Reviewing the Mail: Week of 6/22

I'm writing this early -- on Friday evening, actually, in the middle of packing for another trip on behalf of my liege, Lord John Wiley. That shouldn't effect any of what I write -- I can't see why it would -- but I do have an urge to share the most useless information with you folks, so there you are.

As usual, these are books that showed up on my doorstep, more or less unexpectedly, and they're all coming out in the near future from some of my nation's finer publishing firms. I have not read any of them, but here's what I can tell you anyway:

Sea Change is a first novel, some kind of odd fantasy -- the main character, Lilly, befriends a talking kraken and makes a frightening deal with a witch when he's sold to a circus, which can give you a sense of what kind of odd -- by S.M. Wheeler. She's probably no relation -- though we share a connection with upstate New York, for whatever that's worth -- but she's a Wheeler, which means her books are by definition better than most. Sea Change is a Tor hardcover, which hit stores a few days ago.

Steven Erikson's first novel was This River Awakens, a literary coming-of-age novel set in 1971 in a small Canadian town (and originally published under his real name, Steve Lundin). It is not a fantasy novel -- certainly not along the lines of his bloody, complex epic fantasies that began a couple of years later with Gardens of the Moon -- but it's being published now in the US (for the first time, I think) by his fantasy publisher, Tor, in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback the first week of July.

Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series -- in which a WW II destroyer wanders via one of those convenient light-show temporal rifts into an alternate world in which a civilization of talking lemurs is caught up in a gigantic war with a civilization of talking lizards -- reaches its eighth book with Storm Surge, coming as a hardcover from Roc on July 2nd. I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure that the cute furry aliens are the good guys and the cold-hearted clammy forked-tongues are the evil ones, as required.

And last is a big book of the art of Atsushi Ohkubo, best known (to me, at least) as the creator of the Soul Eater series, with the unsurprising title Soul Eater Soul Art. It's coming from Yen Press this month -- which means it's probably out in all the places you might want to buy it -- and it has a neat clear plastic slipcase and lots of nice Ohkubo art (though not so much in the way of captions or text of any kind).