Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/10

The mail was light again, presumably because publishing offices were catching up from the holidays -- I know my office was, in particular the cube-shaped region of that office where I sit.

And, just in case you don't know what this list is: I review books, here and other places, so I get review copies in the mail. I'll never manage to review everything I see, but I want to at least mention them all, so I do posts like this every Monday morning, covering the mail of the week previous. And, last week, what I saw was:

Cartoon Marriage is a new book by the married New Yorker cartoonists Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin that combines cartoons by both of them (each separately, I mean) with new collaborative pages about their life and work together. Donnelly edited the vaguely similar Sex and Sensibility last year, which collected two hundred cartoons by ten female cartoonists on the subject of the sexes (and which I reviewed). Cartoon Marriage, which I'm greatly looking forward to reading, is coming from Random House as a hardcover January 27th.

I'm not quite as thrilled to see Ben 10 Alien Force: Ben 10 Returns, a fumetti-style retelling of the beginning of the TV series, but I know my two sons will be gaga over it, and I expect many other boys in their age group will be as well. This book is adapted by Elizabeth Hurchalla from the TV show and designed & lettered by Tomas Montalvo-Lagos. Del Rey published it on December 30th, and they also mention that an original graphic novel -- black-and-white and drawn in a manga style by person or persons unspecified -- will be coming along in the fall.

Tom Lloyd's The Twilight Herald is the second in his epic fantasy series "The Twilight Reign." I'm afraid I don't know much about this series -- has anyone out there read The Stormcaller and want to comment on it? Twilight Herald will be published by Pyr in trade paperback in March.

And last for this week is David Marusek's second novel, Mind Over Ship, a sequel to his critically acclaimed Counting Heads. (In a puckish twist, there's a big, very positive quote from The New York Times about Counting Heads, even though the Times's then-new SF reviewer, David Itzkoff, famously compared it to "a biology textbook or a stereo manual.") Tor will publish Mind Over Ship in hardcover this month.