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December's delights are here! Thrilling tales, romance, and magic await you.

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Family secrets aren't just dangerous, they are deadly.


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Two restless souls, one wild Christmas on the ranch�where sparks fly, and dreams ride free.


Mina

Mina, March 2004
by Jonatha Ceely

Delacorte
336 pages
ISBN: 038533690X
Hardcover
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"Beautifully inspiring historical saga."

Fresh Fiction Review

Mina
Jonatha Ceely

Reviewed by Anne Barringer
Posted November 28, 2005

Women's Fiction Historical

In an attic full of disposable treasures and lost memories, a young woman uncovers a locked wooden box. Letters wait to tell their treasured tales, inside a cocoon of yellowed cloth, bound by a fancy green ribbon and a small golden ring. Thus, the reader is drawn along into this beautifully contained story. Paddy is not your average Irish male servant. In fact, Paddy is really Mina, a young woman who narrowly escaped the deadly horrors of the Irish famine with her elder brother, only to be left behind when their first passage sinks. Wrongfully indentured to a woman who would use her in a brothel, she finds herself in the kitchen of Master Coates. Mina learns to cook as a much stronger bond forms between her and the quietly efficient Mr. Serle, head chef of the Coates' estate. Learning to trust someone with her most dangerous secrets, Mina must mature both physically and mentally, putting her misconceptions and misdirections behind her. Only then can she escape her past, embrace her dreams and inspire her new companion as well. A beautifully wrought tale, MINA is inspiring, engaging and enlightening. Ms. Ceely's first novel evokes the lushness of the land, while showcasing the abject poverty within its borders and the fight to rise above it all. This is a book to treasure, as much as one treasures the human spirit. Readers will remember Mina long after the last page is turned.

Learn more about Mina

SUMMARY

In the musty attic of an upstate New York house, a woman finds a clasped box, hidden away for over a century. Inside, wrapped in cambric and tied with a green ribbon, is an old manuscript written by a girl dreaming of a better life, fighting for survival, and coming of age in a time of chaos and danger. This wondrously told tale is a stirring adventure set in nineteenth-century England, a novel of rich history and vibrant imagination. Amid the lush fields and gardens of an English estate, in a kitchen where every meal is a sumptuous feast, a young servant called Paddy anxiously hides her true identity. Using coal soot and grease, she conceals her flaming head of red hair and covers her body, desperate to keep the job she needs to survive. But the girl, whose real name is Mina, cannot conceal from herself the pain of her past or the beauty of an Ireland she remembers with love and grief-- until she meets a man who convinces her to trust him, a man hiding sorrows of his own. To the mysterious Mr. Serle--the estate's skilled and quiet chef--Mina dares to confess her true identity and reveal a shattered past: her flight from the blighted fields of her homeland to the teeming streets of Liverpool...her memories of the family she lost and dreams for the future. And as Mina and Mr. Serle begin to know each other, an extraordinary journey begins--a journey of faith and identity, adventure and awakening, that will alter the course of both their lives. The sights and sounds of nineteenth-century England come vividly to life in a tale that explores the intricate relationship forged by two people in hiding.


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