Mailbox Monday October 19, 2009

Mailbox Monday is hosted at The Printed Page.


Primitive by Mark Nykanen
I won this book in a drawing from Bell Bridge Books during Book Blogger Awareness Week. Thank you to Jackie over at LiteraryEscapism.

Sonya Adams steps into a limo at a Montana airport expecting to be driven to her next modeling assignment. Minutes later she realizes the horrifying truth: she's been tricked and kidnapped. Plunged into the world of a neo-primitive survivalist cult in the snow-locked mountains of the Pacific Northwest, Sonya becomes a pawn in their mission to reveal a doomsday environmental secret -- a secret the government and the energy corporations will kill to keep.


Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan by Ali Eteraz
I received this book from Julie over at FSB Associates.

Ali Eteraz's Children of Dust is a spellbinding portrayal of a life that few Americans can imagine. From his schooling in a madrassa in Pakistan to his teenage years as a Muslim American in the Bible Belt, and back to Pakistan to find a pious Muslim wife, this lyrical, penetrating saga from a brilliant new literary voice captures the heart of our universal quest for identity.



Fallen by Lauren Kate
I received this book from Random House for review.

There's something achingly familiar about Daniel Grigori.

Mysterious and aloof, he captures Luce Price's attention from the moment she sees him on her first day at the Sword & Cross boarding school in sultry Savannah, Georgia. He's the one bright spot in a place where cell phones are forbidden, the other students are all screw-ups, and security cameras watch every move.

Even though Daniel wants nothing to do with Luce--and goes out of his way to make that very clear--she can't let it go. Drawn to him like a moth to a flame, she has to find out what Daniel is so desperate to keep secret . . . even if it kills her.

Dangerously exciting and darkly romantic, Fallen is a page turning thriller and the ultimate love story.

Elynia: A Novel in Lyric by David Michael Belczyk
I received this book from the author for review.

Elynia is about humility.

It examines four generations of characters diverse in time and place whose varied struggles distill a unified expression of human need. The characters are interconnected in unusual but intimate ways, for example: the immigrant shoe-man works his life away in a dying town to see his son wrongly arrested by a man whose shoes he shines; as a student, the son watched his friend betray the memory of a departed mother by stealing her makeup for a drunken gag; the friend marries a waitress who secretly loves a man atoning for his past by refurbishing a house; a man whose paintings were rejected by his love, the granddaughter of the woman who boards the shoe-man after a fire. Elynia is the only named character in the manuscript but appears only in reference by others. The other characters occupy iconic roles, each representing a stage or state in life. The reader's second-hand knowledge of Elynia mirrors the search for identity that haunts the unnamed, tactile characters and blurs their distinctions.