In My Mailbox

Marcia at the Printed Page hosts Mailbox Monday. It's been a long time since I've participated. This week however I received some adult titles I wanted to share and they don't fit the scope of New Crayons. Received some YA, too.

This week in my mailbox:

From Paperback Swap, I got a fantastic hardcover copy of Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler. We already have a copy in our Prize Bucket for Color Online and this was a trade book. Ari would be pleased to know I'm keeping this for my personal collection. The opening scene is bone-chilling. Primal and violent and dark. This book turns so many mores and beliefs on their head than I think I've ever seen in a single novel.

Received a copy of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women edited by Gail Collins for review. A comprehensive mix of oral history and Collins's keen research, this is the definitive book about five crucial decades of progress, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone this beloved New York Times columnist is known for.


Also received Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz for review. I love memoirs and it seems I'm going to continue my current streak with this genre. 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.



Paper Towns by John Green. I received this as part of Pass-it-On challenge I learned about from Edi at Crazy Quilts.
Paper Towns also alerts us to something that is easy to overlook. I think we all understand that we tend to dehumanize our so-called enemies, and so it’s easier to watch out for that. But it’s harder to watch out for the fact that we can also dehumanize the people we admire or love. By imagining them to be perfect, we are not allowing them any emotions that don’t conform to our mental picture of them. As Quentin says:

And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a room full of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Read Ana's full review.

Thanks to author, L.M. Preston, I received a copy of Explorer X-Alpha.
For most kids, a trip to space camp is a trip of a lifetime, for Aadi it was life altering. After receiving a camp immunization needed for travel to Mars, Aadi finds that the immunization is the catalyst of an insidious experiment. Lucky for him, he was engineered to survive, thrive, and dominate. Without realizing he is being trained to conquer worlds, and manipulated under the guise of a camp, he unfolds the plot too late for a change of fate.