Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/16

Once again, I'm listing the books -- usually brand-new -- that I saw the previous week for review or notice or whatever, sent by the various friendly and hardworking publicists of the publishing business.

Here's what I saw:

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany is an attractive little book from Two Cranes Press, along the lines of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. It's edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg, with illustrations by Janet Chui. I've got a finished book, and the cover letter says that they expect most sales to be through their website, so I think this is officially published at this point. Contributors are mostly people I don't recognize -- which doesn't mean much -- but include Jay Lake, Vera Nazarian, Christopher M. Cevasco, and my co-worker Livia Llewellyn. (After a quick check, I found that it's not available at either Amazon or BN.com, which is unfortunate -- I hope it at least gets into the hands of some convention dealers.)

The Scourge of God is the second book in the second trilogy of S.M. Stirling's contemporary "Change" series, in which all technology that interfered with his plot suddenly stopped working so that his characters could batter each other with outdated weaponry. This is precisely the kind of book I avoid reading to protect my blood pressure -- my entire side of the continent is marked on the internal map as "Eastern Death Zone," and I've previously mentioned how I feel about writers who slaughter my family fictionally to allow their neo-barbarians to rape and pillage. So I won't be reading this one, to avoid turning into a spittle-flecked screaming lunatic. But, for those of you who do like this stuff, Roc will publish Scourge of God September 2nd.

The folks at Aurora sent me four more adults-only yaoi manga from their Deux line, neatly sealed up in shrinkwrap that I'm not sure if I'll ever open:

• Ruff Love by Tamaki Krishima, the story of a dog who comes back as a man (with dog ears and tail) to fall in love with his former owner's grandson
• Heavenly Body by Takashi Kanzaki, in which a schoolboy (at boarding school, I think) has his body fought over by boyish representatives of Heaven and Hell
• Hisami Shimada's Maid in Heaven, about a boy who has to replace his grandmother as a maid for a rich young man
• and Two of Hearts by Kano Miyamoto, which might be less high-concept -- the back cover copy talks about a magazine writer who meets a "shy, troubled young man undressing on the beach"

The manga publisher Broccoli also sent me some books, the first time I've looked closely at their output. All were the beginnings of series -- that's probably assumed when it comes to manga, but I'll say it anyway. First was Koi Cupid, an all-ages series by Mia Ikumi. It's about three cute little girls -- Koi, Ai, and Ren -- who are cupids-in-training, and who get into all sorts of trouble. The first volume was published in April, and a second will be out in December.

Also from Broccoli is Sola, a series for teenagers with (in the order of the credits on the book) art by Chaco Abeno, story by Naoki Hisaya, and character design by Naru Nanao. A high school boy whose hobby is taking pictures of the sky meets a girl who can't go out in the sun, and, before long, supernatural stuff and a guy with a sword pop up to make trouble. The first volume of Sola was published in June.

And last of the three from Broccoli is E'S by Satol Yuiga, originally published in January of 2007. (This series has four volumes out already, with four more anticipated before the end of the year.) It looks to my eye like a manga take on the X-Men concept, set in a world where people with psychic powers are persecuted and focusing on Kai Kudou, who is part of an organization to save and protect psychics.