Mailbox Madness (5/2 - 5/9)

In My Mailbox is hosted at The Story Siren. 

Mailbox Monday is hosted at The Printed Page . Please visit Kristi and Marcia  and take a look at what packages everybody else got this week!

101 Things I Learned (TM) in Fashion School

by Alfredo Cabrera with Matthew Frederick

101 Concise Lessons on Every Aspect of the Fashion Industry: Trends -- Design -- Materials and Costs -- Production -- Marketing -- Licensing -- Outsourcing -- Pricing. . . and more.

This indispensable resource provides essential advice to undergraduates, designers, and anyone interested in the fashion world. Each two-page layout is illustrated and illuminates an important industry topic -- using humor, statistics, or real-life examples to drive the point home. You will find yourself dwelling on each page, as the lessons behind the lessons take root.

It's like getting a fashion school degree in 202 pages.

Never Let You Go

by Erin Healy

Losing everything has Lexi clinging to her daughter. Hell is determined to loosen her grip.

It's been seven years since disaster struck her family. Lexi Solomon has held it all together since then -- just barely.

But now Lexi is losing it. The husband who deserted her is back in town, wanting to see their daughter Molly. Her sister's shameless murderer is up for parole. An unsavory old friend is demanding payment for debts that Lexi knows nothing about and can't begin to meet.

And something else is going on -- something Lexi feels but can't explain. A dangerous shift is taking place between this reality and the next. Forces beyond her imagination are vying for control.

A rare novel that will satisfy a wide range of readers, Never Let You Go explores the high-stakes decisions played out in the thin spaces between heaven and earth. As the enemy's grip tightens around Lexi, she will have to decide what's truly worth holding on to.

After the Fall

by Kylie Ladd

That's the thing about falling. It doesn't go on indefinitely, and it rarely ends well. . . plunge, plummet, pain. Even if you get straight back up, even when you regain your footing, after the fall nothing is ever quite the same.

Neuropsychologist Kylie Ladd makes her fiction debut with the most fully realized exploration of adultery in recent years.

A captivating blend of psychological insight, raw emotion, and rare wisdom courses through this enthralling tale of two marriages brought together by friendship -- and the illicit affair that blows their worlds apart.

"I had been married three years when I fell in love," begins Kate, a firecracker of a woman who thought she'd found the yin to her yang in Cary, her sensible and adoring husband. Until the night she shares an unexpected (and unexpectedly public) kiss with their married friend Luke, marking the beginning of a fiery romance that will tear the foursome apart and shake the core of their most intimate hopes and fears.

After the Fall peers into the souls of two young, devoted couples betrayed by the one thing they thought was secure and faultless: their friendship. told in a kaleidoscope of first-person voices, this is an unsettling, morally complex read about the secret longings we all harbor and what happens when the unexpected becomes inevitable.

Amanda Memories

by Dr. Joel R. Gecht

Ambitious but naive, Brian Roberts is set on a career path that will lead to a psychology degree, financial stability, and emotional fulfillment. His marriage to hometown sweetheart Nancy seems to assure a fine future.

But when beautiful green-eyed Amanda Wagner, a deeply troubled young woman, becomes his patient, the future becomes blurry.  Her dependency on Brian becomes an aphrodisiac for him.  The need and the obsession are mutual.

Brian goes on to become a successful Hollywood TV talk show doc, but he flounders in the pretentious and posh world of Beverly Hills, celebrity, and money. And worst of all, Brian and Nancy are drifting apart.

Then, while making her final decent, Amanda is found dead and Brian emerges as the prime suspect. Nancy sets out to vindicate Brian. Her quest, however, will lead her to the darkest corners of Amanda's tortured past and will not only determine Brian's fate, but will ultimately unlock the secrets trapped within Amanda's family lineage.

Welcome to Harmony

by Jodi Thomas

A Place to Belong

Sixteen-year-old runaway Reagan has always wanted a place to belong. She's never had a real home of her own, but maybe she can borrow someone else's. At least for a little while. . .

