In My Mailbox - 8/28/10

Credit goes to The Story Siren for creating and hosting the In My Mailbox feature.

I forgot to do an IMM post last week, so there are two weeks of books here. I also got Mockingjay, but everyone knows about that book! I am not sure if I will review it though because most of my strong opinions on it require spoilers to explain.

Bought:

Storyteller by Patricia Reilly Giff

While staying with her aunt, Elizabeth finds something remarkable: a drawing. It hangs on the wall, a portrait of her ancestor, Eliza, known as Zee. She looks like Elizabeth.
The girls’ lives intertwine as Elizabeth’s present-day story alternates with Zee’s, which takes place during the American Revolution. Zee is dreamy, and hopeful for the future—until the Revolution tears apart her family and her community in upstate New York. Left on her own, she struggles to survive and to follow her father and brother into battle.
Zee’s story has been waiting to be rediscovered by the right person. As Elizabeth learns about Zee, and walks where Zee once walked and battles raged, the past becomes as vivid and real as the present.


Lady Jane Grey: Queen for Sale by Caroline Corby

Lady Jane Grey: Queen for Sale is the story of a Tudor girl doomed from birth by her royal blood. When Henry VIII dies Jane overhears that, inexplicably, in his will he has elevated her family in the event that his own children produce no heirs. Overnight the nine-year-old Jane has become a valuable pawn in the struggle for the throne of England. After being sold by her parents to Thomas Seymour, Jane is traded between powerful Tudor families as she grows older. As King Edward VI gets frailer, Jane’s value rises. She falls into the hands of Warwick, a man who will do anything to get her on the throne. When he forces her to marry his son, Jane’s fate is sealed. She must become queen or die.


I Am Canada: Blood and Iron by Paul Yee

Heen's father and grandfather have brought their family in China to the brink of ruin with their gambling habits. To solve their money troubles, Heen and his father come to Canada to build the railway - a decision plagued by disaster. The living conditions provided for workers are wretched and work on the railway is excruciating. Transporting tons of gravel and working in tunnels about to be dynamited proves to be deadly for many of his co-workers. Soon the friction between the Chinese workers and the whites, who barely acknowledge these deaths, reaches a fevered pitch. As an added stress, Heen's father has found some men to gamble with, which puts all of their earnings at risk. Heen's only solace is his journal, where his chilling observations of the injustice and peril heaped upon the workers serve as an important testament to this dramatic era in Canadian history.


I Am Canada: Prisoner of Dieppe by Hugh Brewster

Alistair "Allie" Morrison lets his friend Mackie talk him into enlisting for WWII, even though he's only 18. After months of endless training Allie's eager for battle. But his first action is not just any battle…it's the disastrous raid on the German-held port of Dieppe. He and his unit are under orders to take one of the main beaches, but they disembark from their landing craft onto a killing ground. As Allie gets his bearings and makes sense of the horror on every side, he witnesses friends advance into a massacre. All told, almost a thousand Canadian soldiers died that day. In the resulting chaotic evacuation, Allie and Mackie are captured as POWs and sent to Stalag VIIIB in Germany. Still shell-shocked from their fighting, the soldiers struggle to maintain their courage. Others, like Mackie, are determined to plot an escape and outwit their captors, at any cost.


For review:

Vigilante's Bride by Yvonne Harris

Robbing a stagecoach on Christmas Eve and kidnapping a woman passenger is the last thing Luke Sullivan expects to do. He just wanted to reclaim the money stolen from him, but ends up with a feisty copper-haired orphan thrown over his shoulder who was on her way to marry Sullivan's bitter enemy.
Emily McCarthy is an orphan out of options. Forced to marry because she was too old for her orphanage, she doesn't take kindly to her "rescue." Still she trusts God can turn any situation to good especially when it seems Sullivan may just be the man of her dreams. But Sullivan's crossed a dangerous man unused to losing and Emily may just be the prize he's unwilling to sacrifice.



A Prince Among Frogs by E.D. Baker

While Princess Millie and her dragon fiance, Audun, prepare for their wedding, all kinds of disasters strike, causing the family to leave the castle and pursue the Wizard Olebald, the sea witch Nastia Nautica and other adversaries from earlier books who must be banished from Greater Greensward forever. Most of all they need to find out which of the many frogs in the swamp is Felix, Millie's baby brother…