In My Mailbox #107

In My Mailbox brought to you by The Story Siren

For Review: thanks to Feiwel and Friends

When the Sea is Rising Red - Cat Hellisen

In sixteen-year-old Felicita’s world, magic is strictly controlled—or so those in power like to believe. After her dearest friend, Ilven, kills herself to escape an arranged marriage, Felicita chooses freedom over privilege. She fakes her own death and leaves her sheltered life as one of Pelimburg’s magical elite behind. Living in the slums, scrubbing dishes for a living, she falls for charismatic Dash while also becoming fascinated with vampire Jannik. Then something shocking washes up on the beach: Ilven’s death has called out of the sea a dangerous, wild magic. Felicita must decide whether her loyalties lie with the family she abandoned . . . or with those who would twist this dark power to destroy Pelimburg’s caste system, and the whole city along with it.

After the Snow - S.D. Crockett 

A stunningly beautiful novel about a young boy’s survival during a winter that never ends. 2059. The snow begins to fall. Only the few are prepared. A new ice-age has begun. Born after the snows, fifteen-year-old straggler kid Willo Blake has never known a life outside hunting and trapping in the hills. When his family mysteriously disappears, leaving him alone on a freezing mountain, Willo sets off into the unknown to find them. Meanwhile, across Britain, outlawed followers of survivalist John Blovyn are planning an escape to the fabled Islands talked of in a revolutionary book. When Willo meets an abandoned girl on his trek across the hills, his world collides with outlaws and halfmen on an epic journey that leads him to the new world of the city - a place where the dog spirit inside his head cannot help him. It is a journey of betrayal and violence. A journey of awakening love and humanity. A journey that changes everything he ever thought he knew.

Life is but a Dream - Brian James 

Alec and Sabrina are crazy in love. Problem is: Sabrina’s really crazy. Sabrina, an artist, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her parents check her into the Wellness Center. There she meets Alec, who is convinced it's the world that's crazy, not the two of them. They are meant to be together; they are special. But when Alec starts to convince Sabrina that her treatment will wipe out everything that makes her creative, she worries that she'll lose hold of her dreams and herself. Should she listen to her doctor? Her decision may have fatal consequences.

Various Positions - Martha Schabas

Nuanced, fresh, and gorgeously well-written, Martha Schabas' extraordinary debut novel takes us inside the beauty and brutality of professional ballet, and the young women striving to make it in that world. Shy and introverted, and trapped between the hyper-sexualized world of her teenaged friends and her dysfunctional family, Georgia is only at ease when she's dancing. Fortunately, she's an unusually talented and promising dancer. When she is accepted into the notoriously exclusive Royal Ballet Academy--Canada's preeminent dance school--Georgia thinks she has made the perfect escape. In ballet, she finds the exhilarating control and power she lacks elsewhere in her life: physical, emotional and, increasingly, sexual. This dynamic is nowhere more obvious than in Georgia's relationship with Artistic Director Roderick Allen. As Roderick singles her out as a star and subjects her to increasingly vicious training, Georgia obsesses about becoming his perfect student, disciplined and sexless. But a disturbing incident with a stranger on the subway, coupled with her dawning recognition of the truth of her parents' unhappy marriage, causes her to radically reassess her ideas about physical boundaries--a reassessment that threatens both Roderick's future at the academy and Georgia's ambitions as a ballerina.

Bought/Swapped:

The Girl Who Could Fly - Victoria Forester

The City of Ember - Jeanne DuPrau

Bamboo People - Mitali Perkins

Every You, Every Me - David Levithan (my review)

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer - Michelle Hodkin

Won:

Weird circle thing with 6-14-11 stamped on it (air date). The Nine Lives of Chloe King postcard.

That's what I go this week. What did you all get?