Monday, March 4, 2024

Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week
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Warning:  Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles, and humongous wish lists.
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Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia @A Girl and Her Books, has a permanent home now at  MAILBOX MONDAY.
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Here is a shout out to the administrators
THANKS to everyone for keeping Mailbox Monday alive.

NetGalley's this week!

Middletide by Sarah Crouch

In this gripping and intensely atmospheric debut, disquiet descends on a small town after the suspicious death of a beautiful young doctor, with all clues pointing to the reclusive young man who abandoned the community in chase of big city dreams but returned for the first love he left behind. Perfect for fans of All Good People Here and Where the Crawdads Sing

One peaceful morning, in the small, Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of prodigal son and failed writer, Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah Leith’s own novel.

Out of money and motivation, thirty-three-year-old Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his futile writing career. Hungry for purpose, he throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he betrayed but was never able to forget.

As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder in this scintillating literary thriller that seeks to uncover a case of love, loss, and revenge.

Dancing With Dragons by Jenni Ogden


From Jenni Ogden, author of multiple-award-winning A Drop in the Ocean, comes another evocative story of friendship, coral reefs, and marine conservation for book-club readers.

It is the late 1970s and teenagers Gaia and her brother Bron live with their parents on their isolated property on Western Australia’s Coral Coast. Intensively trained for a career as a professional ballet dancer by her mother, once a Principal Dancer in the American Ballet Theatre, Gaia also loves snorkeling over the coral reef that borders their small market garden. Then comes a day that changes her life she discovers a rare pair of dramatically colored seadragons, their courtship dance over the coral spellbinding, and that night she loses her entire family and her dancing dream. Two years later she returns to the abandoned property, determined to live off the land. For years her only friends are the wild animals of the bush and reef, and Mary and Eddie, an Aboriginal couple who work for the racist farmer on the neighboring property — until one morning Jarrah, Mary’s 11-year-old orphaned nephew, is entranced when he sees Gaia dancing on the beach. As an unlikely friendship between these two lonely and scarred people deepens, they discover that when you lose everything the only way to survive is to open your heart.

Find Me In California by Kerry Lonsdale

An achingly romantic novel about chance meetings, buried secrets, and the multiple facets of love and family bonds by Wall Street Journal bestselling author Kerry Lonsdale.

Raised by her fiercely passionate and free-spirited grandmother, Julia Hope has never gone without love. But as she tends to her only living relative during her final days, Julia struggles to overcome her fear of being alone.

A thousand miles away, Matt Gatlin has managed to avoid the coldhearted grandmother with whom he once lived. But after twelve years of her being blessedly out of sight, she needs him. His resentments still raw, Matt packs up his car and reluctantly heads to California to confront a bitter past he thought was long gone.

Over the next six days, Julia’s and Matt’s fates intersect. An old diary exposes the tragedy of a long-lost love. A history of secrets in two families comes to light. And on a lonely back road, Matt picks up an unusual yet captivating hitchhiker with a secret of her own.

For Julia and Matt, something heartbreaking and heartwarming, mysterious and beautiful, will touch their lives—with neither of them realizing that maybe they’re destined for each other.

The Perfect Sister by Stephanie DeCarolis


A woman’s search for her missing sister on the sandy white beaches of the Hamptons uncovers a wealth of secrets worth killing for—a sultry and sumptuous psychological suspense from USA Today bestselling author Stephanie DeCarolis.

Alex Walker has always looked up to her perfect older sister. Maddie has succeeded in all the ways Alex has not: She escaped their hometown and seems to have put the memories of their unstable childhood behind her. But despite the different paths their lives have taken, the two sisters made a pact to spend one week together every summer. It was a promise they’d never broken . . . until now.

When Maddie suddenly cancels her annual trip home, Alex begins to worry. But when Maddie stops returning her calls altogether, Alex is certain something is wrong. Relying on the only clues Maddie left behind, Alex follows her sister’s footsteps to the Hamptons where she meets the Blackwell family—the last people to have seen Maddie before she vanished into thin air. The Blackwells seem to have it all: wealth, beauty, and a beachside mansion on a private stretch of Hamptons real estate. It’s a world unlike any Alex has ever known, but she quickly discovers that looks can be deceiving, and that a life of luxury always comes at a cost.

A Place To Hide by Ronald H. Balson


From the winner of the National Jewish Book Award

Theodore “Teddy” Hartigan is the scion of a wealthy Washington, D.C. family who place him into a comfortable job at the State Department and a placid diplomat’s career. In 1938, as Hitler’s inexorable rise continues, Teddy is re-assigned to the US Consulate in Amsterdam to replace fleeing staff

Teddy’s job is to process visa applications, and by 1939, refugees from Nazi-conquered Poland, Austria, and other countries are desperate to secure safe passage to America. As Hitler sweeps through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Holland, the screws tighten and law after virulent law is passed to threaten the lives, indeed the very existence of the Jewish people. When Teddy and his girlfriend Sara are introduced to an orphaned young girl named Katy, who has been abandoned on the grounds of a nursery school, they agree to adopt her. Teddy comes to realize that he holds the key to saving lives, whether five, fifty, or five hundred—and makes the dangerous and selfless decision to join with underground groups and use his position at the Consulate to rescue those with no other avenue of escape.

Powerful and dramatic, National Jewish Book Award winner Ron Balson’s A Place to Hide explores the deeply-moving actions of an ordinary man who resolves, under perilous circumstances, to make a difference.

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Natalie Jenner

In this new book from the author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls, a group of British and American expatriates in 1950s Rome become embroiled in controversy while making a movie about a female Italian resistance fighter during the occupation codenamed La Scolaretta: the Schoolgirl assassin.

A surprise phone call from her late fiancé’s family sends Vivien Lowry of Bloomsbury Girls off on her next adventure. Struggling as a playwright, she moves to Italy both to reckon with her past and create a new future as a script-writer at the Cinecittà studios in Rome. Here she encounters the greatest male bastion of them all, the Vatican, and ends up entangled with the church and the censors while romantically caught between two men: an enigmatic American film financier with an estranged movie star wife, and a socialist Italian prince and independent filmmaker under house arrest over a censored screenplay.

In this stand-alone novel, Jenner again brings to life a large and intriguing cast, each of whom has a wartime experience from their past that they must revisit in order to move on – Vivien most of all. With surprise appearances by characters from both The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls, and cameos by screen legends such as Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, and Gina Lollobrigida, Every Time We Say Goodbye captures both la dolce vita and the haunting, infinite legacy of war.



3 comments:

  1. Oh my gosh....all of your books look GREAT!!

    ENJOY!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks like a great book haul with variety. Happy Reading!

    ReplyDelete

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