Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is hosted by Marsha at the Printed Page. Stop by Marcia's blog and check out what arrived in everyone's mailboxes.


Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir

Wendy Burden

Descended on her father's side from Cornelius Vanderbilt and on her mother's from a long line of Massachusetts puritans, Burden unsurprisingly opts to focus on the paternal heritage. "Even though this book is about my father and my mother," she begins, "the truth of the matter is my mother's family didn't have a lot of money, and my father's family did, and rich people behaving badly are far more interesting than the not so rich behaving badly." William Burden III, Wendy's father, killed himself when she was very small, and from that time on she and her brothers lived with their mother only on the rare occasions when she wasn't partying in some lotus-land like Palm Beach or Tijuana; eventually they came to view her as "a glamorous lodger who rented the master bedroom suite." The rest of the time the children were with their grandparents in what the author calls Burdenland, the couple's insanely grand demesnes in New York City, Northeast Harbor, Hobe Sound, and Mount Kisco. (The Fifth Avenue apartment, for those who are interested in such details, had fourteen bedrooms). Little Wendy distanced herself from her weird surroundings by cultivating a macabre streak and modeling herself on Wednesday Addams.

It was a surreal life, and Burden possesses the intelligence and dark humor to appreciate its more grotesque elements. Her narrative spares no one, not even herself and certainly not her careless, highly-sexed, frequently drunken mother. But as the book's dedication ("For my mother, goddamn it") reveals, one can sense a grudging affection behind every barbed sentence.




Town in a Blueberrry Jam
(The first book in the Candy Holliday Mystery series)

B. B. Haywood

In the seaside village of Cape Willington, Maine, Candy Holliday has an idyllic life tending to the Blueberry Acres farm she runs with her father. But, when an aging playboy and the newly crowned Blueberry Queen are killed, Candy investigates to clear the name of a local handyman. And as she sorts through the town's juicy secrets, things start to get sticky indeed...