At the nursing home where Reagan works, Miss Beverly Truman's fond memories of Harmony, Texas, seem to fill an empty space inside the girl. After Miss Beverly passes away, Reagan travels to Harmony, pretending to be the woman's granddaughter, and is taken into the home of Beverly's surviving brother.

Still, Reagan is afraid to trust the gruff kindness shown to her by Jeremiah Truman and the warm friendship offered by another teenager named Noah, who dreams of being a rodeo star. She keeps her distance from Noah's sister, Alex McAllen, who's the town sheriff and busy with her own stormy relationship with volunteer fire chief Hank Matheson.

But when prairie fires threaten Harmony, Reagan learns the true meaning of family, friends, and home. . .

Men and Dogs: A Novel

by Katie Crouch

It was the spring of 1985, Hannah Legare was a precocious eleven-year-old completely devoted to her father, Dr. Buzz Legare. One afternoon, he went on a fishing trip in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor, taking the family dog with him. They found the dog later, drifting alone in the small aluminum boat, but Buzz was never seen again.

Fast-forward more than two decades: Hannah is thirty-five, with a successful business and a dedicated husband, Jon, in San Francisco. She's left Charleston far behind, but not the conviction that her father is alive somewhere -- not dead, just missing.  Her obsession begins to play out in self-sabotage, coming to a head one night when, having royally screwed things up with Jon, she finds herself drunkenly climbing up her own fire escape -- with disastrous results.

Head bandaged and heart bruised, Hannah is ordered home by her strong-willed mother, Daisy, and reluctantly welcomed by Palmer, her much more responsible brother who stayed behind in Charleston. There, she encounters rivals and ghosts from her past, including Warren, the childhood love she could never quite forget. Enlisting his help, Hannah sets out on a quest to discover what really happened to her father so long ago.  Palmer and Daisy worry about the manic measures Hannah will take to dredge up the past. Some family secrets, they reason, are best left buried for good.

Graced by a heroine every bit as memorable as the characters Katie Crouch introduced us to in Girls in Trucks -- antic, flawed, and shrewd -- Men and Dogs is a hilarious and moving novel about family, loyalty, and faith.

Dear Bob, Dear Betty: Love and Marriage During the Great Depression

by Elizabeth Catherine Wright

1909 and 1910 were tumultuous years for two Chicago families. Frank Lloyd Wright sailed for Europe with his lover, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, leaving his wife Catherine and their six children behind in Oak Park. James Howard Kehler, a prominent advertising man and friend of Wright's left his pregnant wife and their two young sons to marry a widow.

Robert Llewellyn Wright ("Bob"), was Frank and Catherine's youngest son. Five years old at the time of his father's departure, he suffered throughout his youth from the public scandals that continued to surround his father's personal life. Elizabeth Bryan Kehler ("Betty"), born in Oak Park in July 1910, worshipped her absent father, rebelling against the constraints imposed by her stepfather.

Bob and Betty meet in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression. Sparks fly and they fall in love. Since Betty is in Milwaukee, and Bob in Chicago, they can only see each other on weekends. Their suspenseful love story is told through letters to one another, which grow in frequency and intensity as they struggle to express unfamiliar feelings and search for a way to marry and live together.

The Queen's Governess

by Karen Harper

The extraordinary tale of Elizabeth I's closest ally and most trusted confidante, a woman whose story has never been told. . . until now.

Katherine Ashley, the daughter of a poor country squire, comes to the royal court as a spy for Henry VIII's man Thomas Cromwell. She befriends Anne Boleyn and, as a dying favor to the doomed queen, agrees to become governess to the young Princess Elizabeth. Together they suffer bitter exile, assassination attempts, and imprisonment, barely escaping with their lives. But when Elizabeth is crowned, Kat continues to serve her, faithfully guarding all the queen's secrets, even the ones that could bring down her monarchy.  "Anne Boleyn," Elizabeth once said, "gave me life, but Kat Ashley gave me love."

