Mailbox Monday - 20 May

Mailbox Monday is a weekly meme started years ago by Marcia (she of many blogs) who is no longer actively participating but who manages the string of wonderful Hosts for the weekly bloggers who do participate.  This month's hosting duties belong to Abi of 4 the Love of Books.  Thanks Abi for keeping this going so we can all see what's been landing in our mailboxes.  As you can see, Tutu still goes to the Post office, where I wait to see if there's a little yellow slip in my box telling me to go to the window to pick up my newest tome to add to my every growing pile of goodies to be read.

This week, courtesy of the publisher, I got an E galley  of Joshilynn Jackson's newest one: Someone Else's Love Story

  I fell in love with William Ashe at gunpoint, in a Circle K.

It was on a Friday afternoon at the tail end of a Georgia summer so ungodly hot the air felt like it had all been boiled red. We were both staring down the barrel of an ancient, creaky .32 that could kill us jut as dead as a really nice gun could.

I though then I had landed in my own worst dream, not a love story.

But there we were, William gone still as a pond rock, me holding a green glass bottle of Coca-Cola and shaking so hard it was like a seizure. Both of us were caught under the black eye of that pistol. And yet, seventeen seconds later, before I so much as knew his name, I'd fallen dizzy-down in love with him.

At twenty-one Shandi Pierce is juggling finishing college, raising her delightful three-year-old genius son Nathan, aka Natty Bumppo, and keeping the peace between her eternally warring, long-divorced Christian mother and Jewish father. She's got enough complications without getting caught in the middle of a stick-up in a gas station mini-mart and falling in love with a great wall of a man named William Ashe, who willingly steps between the armed robber and her son.

Shandi doesn't know that her blond god Thor has his own complications. When he looked down the barrel of that gun he believed it was destiny: It's been one year to the day since a tragic act of physics shattered his world. But William doesn't define destiny the way other people do. A brilliant geneticist who believes in science and numbers, destiny to him is about choice.

Now, he and Shandi are about to meet their so-called destinies head on, making choices that will reveal unexpected truths about love, life, and the world they think they know.

Someone Else's Love Story is Joshilyn Jackson's funny, charming, and poignant novel about science and miracles, secrets and truths, faith and forgiveness; about a virgin birth, a sacrifice, and a resurrection; about falling in love, and learning that things aren't always what they seem-or what we hope they will be. It's a novel about discovering what we want and ultimately finding what we need.

It's not due out until November, so look for a review sometime after Labor Day, but you can bet your bippy, I'm not going to wait that long to read this one!  I love Joshilyn Jackson, and I'm ready to dive right in!

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Then in my real mailbox I received a hardback copy of Paulo Coelho's latest.  My husband and I are both big fans of Coelho's take on life, so this one is on the "whoever grabs it first" pile on the coffee table.  The period of history is one that fascinates both of us, so I'm sure we'll be having some good conversations about this one.  Many thanks to Karen at Bookin' with Bingo for the contest and to Knopf the publisher for providing the copy.

The blurb tells us

..there is nothing wrong with anxiety.
Although we cannot control God’s time, it is part of the human condition to want to receive the thing we are waiting for as quickly as possible.
Or to drive away whatever is causing our fear. . . .
Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.

July 14, 1099. Jerusalem awaits the invasion of the crusaders who have surrounded the city’s gates. There, inside the ancient city’s walls, men and women of every age and every faith have gathered to hear the wise words of a mysterious man known only as the Copt. He has summoned the townspeople to address their fears with truth... 

Now, these many centuries later, the wise man’s answers are a record of the human values that have endured throughout time. And, in Paulo Coelho’s hands, The Manuscript Found in Accra reveals that who we are, what we fear, and what we hope for the future come from the knowledge and belief that can be found within us, and not from the adversity that surrounds us.