In My Mailbox (8)

I didn't get anything on trade or from the library this week and still I had a great week thanks to my friends who generously sent donations for our library. And my friends are readers, writers and educators so I got a really cool stash! To see more, visit The Story Siren. I'm joined Mailbox Monday, too.

From Zetta:

Pemba's Song by Marilyn Nelson and Tonya Hegiman. I know Ms. Nelson's poetry and her sonnets are amazing. I'm looking forward to this spin on paranormal fiction. Pemba knows she's not crazy. But who is that looking out at her through her mirror's eye? And why is the apparition calling her "friend"? Her real friends are back home in Brooklyn.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson. In this fascinating and eye-opening Revolution-era novel, Octavian, a black youth raised in a Boston household of radical philosophers, is given an excellent classical education. He and his mother, an African princess, are kept isolated on the estate, and only as he grows older does he realize that while he is well dressed and well fed, he is indeed a captive being used by his guardians as part of an experiment to determine the intellectual acuity of Africans

Life of Pi by by Yann Martel and The Kite Runner by by Khaled Hosseini. Both of these have been in my tbr forever. One day. I did read A Thousand Splendid Suns. Loved it.

From Sweet Afton:

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Incredible. Read both Parables. POS will evoke a lot of emotion. Be prepared not to read anything for a few days after this. hopeful tale set in a dystopian future United States of walled cities, disease, fires, and madness. Lauren Olamina is an 18-year-old woman with hyperempathy syndrome--if she sees another in pain, she feels their pain as acutely as if it were real.

Symptomatic by Danzy Senna. A young biracial woman's postcollege year in New York proves psychologically challenging in Senna's muddled second novel. The unnamed narrator has landed a prestigious fellowship and a job as a reporter at a big New York magazine, not to mention a "strange lovely" new boyfriend who moves her into his apartment faster than she can say "nice place.

The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips.Phillips's searing debut reveals the poverty, injustices and cruelties that one black family suffers—some of this at the hands of its matriarch—in a 1958 backwater Georgia town. Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn loves her mother, Rozelle, but knows there's "something wrong" with her—which, as it soon becomes clear, is an extreme understatement.

Carlene Brice sent us a copy of her book, Orange, Mint and Honey. We're hoping to do an interview soon. African-American Shay Dixon, a burnt-out grad student, has a visitation/fantasy/fever dream featuring Nina Simone, the high priestess of soul, who counsels Shay to go home. To do that, she must face Nona, the drunken failure of a mother she's not spoken to in seven years and blames for a harrowing childhood that left her emotionally scarred.