Mailbox Monday – 1/3/11

Mailbox Monday is on a blog tour! The popular meme started over at The Printed Page blog is being hosted by Rose City Reader for the month of January!

Here’s what we’ve received recently:

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Janice’s Thoughts: This is one of the best historical novels I have come across lately. Pullinger weaves this heart-breaking, yet heroic, story of real-life characters Lady Lucie Duff Gordon (toast of London society), Sally Naldrett (her loyal lady’s maid), and Mr. Omar Abu Halaweh (their Egyptian dragoman). With Lady Duff Gordon’s departure from England and family in 1862 to Egypt’s Nile Valley to seek relief from tuberculosis, the author takes the reader right into the heart of a life of class, race, love and loyalties in Egypt. Through her research using Lucie’s own book Letters From Egypt, Katherine Frank’s biography, Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt and many other sources, Pullinger creates, with this reader for sure, the desire to read more about both these characters and life in Egypt during this period.

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Janice’s Thoughts: To be a “tourist” visiting a city is a world away from actually living in and becoming a part of that same city. We discovered that fact several years ago when we lived in a small town (in a noodle factory, to be exact) in Germany for two years. The joys of discovering which day every week the fresh flowers arrive at the village flower kiosk, the delight of watching your little street change with the seasons, or the realization that you have almost become a “regular” in the local gasthaus cannot occur within a week or a month. Penelope Rowlands has compiled the writings of a variety of persons who have experienced the reality of becoming “insiders” to the daily life of the fascinating city of Paris. While each of these persons was drawn to Paris for differing reasons, their memoirs all echo the theme of how their lives were changed by becoming a resident of this magical “city of lights” and give readers a view that will not be found in any tourist guidebook of Paris. Each writer makes you feel the love, loneliness, and frustrations that they have experienced but you are primarily left with their love for this city which is now “theirs.”