Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday started by Marcia at The Printed Page is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don’t count, eBooks & audio books do). This month Mailbox Monday is being hosted by Laura at I'm Booking It. Stop by there to check out everyone else's mailboxes.


From Goodreads: Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life. The book club at my local library picked this one as their March selection at right about the same time that I found it in a thrift store. I decided that was a sign that I was meant to read it and maybe even attend the book club meeting and meet some people outside of my regular circle! I only have a week to get it read so we'll see how this pans out!

From Goodreads: At twelve, Emily Parmenter knows alone all too well. Left mostly to herself after her beautiful young mother disappeared and her beloved older brother died, Emily is keenly aware of yearning and loss. Rather than be consumed by sadness, she has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise the legendary Lowcountry Boykin hunting spaniels. It is a meager, narrow, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic: the storied deep-sea dolphins who come regularly to play in Sweetwater Creek; her extraordinary bond with the beautiful dogs she trains; her almost mystic communion with her own spaniel, Elvis; the dreaming old Lowcountry itself. Emily hides from the dreaded world here. It is enough.

And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season to spend a healing summer with the quiet marshes and river, and the life-giving dogs. Where Emily's father sees their guest as an entrée to a society he thought forever out of reach, Emily is at once threatened and mystified. Lulu has a powerful enchantment of her own, and this, along with the dark, crippling secret she brings with her, will inevitably blow Emily's magical water world apart and let the real one in—but at a terrible price.Anne Rivers Siddons is an author I like, her stories are often set in the Lowcountry and I enjoy that. This one looked good so I picked it up but there's no urgency to read it so it may be awhile!

From Goodreads: When Henry meets Clare, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Henry has never met Clare before; Clare has known Henry since she was six. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. Henry and Clare's attempts to live normal lives are threatened by a force they can neither prevent nor control, making their passionate love story intensely moving and entirely unforgettable. The Time Traveler's Wife is a story of fate, hope and belief, and more than that, it's about the power of love to endure beyond the bounds of time.This one got past me and I didn't really mind until I listened to Her Fearful Symmetry on audio and loved it. So I decided I need to read this one and then rent the movie!

From Goodreads: From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to World’s Fair, The March, and Homer & Langley, the fiction of E. L. Doctorow comprises a towering achievement in modern American letters. Now Doctorow returns with an enthralling collection of brilliant, startling short fiction about people who, as the author notes in his Preface, are somehow “distinct from their surroundings—people in some sort of contest with the prevailing world”.

This stunning collection, contains six unforgettable stories that have never appeared in book form and a selection of previous Doctorow classics.

All the Time in the World affords us another opportunity to savor the genius of this American master.This was a win on Goodreads First Reads. My only recollection of E.L. Doctrow is reading Ragtime at about age thirteen enjoying the story well enough but then going back and rereading all the sex scenes because it was one of my first more mature selections and was quite a shift from Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden! I've already the first few stories and while I haven't fallen in love with any of the characters yet, I'm connecting with the stories and finding them interesting (and tyhey've all been clean reads thus far!).