Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/20/21

Three books this week: I'll start with two that I bought from a predatory monopolistic online retailer (use my links! at least until the antitrust authorities finally get off their butts!) because I was already getting some birthday presents for my older son (aka Thing 1, now 23). The third is yet another one from the library, because those are still free.

The Book Tour is the first new graphic novel for adults from Andi Watson in more than a decade -- my guess is since 2005's Little Star, but I could be miscounting. (He did a book or two for Minx, which was fuzzily YA; that could count, or maybe not, as adult.) Anyway, he's been making books for younger readers, and they have been awesome, but I am an adult and I'm a huge fan of the burst of GNs he did in the early years of this century (Breakfast After Noon, Love Fights, Dumped, Slow News Day). So I'm really happy to see him get back to his old stomping grounds, and looking forward to reading this.

Speaking of old stomping grounds, it's been nearly two decades since Steven Brust last wrote in the voice of Paarfi of Roundwood, but he's back in The Baron of Magister Valley. The original burst of Paarfi books transmuted Dumas's D'Artagnan romances into Brust's fictional world of Dragarea, in an arch, affected style heavily influenced by the first Dumas translation Brust read. (The style could take some getting used to, but I loved it - and Brust fans are likely to be looking for stylistic tricks and fine writing to begin with.) Those books came out from 1991 through 2004 in three "novels" and five volumes. (The third D'Artagnan book, The Vicomte of Bragelonne, is massive and typically published in at least three volumes, so Brust followed that model closely.) Magister Valley is Brust's Dragaeran transformation of the other major Dumas work, The Count of Monte Cristo. I am so far out of the SFnal loop that this book managed to be published and live in the world for several months before I even knew it existed, so it was a happy discovery.

And the library book is The Fire Never Goes Out, a collection of memoir comics from the past decade by Noelle Stevenson, best known as a cartoonist for Nimona. I say "as a cartoonist," because she's also show-runner for the current She-Ra TV show, which has a somewhat higher profile than any mere book, and she's also written Lumberjanes stuff, which is pretty well known. She's also still ridiculously young, but she can't help that.