In My Mailbox (07.20-25.09)

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I had what I consider to be a nice, normal week--just three books. First off, I won a book (yay!) from Amanda at A Patchwork of Books:

Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler (ARC). Synopsis:

"Don't worry, Anna. I'll tell her, okay? Just let me think about the best way to do it."
"Okay."
"Promise me? Promise you won't say anything?"
"Don't worry." I laughed. "It's our secret, right?" According to her best friend Frankie, twenty days in ZanzibarBay is the perfect opportunity to have a summer fling, and if they meet one boy ever day, there's a pretty good chance Anna will find her first summer romance. Anna lightheartedly agrees to the game, but there's something she hasn't told Frankie---she's already had that kind of romance, and it was with Frankie's older brother, Matt, just before his tragic death one year ago.

And from the kind folks at HarperCollins I received a copy The Lost Chalice by Vernon Silver. Synopsis:

Sotheby's. New York City. June 19, 1990.

Nothing of its kind had been sold to the public in more than a century. On a warm June evening on Manhattan's Upper East Side, with the auction-house showroom crammed with the wealthy, the curious, and the press, history was made when an anonymous man in a green golf sweater paid an unprecedented three quarters of a million dollars to win the twenty-five-hundred-year-old chalice. After that night, this historical artifact disappeared, its whereabouts a mystery. Until now.

It is among the most prized of antiquities: the Greek artist Euphronios's wine cup depicting the death of Zeus's son Sarpedon at Troy. Lost for more than two millennia, the chalice—one of only six of its kind found intact—mysteriously surfaced in the collection of a Hollywood producer, who then sold it to a Texas billionaire. Coveted by obsessed private collectors, dealers, and museum curators, it was also of intense interest to the Italian police, who believed it belonged to their country, where it had first been dug up earlier in the twentieth century.

In this breathtaking tale of history, adventure, and intrigue, archaeologist and journalist Vernon Silver pieces together the extraordinary tale of the lost cup and offers a portrait of the modern antiquities trade: a world of tomb raiders, smugglers, wealthy collectors, ambitious archaeologists, rapacious dealers, corrupt curators, and international law enforcement. Spanning twenty-five hundred years, The Lost Chalice moves from the mythic battlefield of the Trojan War to the countryside of twentieth-century Tuscany, the dusty libraries of Oxford University to the exhibition halls of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the cramped law-enforcement offices of the Carabinieri to the tony rooms of New York's auction houses to solve the mystery of the world's rarest masterpiece.

As Silver learns, the discovery of the chalice exposes another riddle—and an even greater missing treasure. Epic and thrilling, The Lost Chalice is a driving true-life detective story that illuminates a big-money, high-stakes, double-dealing world, which is as fascinating as it is unforgettable. Silver's thrilling tale opens a window onto Italian history, culture, and life rarely seen.

And as I'll be participating in an upcoming TLC tour I received a copy of Time of My Life by Allison Winn Scotch. Synopsis:

Jillian Westfield has the perfect suburban life straight out of the upscale women's magazines that she obsessively reads. She’s got the modern-print rugs of Metropolitan Home, the elegant meals from Gourmet, the clutter-free closets out of Real Simple, and the elaborate Easter egg hunts seen in Parents. With her successful investment banker husband behind the wheel and her cherubic eighteen-month-old in the backseat, hers could be the family in the magazines’ glossy Range Rover ads.

Yet somehow all of the how-to magazine stories in the world can’t seem to fix her faltering marriage, banish the tedium of days spent changing diapers, or stop her from asking, “What if?”

Then one morning Jillian wakes up seven years in the past. Before her daughter was born. Before she married Henry. Suddenly she’s back in her post–grad school Ikea-furnished Manhattan apartment. She’s back in her fast-paced job with the advertising agency. And she’s still with Jackson, the ex-boyfriend and star of her what-if fantasies.

Armed with twenty-twenty hindsight, she’s free to choose all over again. She can use the zippy ad campaigns from her future to wow the clients and bosses in her present. She can reconnect with the mother who abandoned her so many years before. She can fix the fights at every juncture that doomed her relationship with Jackson. Or can she?

With each new choice setting off a trajectory of unforeseen consequences, Jillian soon realizes that getting to happily ever after is more complicated than changing the lines in her part of the script. Happiness, it turns out, isn’tan either-or proposition. As she closes in on all the things she thought she wanted, Jillian must confront the greatest what-if of all: What if the problem was never Henry or Jackson, but her?

Sharp, funny, and heartwarming, Time of My Life will appeal to anyone who has ever wanted to redo the past and will leave readers pondering, “Do we get the reality we deserve?”

What was in YOUR mailbox this week?