Reviewing the Mail: Week of May 31, 2025

 A few new books arrived this week - three in a box from the fine folks at Tachyon, and one from the library. As always, books from actual publishers come first, especially since I vaguely want to read all three of them:

The Adventures of Mary Darling is the new novel from Pat Murphy, which seems to be her first since The Wild Girls in 2007. I have a bound galley, but publication date was May 5th, so I think you could get your own copy immediately. It's a retelling of Peter Pan, at least to some degree, focusing on their mother (Mary), who consults with Sherlock Holmes about their disappearance but then has to chase off around the world to gather allies and clear her name and (presumably) save her children. It's not clear if there are any fantasy elements, but Murphy has been a SFF writer from the beginning, so I'd expect something.

I read Josh Rountree's first book The Legend of Charlie Fish, a particularly weird Western, and liked it a lot. So I'm happy to see he's back with The Unkillable Frank Lightning, another story in the same style. There's this married couple - he's a soldier, she's an occultist. In 1879, he was killed in the line of duty, and she resurrected him, but he came back without his soul. The novel takes place primarily twenty-five years later, when they meet again. For this one, I have a finished book, but it apparently doesn't publish until early July.

And the third book from Tachyon is If Wishes Were Retail, a novel by Auston Habershaw. It's a humorous fantasy, I think of the subset where the world already has magic on an everyday level. Alex is a teen, who wants to get out of her dead-end town - but even more than that, she needs a job, to get some income, to have any chances. So she's interviewing for a job at the dying local mall, working for Mr. Jinn and selling wishes at a kiosk. Good news is she gets the job. And I assume the less-good news is what happens next.

The library book, which I will read even more quickly, because library, is Thor, the second in George O'Connor's Asgardians series. The first one was Odin, which I saw a couple of months ago, and, before that, O'Connor did a twelve-book series about the Greek pantheon, which was quite impressive. This one, I presume, retells the legends about Thor, as the title implies.