Monday Mailbox - November 15th

It's Mailbox Monday, a fun weekly meme started by Marcia at The Printed Page. Mailbox Monday is now is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Julie at Knitting and Sundries.  Just as the post office or mailbox is a place to gather to share the news, this gives readers  a chance to share the books that came into their house last week. So be sure to drop over there and see what everybody else got in the mail.

I got some goodies this week:

The Emerald Atlas by
John Stephens

I don't often read YA books, but I have a grand-daughter who has leapt from Little Bear right into the Twilight series, so I'm becoming much more aware of the YA market.  We also are trying to build up our collection at our little town library. So when I had a chance to get a galley of this one, I jumped to grab it.  Publication isn't until next April--hence the plain green cover--so stay tuned for a review sometime early next year.


I got two more contest wins this week

War 

By Sebastian Junger

We have this in hard cover at the library, but hubbie was thrilled when I won the audio version for us because he wants to listen to it during his daily jog.  The unabridged version even included a CD with a PDF printout of the photos on the hardcover.  COOL!

Thanks to Kim at MetroReader for hosting the contest.

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The Love Goddess' Cooking School

by Melissa Senate

This one sounds eerily similar to The School of Essential Ingredients, but with a setting in Coastal Maine and an Italian grandmother running the cooking school, who can resist.

Holly Maguire’s grandmother Camilla was the Love Goddess of Blue Crab Island, Maine—a Milanese fortune-teller who could predict the right man for you, and whose Italian cooking was rumored to save marriages. Holly has been waiting years for her unlikely fortune: her true love will like sa cordula, an unappetizing old-world delicacy. But Holly can’t make a decent marinara sauce, let alone sa cordula. Maybe that’s why the man she hopes to marry breaks her heart. So when Holly inherits Camilla’s Cucinotta, she’s determined to forget about fortunes and love and become an Italian cooking teacher worthy of her grandmother’s legacy.
But Holly’s four students are seeking much more than how to make Camilla’s chicken alla Milanese. Simon, a single father, hopes to cook his way back into his daughter’s heart. Juliet, Holly’s childhood friend, hides a painful secret. Tamara, a serial dater, can’t find the love she longs for. And twelve-year-old Mia thinks learning to cook will stop her dad, Liam, from marrying his phony lasagna-queen girlfriend. As the class gathers each week, adding Camilla’s essential ingredients of wishes and memories in every pot and pan, unexpected friendships and romances are formed—and tested. Especially when Holly falls hard for Liam . . . and learns a thing or two about finding her own recipe for happiness.

  Thanks to Free Book Fridays for the weekly giveaway contests.
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Rounding out the week's deliveries,  I got a review copy of

Sea Change

by Jeremy Page

published by Viking Press.

The cover image draws me right into this one and the publisher's blurb leaves me no doubt that I'm really going to find this a topnotch read:

A stunning follow-up from the author of Salt--"thrilling and memorable" (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times).
After experiencing a devastating tragedy, Guy sets out to sea in an old Dutch barge that has now become his home. Every night, he writes the imagined diary of the man he might have been-and the family he should have had.
As he embarks upon the stormy waters of the North Sea-writing about a trip through the small towns and nightclubs of the rural American South-Guy's stories begin to unfold in unexpected ways. And when he meets a mother and daughter, he realizes that it might just be possible to begin his life again.
Haunting and exquisitely crafted, Sea Change is a deeply affecting novel of love and family by an acclaimed young writer.

It was a great Mailbox week.  What was in yours?