Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/28/18

Howdy! This week I have two books -- one that I bought, and one that came in the mail from its publisher. Since the latter is what this weekly post was originally designed to showcase, it gets to go first.

New from our friends at Tachyon is Nancy Springer's fantasy novel The Oddling Prince, newly published in trade paperback. She's written a lot of interesting books across several genres during her long career -- I remember Larque on the Wing, her Tiptree-winner from 1994, and I think I've read several other of her books as well -- and this seems to be her first novel in about five years, after "retiring." (Do authors ever really retire? Or, rather, does it stick?) This looks to be a historical (or maybe ahistorical) fantasy, set in the Scottish kingdom of Calidon, with a cursed dying king and two very different brothers.

And the book I bought is another short graphic novel from German cartoonist Mawil: We Can Still Be Friends. It looks to be another slice-of-life semi-autobiographical story, like his Home and Away, which I read at the beginning of the year. Mawil has a great, very distinctive cartoony style, and makes funny comics in that style -- I need to keep digging up his stuff.