Darlington Woods

by Mike Dellosso

Rob Shields has just lost his wife and son. As he is battling depression, denial, and an irrational fear of darkness, an eerie dream convinces him that the answer to the mystery of his son's disappearance is in Darlington, a town found on no map.  Teaming up with a quirky waitress who insists she has been there, Shields begins his quest to find the truth. His search leads him deep into the woods surrounding the town where, once in, there seems to be no way out.

Burned (House of Night Novels)

by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Things have turned black at the House of Night. Zoey Redbird's soul has shattered. With everything she's ever stood for falling apart, and a broken heart making her want to stay in the Otherworld forever, Zoey's fading fast. It's seeming more and more doubtful that she will be able to pull herself back together in time to rejoin her friends and set the world to rights. As the only living person who can reach her, Stark must find a way to get to her.  But how? He will have to die to do so, the Vampyre High Council stipulates.  And then Zoey will give up for sure.  There are only seven days left.

Enter BFF Stevie Rae. She wants to help Z, but she has massive problems of her own. The rogue Red Fledglings are acting up, and this time not even Stevie Rae can protect them from the consequences. Her kinda boyfriend, Dallas, is sweet but too nosy for his own good. The truth is, Stevie Rae's hiding a secret that might be the key to getting Zoey home -- but it also threatens to explode her whole world.

In the middle of the whole mess is Aphrodite: ex-Fledgling, trust-fund baby, total hag from Hell (and proud of it). She's always been blessed (if you could call it that) with visions that can reveal the future, but now it seems that Nyx has decided to speak through her with the goddess's own voice, whether Aphrodite wants it or not. Aphrodite's loyalty can swing a lot of different ways, but right now Zoey's fate hangs in the balance.

Three girls. . . playing with fire. . .if they don't watch out, everyone will get Burned.

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

by Hampton Sides

On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man -- whose real name was James Earl Ray -- drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace's racist presidential campaign.

On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage men were crushed to death in their hydraulic truck, provoking the exclusively African American workforce to go on strike. Hoping to resuscitate his faltering civil rights crusade, Martin Luther King, Jr. joined the sanitation workers' cause, but their march turned violent. Humiliated, King fatefully vowed to return to Memphis in April.

With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel when the drifter catches up with his prey. Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots and the pathos of King's funeral, Sides gives us a riveting crosscut narrative of the assassin's flight and the sixty-five-day search that led investigators to Canada, Portugal, and England -- a massive manhunt ironically led by Hoover's FBI.

Magnificent in scope and drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, this nonfiction thriller illuminates one of the darkest hours in American life -- an example of how history is so often a matter of the petty bringing down the great.

 

Hiking Through: Finding Peace and Freedom on the Appalachian Trail 

by Paul V. Stutzman

When he lost his wife to breast cancer, Paul Stutzman decided to make some big changes.  He quit his job of seventeen years and set out on a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,176 mile stretch of varying terrain spanning fourteen states. During his nearly five-month-long hike, he battled brutal trail conditions and overwhelming loneliness, but also enjoyed spectacular scenery and trail camaraderie.

With breathtaking descriptions and humorous anecdotes from his travels, Stutzman reveals how immersing himself in nature and befriending fellow hikers helped him recover from a devastating loss. Somewhere between Georgia and Maine, he realized that God had been with him every step of the way, and on a famous path through the wilderness, he found his own path to peace and freedom.

A Woman's Walk in Grace: God's Pathway to Spiritual Growth

by Catherine Martin

Would you like to experience a new season of growing spiritually and becoming mature in the Lord? You've probably learned that simply trying harder is not the answer. Instead, the secret is to extend your roots deep into the rich soil of God's grace. Join Catherine Martin in this refreshing tour of God's favor, where you will. . .

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  trade your ashes for God's beauty and your poverty for His riches
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  relax in the assurance that Christ is living His life in you
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  follow the Lord's leading through the seasons of the soul
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  enjoy God's gift of a new day
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  embrace God's dreams for your life

Enjoy a quiet stroll through the garden of God's grace, where you can "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:18) 

What great things were in your mailbox this week?