Mailbox Monday!



Another Monday, Another Mailbox!! This is a feature where we all share with each other the yummy books that showed up at our doors! WARNING: Mailbox Mondays can lead to extreme envy and GINORMOUS wishlists!!



Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire by Leslie Carroll.  Acquired by NAL Trade/Penguin.

Release Date:  January 5, 2010

SYNOPSIS:  A funny, raucous, and delightfully dirty 900-year history of the royal marriages of Europe's most famous-and infamous-monarchs.

Since time immemorial, royal marriages have had little to do with love- and almost everything to do with diplomacy and dynasty. Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia's Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France's Henri II and Catherine de Medici-all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England's Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge...

Full of the juicy gossip and bad behavior that characterized
Royal Affairs, this book chronicles the love-hate marriages of the crowned heads of Europe-from the Angevins to Charles and Di-and ponders how dynasties ever survived at all.




Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin (acquired by Delacorte Press)

Release  Date:  January 12, 2010

SYNOPSIS:  Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war. 

For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.





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10 comments:

  1. those sound like some great reads! lol....mailbox mondays do lead to extreme envy :O)
    http://thebookworm07.blogspot.com/

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  2. Hope you enjoy these, they look good!

    Mine is here: http://abookwormsblog1.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-are-you-reading-mailbox-monday.html

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  3. Sounds like two very different and enjoyable books.
    Alice I Have Been sounds like a touching, wonderful story.
    Notorious Royal Marriages should be fun.
    I'll be asking the library to order them (I work there).

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  4. I am DYING to read "Alice I have Been!' The both look great!

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  5. Oh I just adore that Alice I Have Been cover! I want this so bad now! I've always been fascinated with Alice in Wonderland in any format :)

    Happy reading!

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  6. I read Alice and I did like it a lot especially the second part of the book. I still didn't get the review up on my blog (I am sooo lazy these days).

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  7. Alice I have been is wonderful. Try to read that one pretty soon if you can! I know you've got a lot on your plate like everyone else :)

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  8. These both look great! I have had "Alice" on my TBR list for what seems like forever. Can't wait to read your reviews of both.

    Mine is here: http://psychoticstate.blogspot.com/2009/12/mailbox-monday-december-7-2009.html

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  9. Hi, Amy!

    You've seen the final copy of NOTORIOUS ROYAL MARRIAGES before I have! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

    And ... thank you, librarypat, for ordering a copy for your library. Where are you located?

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  10. I am very jealous of Alice I Have Been. I would love to read that one! I look forward to your thoughts on it!

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