[In My Mailbox] #17

gehostet von The Story Siren


Letzten Sonntag hat mir leider die Zeit für den IMM-Post gefehlt, dabei hätte ich zwei neue Bücher zu vermelden gehabt. Diese Woche hab ich Zeit aber dafür keine Bücher bekommen. Ironie lässt grüßen.
Macht aber nichts, dann stell ich euch jetzt einfach kurz die Bücher der vorletzten Woche vor. ;-)

Zum einen kam da "A gathering Light" von Jennifer Donnelly. Von Revolution war ich so dermaßen begeistert, dass ich nur wenig später Donnellys erstes Jugendbuch bestellt habe.

It's 1906 and 16-year-old Mattie Gokey is at a crossroads in her life. She's escaped the overwhelming responsibilities of helping to run her father's brokedown farm in exchange for a paid summer job as a serving girl at a fancy hotel in the Adirondacks. She's saving as much of her salary as she can, but she's having trouble deciding how she's going to use the money at the end of the summer. Mattie's gift is for writing and she's been accepted to Barnard College in New York City, but she's held back by her sense of responsibility to her family--and by her budding romance with handsome-but-dull Royal Loomis. Royal awakens feelings in Mattie that she doesn't want to ignore, but she can't deny her passion for words and her desire to write. 

At the hotel, Mattie gets caught up in the disappearance of a young couple who had gone out together in a rowboat. Mattie spoke with the young woman, Grace Brown, just before the fateful boating trip, when Grace gave her a packet of love letters and asked her to burn them. When Grace is found drowned, Mattie reads the letters and finds that she holds the key to unraveling the girl's death and her beau's mysterious disappearance. Grace Brown's story is a true one (it's the same story told in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and in the film adaptation, A Place in the Sun), and author Jennifer Donnelly masterfully interweaves the real-life story with Mattie's, making her seem even more real.

Mattie's frank voice reveals much about poverty, racism, and feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. She witnesses illness and death at a range far closer than most teens do today, and she's there when her best friend Minnie gives birth to twins. Mattie describes Minnie's harrowing labor with gut-wrenching clarity, and a visit with Minnie and the twins a few weeks later dispels any romance from the reality of young motherhood (and marriage). Overall, readers will get a taste of how bitter--and how sweet--ordinary life in the early 1900s could be. Despite the wide variety of troubles Mattie describes, the book never feels melodramatic, just heartbreakingly real.


Gleich am nächsten Tag kam völlig überraschend ein Rezensionsexemplar des Otherworld-Verlages. Die Leseprobe klang sehr vielversprechend, ich hoffe, ich kann das Buch bald lesen.


Sie sind Verbündete der Polizei und helfen, Verbrechen aufzuklären - die Seher. Doch einigen von ihnen ist das zu wenig. Getrieben von dem Wunsch nach Macht, haben sie Dämonen heraufbeschworen, die sich nicht länger kontrollieren lassen. Im heutigen Edinburgh, der romantischen alten Hauptstadt Schottlands, ist der Agent Logan Drake hinter den Dämonensehern her - und verliebt sich in eine Frau, die mit ihrem inneren Teufel kämpft.

Klingt nach Fantasy gemischt mit Thriller/Krimi - bin gespannt!

Herzlichen Dank an Otherworld!