Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/8

Below are some books that showed up on my doorstep this week: I haven't read them yet, but I think I can describe them half-decently even with that handicap. Perhaps one of them will be your favorite book of the year?

First up is a package that had three books in it: the entire Zita the Spacegirl series by Ben Hatke. All of them are published by First Second: Zita the Spacegirl came out in mid-2010, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl in 2012, and the trilogy concludes with The Return of Zita the Spacegirl in May. They're all graphic novels, with an age guidance of 8+, and the first two have gotten a lot of admiring review attention and acclaim. And now I get to read all three of them together, which should be fun.

The other package was from Tor, which wanted me to know they were publishing Elspeth Cooper's novel The Raven's Shadow (third book in The Wild Hunt series) as a hardcover on March 11th. This is an epic fantasy series set on two different worlds separate by the Veil -- as far as I can tell, neither of them is the "real world," which is a nice breath of originality. The earlier books in the series -- because I assume with things like this that it's best to begin at the beginning -- are Songs of the Earth and Trinity Rising.