Mailbox Monday: March 29

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. (Checked out library books don’t count, but eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

After last week's spending spree, I vowed not to buy anymore books for a while and so far I've stayed true. These were all freebies and I'm looking forward to reading all of them!

Sent to me by the author, Kathleen Grissom. Published February 2010 by Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster. 365 pages. From the Back Cover:

Orphaned while onboard ship from Ireland, seven-year-old Lavinia arrives on the steps of a tobacco plantation where she is to live and work with the slaves of the kitchen house. Under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate daughter, Lavinia becomes deeply bonded to her adopted family, though she is set apart from them by her white skin. Eventually, Lavinia is accepted into the worl of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. Lavinia finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds. When she is forced to make a choice, loyalties are brought into question, dangerous tryths are laid bare, and lives are put at risk.


ARC sent to me from Riverhead Books via ReadingGroupGuides.com. To be published April 29, 2010 by Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group. 290 pages. From the Inside Flap:

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, they speak no English and own nothing but debt. Kimberly's talent for school does not pay the bills, and she quickly begins a double life, carefully hidden from the outside world: an exceptional student by day, she is a Chinatown sweatshop worker by evening and weekend. Disguising the most difficult truths of her life - her staggering poverty, the weight of her family's expectations, her love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition - Kimberly learns to translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the two worlds she straddles.


Sent to me by the author, Brandy Purdy. Published February 2010 by Kensington Books. 320 pages. From the Back Cover:

Shy, plain Lady Jane Parker feels out of place in Henry VIII's courtly world of glamour and intrigue - until she meets the handsome George Boleyn. Overjoyed when their fathers arrange a match, her dreams of a loving union are waylaid when she meets George's sister, Anne. For George is completely devoted to his sister, and cold and indifferent to his bride. As Anne acquires a wide circle of admirers, including King Henry, Jane's resentment grows. But if becoming Henry's queen makes Anne the most powerful woman in England, it also makes her highly vulnerable. And as Henry, desperate for a male heir, begins to tire of his mercurial wife, the stage is set for the ultimate betrayal...


Sent to me from Perseverence Press via LibraryThing.com. To be published April 10, 2010 by John Daniel & Company, a division of Daniel & Daniel Publishers. 243 pages. From the Back Cover:

Mitchelstown Castle in County Cork, seat of the notorious Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family, fairly hums with intrigue. The new young governess, Mary Wollstonecraft, witnesses a stabbing and attends a pagan bonfire at which an illegitimate sprig of the nobility is killed. When the young Irishman Liam Donovan, who hated the aristocratic rogue for seducing his niece, becomes the prime suspect for his murder, Mary - ever a champion of the oppressed, and susceptible to Liam's charm - determines to prove him innocent. 

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