Mailbox Monday! (Jan 23, 2012)

 Mailbox Monday will be hosted in January by Alyce at At Home With Books.  In My Mailbox is hosted Sundays at The Story Siren. Please visit these posts and take a look at what packages everybody else got this week! 

The Starboard Sea

by Amber Dermont

After the suicide of his friend and sailing partner, Jason Prosper transfers to a New England boarding school to finish his senior year.  Here - amidst the stock market collapse of 1987, the abuses of class privilege, the mutability of sexual desire, and the risks of competitive sailing -- Jason must navigate the depths of his emotions, while finding his moral center, forgiving himself, and accepting the gift of love.

The Snow Child

by Eowyn Ivey

Homesteaders Jack and Mabel have carved out a quiet life of hard work and routine for themselves in the wilderness that is 1920s Alaska, both still deeply longing for the child it's now impossible for them to have.  Yet their love for each other is strong, and in a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they play together, building a child out of snow.  The next morning the snow child is gone -- but a trail of tiny footsteps remains.  For weeks following, they both catch glimpses of a blond little girl alone in the woods but neither dares mention it to the other, afraid that long-buried hopes have overruled common sense.

Then the little girl, who calls herself Faina, shows up on their doorstep.  Small and fair, she seems truly magical: she hunts with a red fox at her side, she leaves blizzards in her wake, and somehow she manages to survive alone in the harsh Alaskan wilderness.  As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand Faina, they come to love her as their own.  But in this beautiful, violent place, things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform them all.

Eowyn Ivey's enchanting, mesmerizing debut is the story of a couple whose longing for a child is so intense that they may have imagined her into existence.  As dazzling as the snowy Alaskan landscape in which it is set, The Snow Child shines with imaginative power, immersing the reader in a place both faraway and familiar, a tale both universal and brilliantly unique. 

Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life.  Blood, Bones and Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years:  the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned the essence of hospitality; Hamilton's own kitchen at Prune, with its many unexpected challenges; and the kitchen of her Italian mother-in-law, who serves as the link between Hamilton's idyllic past and her own future family -- the result of a prickly marriage that nonetheless yields lasting dividends.  By turns epic and intimate, Gabrielle Hamilton's story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion.

What books came home to you this week?