In My Mailbox #14

In My Mailbox is hosted each week by The Story Siren.

This week I picked up two books at the library:

Some Girls: My Life in a Harem by Jillian Lauren (2010)

At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The "casting director" told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties. Soon, Jillian was on a plane to Borneo, where she would spend the next eighteen months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, leaving behind her gritty East Village apartment for a palace with rugs laced with gold and trading her band of artist friends for a coterie of backstabbing beauties. More than just a sexy read set in an exotic land, "Some Girls" is also the story of how a rebellious teen found herself - and the courage to meet her birth mother and eventually adopt a baby boy.

Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, An American Town by Warren St. John (2009)

Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement centre in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world's war zones - from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colours playing soccer in any open space they could find. The town also became home to Luma Mufleh, an American-educated Jordanian woman who founded a youth soccer team to unify Clarkston's refugee children and keep them off the streets. These kids named themselves the Fugees. This fast-paced chronicle of a single season is a complex and inspiring tale of a small town becoming a global community-and an account of the ingenious and complicated ways we create a home in a changing world.