The Printed Page

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don’t count, eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

If you’re new to Mailbox Monday welcome! Thank you to everyone who stops by Mailbox Monday. Whether you comment or visit I appreciate your taking the time to drop in.

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Fiction ~ The Summer Kitchen by Karen Weinreb (new-to-me author/Authors on the Web) (Claimed by Zia)

When Nora Banks goes to answer the doorbell very early one November 1st, she thinks it must be a group of teen pranksters still out trick-or-treating. But it’s no prank—it’s the Feds, who have come to arrest her husband Evan for a white collar crime. Nora’s enviable, privileged life in the eighteenth-century house she’d quit her job to renovate to museum-quality perfection, is upended in an instant.
The Bedford wives close ranks against Nora and her children. Nora’s only support comes from her children’s nanny Beatriz. The two women bond to raise the boys as smoothly as possible while Nora goes back to work. Baking has always been her biggest passion, so she launches a business of her own, the Summer Kitchen. Tempted by the offer of an affair with one of the local husbands and thwarted by an alpha wife who actively tries to shut down her business, Nora has to reach into reserves she didn’t know she had to support her family and change her way of thinking about life, family, money, and romance.

Fiction ~ Breaking the Bank by Yona Zeldis McDonough (new-to-me author/author contact) (Claimed by Carrie)

Mia Saul is down on her luck. Dumped by her husband, jettisoned from her job and estranged from her adored older brother, she and her young daughter Eden have had had to make a downscale move to a crummy apartment where their neighbors include a tough young drug dealer and a widower who lets his dogs use the hallways as their own personal litter box. Juggling a series of temporary jobs, wrangling with her ex-husband over child support and trying to keep pace with Eden’s increasingly erratic behavior have left Mia weary and worn out.

Then one evening a routine stop at her local bank’s ATM yields a surprise. The machine begins producing bills—quite a lot of them in fact—that are neither recorded nor debited from her account. At first Mia attributes the excess cash to a stroke of much needed luck. But when the machine continues to give her unaccounted for money and actually begins communicating with her, her life gets turned around in ways she never thought possible.

Contemporary/historical fiction ~ Receive Me Falling by Erika Robuck (new-to-me author/publicist contact) (Claimed by Shannan)

Every slave story is a ghost story. The haunting words of an historian and former cane worker on the Caribbean island of Nevis launch Meghan Owen on her quest to unlock the secrets of an abandoned sugar plantation and its ghosts. After Meg’s parents die in a car accident on the night of her engagement party, she calls off her wedding, takes leave of her job in Annapolis, and travels to land she’s inherited on Nevis. A series of discoveries in an old plantation house on the property, Eden, set her on a search for the truth surrounding the shameful past of her ancestors, their slaves, and the tragedy that resulted in the fall of the plantation and its inhabitants. Through a crushing phone call with her lawyer, Meg learns that her father’s estate was built on stolen money, and is being sued by multiple sources. She is faced with having to sell the land and plantation home, and deal with the betrayal she feels from her deceased father. In alternating chapters, the historical drama of the Dall family unfolds. Upon the arrival of British abolitionists to the hedonistic 19th century plantation society, Catherine Dall is forced to choose between her lifestyle and the scandal of deserting her family. An angry confrontation with Catherine’s slave, Leah, results in the girl’s death, but was it murder or suicide? Hidden texts, scandalous diaries, antique paintings, and confessional letters help Meghan Owen uncover the secrets of Eden and put the ghosts to rest.

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What books came into your house last week? Don’t forget to leave a link to your Mailbox post or a list of books if you don’t have a blog.

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