In My Mailbox - 10/16/10

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

Here are my new books for this week:

For review:

Anya's War by Andrea Alban

Anya Rosen and her family have left Odessa for Shanghai, believing that it will be a safe haven from Hitler’s forces. At first, Anya’s life in the Jewish Quarter of Shanghai is privileged and relatively carefree: She has crushes on boys, fights with her mother, and longs to defy expectations just like her hero, Amelia Earhart.
Then Anya finds a baby - a newborn abandoned on the street. Amelia Earhart goes missing. And it becomes dangerously clear that no place is safe — not for Jewish
families like the Rosens, not for Shanghai’s poor, not for adventurous women pilots.
Based on a true story, here is a rich, transcendent novel about a little-known time in Holocaust history.


Bought:

Cate of the Lost Colony by Lisa Klein

Lady Catherine is one of Queen Elizabeth's favorite court maidens—until her forbidden romance with Sir Walter Ralegh is discovered. In a bitter twist of irony, the jealous queen banishes Cate to Ralegh's colony of Roanoke, in the New World. Ralegh pledges to come for Cate, but as the months stretch out, Cate begins to doubt his promise and his love. Instead it is Manteo, a Croatoan Indian, whom the colonists—and Cate—increasingly turn to. Yet just as Cate's longings for England and Ralegh fade and she discovers a new love in Manteo, Ralegh will finally set sail for the New World.
Seamlessly weaving together fact with fiction, Lisa Klein's newest historical drama is an engrossing tale of adventure and forbidden love—kindled by one of the most famous mysteries in American history: the fate of the settlers at Roanoke, who disappeared without a trace forty years before the Pilgrims would set foot in Plymouth. (I loved the ARC so much that I had to buy a finished copy!)


Threads and Flames by Esther Friesner

It's 1910, and thirteen-year-old Raisa has just traveled alone from a small Polish shtetl all the way to New York City. It's overwhelming, awe-inspiring, and even dangerous, especially when she discovers that her sister has disappeared and she must now fend for herself. She finds work in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory sewing bodices on the popular shirtwaists. Raisa makes friends and even—dare she admit it?— falls in love. But then 1911 dawns, and one March day a spark ignites in the factory. One of the city's most harrowing tragedies unfolds, and Raisa's life is forever changed. . . .
One hundred years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, this moving young adult novel gives life to the tragedy and hope of this transformative event in American history.


Other:

Across the Universe by Beth Revis

A Story of Love, Murder, and Madness Aboard an Enormous Spaceship Bound for the Future
Amy is a cryogenically frozen passenger aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed. She expects to wake up on a new planet, 300 years in the future. But fifty years before Godspeed's scheduled landing, Amy's cryo chamber is unplugged, and she is nearly killed.
Now, Amy is caught inside an enclosed world where nothing makes sense. Godspeed's passengers have forfeited all control to Eldest, a tyrannical and frightening leader, and Elder, his rebellious and brilliant teenage heir.
Amy desperately wants to trust Elder. But should she? All she knows is that she must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets before whoever woke her tries to kill again.

(Well the story behind this one is weird, I ordered a finished copy from a site that only sells NEW books in the UK, I guess since it was in stock I assumed the UK version was out earlier, somehow they mailed me the ARC.... it's a mystery! They refunded my money though, and told me to keep it.)