interested in more than just her genes as they search for the answer to her presence in the timeline. In the end, Adya encounters a choice no mother should ever face: save her children…or everyone else.

City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell. The description from Macmillan's website says:

Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng— City of Tranquil Light, a place they come to love—and face incredible hardship, will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them?

Must You Go? by Antonia Fraser is described on the author's website:

The sub-title of the book declares its contents: this is 'my life with Harold Pinter', not my complete life, and certainly not his. In essence, it is a love story and as with many love stories, the beginning and the end, the first light and the twilight, are dealt with more fully than the high noon in between, described more impressionistically.

I have based it partly on my own diaries: these have been kept since October 1968 when I suffered from withdrawal symptoms after finishing my first historical biography Mary Queen of Scots which had been the centre of my existence for so long. I have also used my own recollections, being careful to distinguish between the two, immediate reactions (I always write my Diary the next morning unless otherwise noted) and memories. I have also quoted Harold where he told me things about his past, once again noting the source and have occasionally quoted his friends talking to me on the same subject. Looking back at the Diaries, I see that I always paid special attention to any green shoots where Harold's writing was concerned. Although it was not a conscious process, I suppose this was a consequence of a biographer living with a creative artist and observing the process first hand.

Harold and I lived together from August 1975 until his death thirty three and a half years later on Christmas Eve 2008. 'O! call back yesterday, bid time return,' cries one of his courtiers to Richard II. This is my way of doing so.

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (phew!) by Elna Baker From the author's website:

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (Penguin 2009) is a coming of age story about Elna Baker’s experience as a practicing Mormon in New York City. Elna’s life changes when she loses eighty pounds and gets the sexual attention she’s always wanted…. only to discover that as a Mormon she can’t follow through. The book takes on identity, faith, sex and love as Elna questions traditional values in modern times.

City in Shadow by Evan Marshall This book is part of the Hidden Manhattan Mystery series. The Amazon description of this book reads:

A frightened woman leaves a note reading HELP ME outside Sanitation supervisor Anna Winthrop’s apartment . . . A career-making story leads a journalist to a human-trafficking ring . . . A woman acts as bait in an effort to track down her missing sister . . . and Anna’s visiting cousin Patti prowls New York’s dark streets, but won’t say why. All roads lead to the Kirkmore, a sinister apartment tower harboring a secret more horrifying than anyone could ever have imagined.