In My Mailbox: Great Haul from HarperCollins!

In My Mailbox is a meme sponsored by The Story Siren, and one that I don't usually participate in, but this past week I had a visit from my HarperCollins sales rep and she left me with some pretty amazing books that I can't wait to read.  Oh, fall season, how I love thee!  The fall season in publishing is a little like Oscar season in film making--most publishing houses release the big literary guns in the fourth quarter of the calendar year, and this year Harper's got three big 'uns on the fiction list: Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Edrich, and Michael Chabon.  "Oh, look," she says innocently. "I seem to have all three right here in my book stack.  How about that?"

Which doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to the other books in this stack. Anything But Ordinary is a YA novel with a subject that hits somewhat close to home; it's the story of a girl who suffers a diving accident during her Olympic trials and ends up in a coma for 5 years.  Nothing like a little light reading, eh?

The Mirrored World, a follow-up novel from the writer who brought us The Madonnas of Leningrad, should be nice & atmospheric with its 18th century St. Petersburg setting. The Orchardist is Amanda Coplin's debut novel set in the Pacific northwest, and early word is that it's a literary epic worth sinking your teeth into. At the bottom of the stack is The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo, a multi-generational tale of women and their family's olive grove, which one of my favorite booksellers, Annie Philbrick from Bank Square Books, has already blurbed.