Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/28

When you read this, I will be back at work after a lovely week of vacation, spent almost equally catching up on posts for this blog and wasting time with my family. (Sadly, I haven't yet figured out a way to generate a revenue stream from "writing about books on a personal blog," no matter how much I think about Web 15.0 or social sharing or other currently-hot buzzwords. Must be a failure of imagination on my part.)

My great benefactor, the Package Fairy, has possibly also been on vacation (or slumming) this past week, because he brought me only two things. But I'm quite happy to see both of them, so don't get the idea that I'm complaining. As usual, I haven't read either of these books yet, so what I'm about to tell you may be slightly incorrect. If so, you can obtain a full refund of your purchase price of Antick Musings by appearing in person at our Customer Service kiosk in the heart of the Plateau of Leng.

Carrie Vaughn is back with Kitty Steals the Show, the eleventh book (but only tenth novel) in the "Kitty Norville" series, a contemporary fantasy about a werewolf that actually seems to believe in the rule of law most of the time. (That's shocking for most urban fantasy, which tend to have a default morality of "whatever the protagonist does is inherently right" and a huffy attitude towards mundane police and other folks who might want to oversee Little Miz Vampire-killer's felonious activities -- come to think of it, most urban fantasy heroines have the same attitude towards government as investment bankers do: it's fine as long as it stays in its place and doesn't attempt to stop them.) I read the first half-dozen books in this series (and reviewed two of them), but I'm now four novels and a short-story collection behind, which I need to fix at some point. Kitty Steals the Show is a mass-market paperback, publishing tomorrow.

The other book I have is the new novel for younger readers by Catherine Fisher, Darkwater. I haven't read Fisher myself, but my younger son (Thing 2), who has been on a YA fantasy tear this last year, really liked Fisher's novels Incarceron and Sapphique, so I might give this one to him and let him tell me how good it is. (I'm not sure how I'd translate that to the blog, but I'll figure out something.) Darkwater is a deal-with-a-demon novel (Azrael, the deal-maker in question, doesn't seem to be the devil) centered on a boy and a girl a century apart and a building known as Darkwater Hall. Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin for younger readers, will publish this in November.