Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 13, 2022

This week I have two library books to write about. Remember how a week or two ago I said I requested two books? Well, I misremembered: it was three. The other two are here now, and these are they:

The Girl from the Sea is, I think, a standalone graphic novel for mid-grade readers by Molly Knox Ostertag, who did The Witch Boy and at least two sequels for the same publisher. (Scholastic.) (And, not for nothing, did well enough at it, and they published it well enough that this book has a "New York Times Bestselling Author" slug at the bottom of the cover.) I've read two of the three Witch Boy books, which are solid you-can-do-the-thing-you-want-to-do-young-human! books of the kind perennially necessary. I do like to see what Scholastic is putting out, since they're the real 800-pound gorilla of the comics world, making books that vastly more actual people read than any longjohns publisher. And Ostertag does nice work.

And The Good Asian, Vol. 1 collects what I think is the first half of a noirish story by Pornsak Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkgi set in 1936 San Francisco. I don't know much more than that, and haven't (as far as I can remember) read any work by either of those creators before. In fact, I'm not 100% sure I'm going to be able to find the back half of this story easily, so....there's that.