Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 23, 2023

I have four books to mention this week - three that I found randomly on library shelves, while I was there for something else, and one that came in the mail. As always, I'll start with the mail.

The Corset and the Jellyfish is the new book from Nick Bantock, best known for the massively bestselling "Griffin & Sabine" books in the early '90s - those were clever and well-constructed, with physical letters nestled into envelopes in the books, using what I think of as pop-up book technology for different ends. My sense is that his career since then has been one part expanding upon that single massive success, with some subsequent Griffin & Sabine projects (a CD-ROM, a second trilogy, a stage play) and one part doing things that success enabled (lectures, painting, being part of the official committee selecting stamps for Canada).

This book may have vague links to the Griffin and Sabine series - the back cover mentions two loose touchpoints - but it's mostly its own thing, a self-declared "Conundrum of Drabbles." It contains one hundred very short stories with accompanying spot illustrations, in the style Bantock has used for Sabine's work. It looks like there is meant to be some kind of loose, or hidden, overall story or narrative. So quirky, but well within the space Bantock has worked before. It's a small hardcover from Tachyon Publications, publishing on November 7.

Now to the library books - I happened to be in the big library one two over last Sunday, grabbing a movie to watch with the family, and browsed the graphic novel stack while I was there. (Parenthetically: the libraries near me, and maybe those in the US somewhat consistently, shelve GNs in juvenile and YA sections, but not adult - I'm not sure why, but I was poking through the YA section.) These are books that looked vaguely interesting, but I know very little about any of them, obviously.

Tin Man was Justin Madison's debut; it came out in 2022 from Amulet, the books-for-new-people imprint of Abrams. It appears to be about two teens, sister and brother, who meet a Tin Woodsman - looking exactly like the one from The Wizard of Oz, though I think he has a different origin - and they affect each other's lives.

In Waves is a big book that attracted me with its cool green cover; it's by AJ Dungo and is something like a history of surfing and something like a personal story about how surfing has been part of his life. (Or probably both.) There also seems to be some kind of memoir of illness as part of it; I don't know whose illness.

And last is Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto, first in a series by a group of European creators (written by Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël, drawn by David Evrard, colored by Walter) translated by Dan Christensen for this 2019 US publication. It's about Irena Sendlerowa, who I just randomly heard about the other week myself: she was a young Polish woman during WWII and personally smuggled 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, saving their lives.