Mailbox Monday (July 11)

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books they received during the previous week. Warning: MM can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and huge wish lists! Mailbox Monday, which was started by Marcia (who now blogs at A girl and her books) is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Gwendolyn B. at A Sea of Books.

I was starting to despair last week that I would ever get any mail, let alone books, but then finally on Friday I received the two books I’d been waiting for...

The first was Wishing for Snow: A Memoir by Minrose Gwin, which I will be reading for a TLC Book Tour later this month.

From the back cover:

For novelist Minrose Gwin, growing up was a time of chaos and uncertainty, the result of being raised by a parent with a serious mental illness. Life with poet Erin Taylor was unpredictable at best and painful at the worst times, as she spiraled ever deeper into psychosis until her eventual death from cancer. But reading her mother’s childhood diary as an adult, Minrose encountered a very different Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner. Her late mother’s words, written in the 1930s, revealed a cheerful, perceptive young girl growing up in rural Mississippi who wished for snow that “usually didn’t come”—a girl with a bright view of the future as she progressed from college student to young mother to published poet, only to have an unbearable darkness close in around her, cruelly suffocating her hopes and dreams. In her poignant and extraordinary memoir, Wishing for Snow, Minrose Gwin sets out to rediscover her mother in the poems, letters, newspaper clippings, and quixotic lists that Erin left behind after her death. The result is an unforgettable true story of a Southern family and the tragic figure at its center—and a loving daughter’s determination to find the mother she never knew.

The second was Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore, which I won from Sarah at Sarah Reads Too Much during Armchair BEA. I selected this book based on Wendy’s review (at Caribousmom).

From the back cover:

In an effort to make sense of the deaths of several loved ones, Kathleen Dean Moore turned to the comfort of the wild, making a series of excursions to ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands to learn what the natural world could teach her about sorrow and gladness. This book is a record of her experiences. It’s a stunning collection of carefully observed accounts of her life—tracking otters on the beach, cooking breakfast in the desert, canoeing in a snow squall, wading among salmon in the dark—but it is also a profound meditation on the healing power of nature.

Finally, my dad recently returned from a trip to Europe, during which he visited Chatsworth House (which is where the movie The Duchess was filmed) and bought me a signed copy of Wait for Me!: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister by Deborah Devonshire, as he knew I’m interested in the Mitford sisters.

From the inside flap:

Wait for Me! is a misleading title: people have been running to catch up with the youngest of the famous Mitford sisters ever since she could walk. At the age of ninety, Debo (as she is known to all her friends) looks back on a life lived at a cracking pace. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and wittily describing her parents (so memorably fictionalised by her sister Nancy); she talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics (while not being at all political herself), finally setting the record straight. Throughout the book she writes brilliantly about the country and her deep attachment to it and those who live and work in it.

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to A Sea of Books.