Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/13/24

Three books arrived this week - two of them in the mail, through the usual publicity channels, and one from the library. I'll take them in that order.

The Runes of Engagement is a novel by Dave Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell, apparently an expansion of their story of the same name in the anthology Operation Arcana. It's military fantasy, of the "modern soldiers battle orcs" style - there was a popular series about a battle group (in an APC, I want to say?) around twenty years ago that this reminds me of, but I never read those books and now can't remember the author. Well, anyway: grunts fighting dragons. That kind of thing. Looks like this one leans into the dark-humor side of it, rather than staying a straight adventure, which sounds like fun.

Runes will be published June 18th in trade paperback and the usual arrangements of electrons by Tachyon Publications.

Also from Tachyon, but already published - since I have a finished paperback in my hands - is Samantha Mills's debut novel The Wings Upon Her Back. Mills won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards last year for her story "Rabbit Test." (And I now have to admit that I haven't read it, since I read essentially no short fiction these days, and keep thinking I should get back into it.) This is a fantasy novel, possibly with steampunky elements - the acolytes of the Mecha God have copper wings that it's implied actually work - about a middle-aged heroine who devoted her life to a cause and a deity that might not be as admirable as she originally thought, and from whose service she is now irrevocably severed.

And that library book - the last from the batch I requested about three weeks ago - is Lunar New Year Love Story, a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang (creator of Boxers & Saints, among other things) and LeUyen Pham (who has been a celebrated illustrator of books for young readers for a couple of decades - I'm sure I've seen her work, since that heavily overlaps my kids' growing-up years, but I'm not sure of specifics - including a bunch of comics-formatted things mostly done with Shannon Hale). I'm not sure if this book is officially adult or YA - it might depend on whether there are any curses or on-page sex in it - but it's about a young woman, Val, who may be under a family curse to be unlucky in love and who may have a way to break that curse.