Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/31

This post appears in 2011, but records the last few books that arrived in my mailbox at the tail end of 2010 -- and, as with most of this past month, that wasn't much mail, since we all had much better things to do than send books to bloggers in December. (I know my company wasn't doing a whole lot of blogger outreach this past month, so I'm surprised and happy that I saw anything this past month.)

As always, these are books that have just arrived -- I haven't read any of them -- but I'll tell you what I can from looking at them and applying the vast powers of my mind. This week, there were two books in the mail:

Story of Lee, Volume One begins a cross-cultural love story in comics form -- it's written by Sean Michael Wilson (a Scotsman living in Japan) and illustrated by Chie Kutsuwada (a Japanese woman living in London), so they both know a bit about living in a different culture. Lee is a young woman working in her father's shop in Hong Kong, and Matt is a young Scot she meets -- I gather that her father doesn't approve, and that there are other complications. Wilson was also the co-editor of AX: Alternative Manga, which I haven't gotten to yet, but has been reviewed very well (and very widely). The Story of Lee is being published in trade paperback this month by NBM -- the art is somewhat reminiscent of manga, but it reads left-to-right, like a Western comic.

And the other book I saw this week was the fifth (and, I think, last) in the "Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie" series, written by David Lubar for middle-graders, Enter the Zombie. (I particularly like the use of "enter" in the title of the last book in a series; it's surprising and funny.) I haven't read any of these books yet, though they sound like fun -- they're about a kid who became a zombie and then was recruited for a super-secret organization; how can you go wrong? -- and I keep chucking them at my own tween sons. I'll attempt to get one of them to read this, and report back. Enter the Zombie is officially published by Tor tomorrow, which means that you can buy it anywhere you get books today...but only if you ask nicely.