Mailbox Monday~ I won ALL these!!

Edited to Add that I am ecstatic to announce that Claire from The Anne Boleyn files won the Cleaopatra's Daughter!
Congrats, Claire!

Mailbox Monday is hosted by Marcia at The Printed Page. We share what books that we found in our mailboxes last week. And I am adding what I purchased, swapped, etc.


This week, all SEVEN of my new books came from Giveaways I won, I had a great lucky streak in August & early September, and here they come. And it may seem like I just enter giveaways randomly given the way I have all these books all of a sudden, but I promise that I don't take the opportunity from other readers unless I really do want to read the books!! So here we go:

From So Many Precious Books, So Little Time!
I won The Blue Star: A Novel by Tony Earley:

"Seven years ago, readers everywhere fell in love with Jim Glass, the precocious ten-year-old at the heart of Tony Earley's bestseller Jim the Boy. Now a teenager, Jim returns in another tender and wise story of young love on the eve of World War Two. Jim Glass has fallen in love, as only a teenage boy can fall in love, with his classmate Chrissie Steppe. Unfortunately, Chrissie is Bucky Bucklaw's girlfriend, and Bucky has joined the Navy on the eve of war. Jim vows to win Chrissie's heart in his absence, but the war makes high school less than a safe haven, and gives a young man's emotions a grown man's gravity. With the uncanny insight into the well-intentioned heart that made Jim the Boy a favorite novel for thousands of readers, Tony Earley has fashioned another nuanced and unforgettable portrait of America in another time--making it again even realer than our own day."

From A Novel Menagerie I won The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Random House Reader's Circle) by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.

"January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name."


From Dan's Journal I won some books that would be perfect for Serena and Anna's War Through The Generations challege:
On The Bluffs by Steven Schindler "SOMETIMES THE BIGGEST LIES ARE THE ONES WE LIVE While Brian DeLouise was working the graveyard shift at a conspiracy theory-crazed radio station his wife was alley-catting around Washington, DC. But a cheating wife and a dead-end job no longer made him angry or depressed. He was just numb. It took a daring brush with death to awaken his senses and a few clicks on Google to begin a journey to recapture a love he believed was gone forever. Brian finds his lost lover in a rundown mansion on the windswept bluffs of Cape Cod, where he must confront a fast approaching evil while he risks losing everything he now cherishes."

The Sentinels: Fortunes of War by Gordon Zuckerman
"In this riveting amalgam of political intrigue, poignant romance, and bare-knuckled action, six friends risk everything to thwart an international Nazi conspiracy. In the financial devastation of the 1930s, a greedy, power-hungry group of German industrialists plot to usher in the National Socialist Party in order to rearm Germany and reap the financial rewards. Thus rises Hitler. With Hitler in power, the Six Sentinels, graduates of an elite American doctoral program, uncover the industrialists' plan to hoard hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal war profits. Using their financial and familial connections around the globe, they work to foil the machinations of the financiers of the Third Reich. In a daring strategy of Robin Hood style thievery, the sentinels put their lives on the line to serve justice--and thus become embroiled in a dangerous and violent international conspiracy.
A gripping story that escalates at every turn, The Sentinels: Fortunes of War is the first in a series that follows the Six Sentinels as they continue to alter the course of history."

Giv: The Story of a Dog and America by Boston Teran
"My name is Dean Hickok, sergeant, late of the U.S. Marines. I nearly ran down a dog one night on a back road during a Kentucky rainstorm. The dog, it turned out, had been made to suffer and left to die in a crate. But his will to survive, his determination to overcome the many cruelties inflicted upon him, and the ultimate and unabated goodness that abided in him afterward, are the actual reason these pages bearing my name exist at all. I was profoundly wounded of heart and empty of purpose as I drove through the Kentucky darkness that night. I had recently returned from Iraq, the lone survivor of my squad, when my headlights bore through a sweeping rain to find him there, stumbled and fallen. Both of us being on that same road, on that night, and at that moment, was not an accidental happenstance but the poetry of fate. For as much as I saved a dogs life, he saved mine."


From Reading the Past, Sarah had a fantastic title game and all of her participants were winners. Entrants had a puzzle to work from to find current titles and authors, and the top winner found 106 books! I only found 75, I told myself to stop there and I had no idea there would really be so many more! But it was great fun! The books I chose as a participant were:

East of the Sun: A Novel by Julia Gregson "As the Kaisar-i-Hind weighs anchor for Bombay in the autumn of 1928, its passengers ponder their fate in a distant land. They are part of the "Fishing Fleet" -- the name given to the legions of Englishwomen who sail to India each year in search of husbands, heedless of the life that awaits them. The inexperienced chaperone Viva Holloway has been entrusted to watch over three unsettling charges. There's Rose, as beautiful as she is naïve, who plans to marry a cavalry officer she has met a mere handful of times. Her bridesmaid, Victoria, is hell-bent on losing her virginity en route before finding a husband of her own. And shadowing them all is the malevolent presence of a disturbed schoolboy named Guy Glover.
From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites to the poverty of Tamarind Street, from the sooty streets of London to the genteel conversation of the Bombay Yacht Club, East of the Sun is graced with lavish detail and a penetrating sensitivity -- historical fiction at its greatest."

And this one looks awesome:
Sand Daughter by Sarah Bryant "A fascinating snapshot of the world of the Crusades."
"Khalidah faces an arranged marriage at the behest of her father, a Bedouin Clan chief. But when a mysterious stranger named Sulayman reveals the machinations behind her pending union, she suddenly finds herself a pawn in a deadly plot involving her own feuding tribe and the powerful Templar Knights. Faced with certain death, Khalidah runs away with Sulayman, a man she barely knows. Their journey, and the desire that grows between them, will thrust Khalidah toward unimaginable adventure, and the echoes of a past that somehow connect her to the Jinn-the mysterious Afghan warriors who may hold the key to the coming battle for the Holy Land."

I think I am most excited about The Blue Star and the last two.. but thanks to everyone who held these giveaways! I hope I add a few more via some BBAW giveaways, but time will tell. What did you get this past week in your mailbox?