Mailbox Monday (April 9)

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 Cindy at Cindy’s Love of Books.

I received one book in the mail this week: This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family’s Heartbreak by Melissa Coleman, which I’m reading for a TLC blog tour later this month.

From the back cover:

In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman’s parents pack their VW truck and set out to forge a new existence on a rugged coastal homestead. Inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life, Eliot and Sue build their own home by hand, live off the crops they grow, and establish a happy family with Melissa and her two sisters. They also attraction national media and become icons of the back-to-the-land movement, but the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. In the wake of a tragic accident, idealism gives way to human frailty, and by the fall of 1978, Greenwood Farm is abandoned. The search to understand what happened is at the heart of this luminous, heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive memoir.

I also forgot to mention in my previous MM post that my sister Brogan gave me Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna for my birthday. (Brogan reviewed Forna’s memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water on this blog.)

From the back cover:

Aminatta Forna, whose moving and gorgeously written memoir garnered international acclaim, now delivers her first novel, Ancestor Stones, a powerful, sensuous book that beautifully captures Africa’s past century and her present, and the legacy that her daughters take with them wherever they live. Abie returns home from England to West Africa to visit her family after years of civil war, and to reclaim their plantation, Kholifa Estates. There to meet her are her aunts: Asana, lost twin and head wife’s daughter; Hawa, motherless child and manipulator of her own misfortune; Mariama, who sees what lies beyond; and Serah, follower of a Western made dream. Through their tales, Abie begins gathering the family and the country’s history. Reminiscent of The God of Small Things or The House of the Spirits, Ancestor Stones is the unforgettable tale of a family and four women’s attempts to alter the course of their own destiny.

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Cindy’s Love of Books.