My Giveaway + Announcements

*My first foray into an Author Interview with Andrew Xia Fukuda is up! (Should I do more?)
*My first manga review for Natsume Yuujinchou V.1 - please let me know what you think

Sunday, January 17, 2010

In My Mailbox - 01/17/2010

(Meme from The Story Siren)

LIBRARY:

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities--like the Housekeeper’s shoe size--and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away. The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

- I'm about halfway through, SO FRICKIN GOOD, READ THIS EVERYONE, NINEFLY ESPECIALLY, YOU HEAR ME?!?!?! Unless the ending somehow impossibly disappoints, I'm gonna run to the bookstore to find a copy of my own. Highly recommended, y'all. ♥

Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice

Trish Taylor’s white ancestry never got in the way of her love for her black ex-husband, or their mixed race son, Will. But when Trish’s marriage ends, she returns to her family’s Denver, Colorado home to find a sense of identity and connect to her past.
What she finds there shocks her to the very core: her mother and newborn sister were not killed in a car crash as she was told. In fact, her baby sister, Billie Cousins, is now a grown woman; her grandparents had put her up for adoption, unwilling to raise the child of a black man.
Billie, who had no idea she was adopted, wants nothing to do with Trish until a tragedy in Billie’s own family forces her to lean on her surprisingly supportive and sympathetic sister. Together they unravel age-old layers of secrets and resentments and navigate a path toward love, healing, and true reconciliation.


- Diverse characters! Sister bonding! Family stuff! What more can one want out of a novel, really?

Written On Your Skin by Meredith Duran

THE SOCIETY BEAUTY WHO SAVED HIS LIFE...
Beauty, charm, wealthy admirers: Mina Masters enjoys every luxury but freedom. To save herself from an unwanted marriage, she turns her wiles on a darkly handsome stranger. But Mina's wouldbe hero is playing his own deceptive game. A British spy, Phin Granville has no interest in emotional entanglements...until the night Mina saves his life by gambling her own.

THE JADED SPY WHO VOWED TO FORGET HER...
Four years later, Phin inherits a title that frees him from the bloody game of espionage. But memories of the woman who saved him won't let Phin go. When he learns that Mina needs his aid, honor forces him back into the world of his nightmares.
IN LIVES BUILT ON LIES, LOVE IS THE DARKEST SECRET OF ALL...

Deception has ruled Mina's life just as it has Phin's. But as the beauty and the spy match wits in a dangerous dance, their practiced masks begin to slip, revealing a perilous attraction. And the greatest threat they face may not be traitors or murderous conspiracies, but their own dark desires....


- *wrings hands* Please don't let there be any Orientalism, please don't let there be any Orientalism...

Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan

Jameela and her family live in a poor, war-torn village in Afghanistan. Even with her cleft lip and lack of educational opportunities, Jameela feels relatively secure, sustained by her Muslim faith and the love of her mother, Mor. But when Mor dies, Jameela’s father impulsively decides to start a new life in Kabul. Jameela is appalled as he succumbs to alcohol and drugs, then suddenly remarries, a situation that soon has her a virtual slave to a demanding stepmother. After she’s discovered trying to learn to read, Jameela is abandoned in a busy market, eventually landing in an orphanage run by the same army that killed so many members of her family. Throughout it all, the memory of her mother sustains her, giving Jameela the strength to face her father and stepmother when fate brings them together again. Inspired by a true story, and set in a world far removed from that of Western readers, this powerful novel reveals that the desire for identity and self-understanding is universal.

-Whut a Canadian YA author wrote a book with non-white characters?! Pinch me, please.

EBOOK:

Birthday Girl by Diane J. Wright

TOTAL BOOKS = 5

15 comments:

Emma said...

Oh these all look excellent! The House Keeper and the Professor looks especially good. Nice picks!

susan said...

Read this and loved it. I commented about it at BES, but I haven't done a full review. ((smack upside the head)).

yuan said...

@Emma,

Thanks! *cuddles library copy of HK&P* =D

@susan,

lol which book did you read? *glances at blog* Um, I'm assuming it's Wanting Mor? well, whichever of the four books it is, I'll be looking forward to your review! =D

ninefly said...

*makes grabby hands* I NEED NAOOOOOO
arghargharghargh! it's just sitting there on the screen TEMPTING me DDDD8
*GRABBY HANDS*

brizmus said...

I so NEED to read the Housekeeper and the Professor. For serious. . .

Color Online said...

Sorry about that Ah. I read Wanting Mor. Carleen's Brice is our book club read for Februrary. Join us. It's scheduled for first Friday in February.

See my recent read post here

Jenn said...

The Housekeeper and the Professor sounds like a sweet story (but I think I better wait until you've finished and reviewed it, just it doesn't have a HEA after all).

Rebecca said...

Great week you had. All your books look really interesting. Hope you enjoy reading all your books.

in which a girl reads said...

Ooh, Wanting Mor looks fabulous! And the Housekeeper, short-term memory loss, yikes! But that's an awesome premise.

Happy Reading :)

Laura (The Bookie Bunch) said...

Great books! My mom would really want Wanting Mor so I'll have to get that for her.

Here's what I got this week: http://bookielaura.blogspot.com/2010/01/in-my-mailbox-1-17-10.html

Have a great week!

MissA said...

I can't find oyur email so I'll comment here
your comment at the Story Siren made my life. Amazing! Just wanted to say you rock and thanks for coming to my defense. I'm hopelessly uneloquent and I'm not sure how to respond. All I know is, i'm upset.

I still need to read Children of the waters, it's on my bookshelf! And I want to read wanting Mor after reading susan, Zetta, Edi and Doret's reviews!

yuan said...

@MissAttitude,

Ahah, right, I never did put up my email for public viewing. Please don't thank me, I'm speaking out and engaging because I believe it was right for me to do. And believe me, boy was I upset when I read the post and the comments. But I've seen many, many racefail derailing posts typical to the one on Story Siren in the past *year* alone, and the responses given, so I had practice on how to respond, in a way.

lol me too, I haven't opened the pages of Children of the Waters yet. *guilty* I thought I'd try Wanting Mor first... =D

Diana Dang said...

Happy reading! :D

Anonymous said...

I keep seeing you all over the blogosphere and had to stop by and visit your blog. What an amazing, intelligent and welcoming place to be!

Aarti said...

I've heard nothing but good about the Housekeeper and the Professor. MUST get my hands on it! The others all sound wonderful, too- great library loot!