Mailbox Monday, created by Marcia at To Be Continued, formerly The Printed Page, has a permanent home at its own blog. To check out what everyone has received over the last week, visit the blog and check out the links. Leave yours too.

Also, each week, Leslie, Martha, and I will share the Books that Caught Our Eye from everyone’s weekly links.

Here’s what we received:

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls from Audible for book club.

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

Monsoon Mansion by Cinelle Barnes, purchased.

Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines. Filled with her mother’s opulent social aspirations and the gloriously excessive evidence of her father’s self-made success, it was a girl’s storybook playland. But when a monsoon hits, her father leaves, and her mother’s terrible lover takes the reins, Cinelle’s fantastical childhood turns toward tyranny she could never have imagined. Formerly a home worthy of magazines and lavish parties, Mansion Royale becomes a dangerous shell of the splendid palace it had once been.

In this remarkable ode to survival, Cinelle creates something magical out of her truth—underscored by her complicated relationship with her mother. Through a tangle of tragedy and betrayal emerges a revelatory journey of perseverance and strength, of grit and beauty, and of coming to terms with the price of family—and what it takes to grow up.

Aided by Austen by Vaishnavi Nair Kolli, Kindle freebie.

At twenty-seven, Jane Cotton cannot identify with any literary heroines, except one – Anne Elliot of Persuasion, whom she has long loved. Jane however, with her executive job, is no Anne; there is no lost love nor long regrets and at least Anne in Regency England did not have to deal with the small town gossip of Summerfield, where everybody knows everybody. Cautious Jane can only take comfort in her art of staying low! But when she is unexpectedly persuaded into the Annual Summerfield musical, Jane must realize that heroines become so, not as they watch from the sidelines, but as they wade knee deep into life’s hubbubs… perhaps her chance now with trials, confidantes (even suitors gasp!) and Austen-esque triumphs, might finally make for a life worthy of a novel?!

Mr Darcy & Elizabeth: Unexpected Affection by Cassandra Knightley, a Kindle freebie.

Lady Catherine’s objections will be the least of their concerns when compared with the nasty schemes of Mr Wickham, not to mention the scandals posed by Elizabeth’s own relations! Can Mr Darcy handle the chaos that is the Bennet Family? Can Elizabeth put aside her hurt pride long enough to allow her true feelings to shine? Will these two withstand scandal and scorn to finally discover their happily ever ?

Hell’s Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men by Harold Schechter, purchased.

In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm.” Some were hired hands. Others were well-to-do bachelors. All of them vanished without a trace. When their bodies were dug up, they hadn’t merely been poisoned, like victims of other female killers. They’d been butchered.

Hell’s Princess is a riveting account of one of the most sensational killing sprees in the annals of American crime: the shocking series of murders committed by the woman who came to be known as Lady Bluebeard. The only definitive book on this notorious case and the first to reveal previously unknown information about its subject, Harold Schechter’s gripping, suspenseful narrative has all the elements of a classic mystery—and all the gruesome twists of a nightmare.

What did you receive?