Go the f**k to sleep / Adam Mansbach

This book has created a bit of a buzz, but for once I approve.  This time I'm not reviewing a children's book, it just looks like one.  In the fine tradition of Pratchett's Where's my cow?, Mansbach gives us a beautiful picture book that tired parents everywhere will doubtless cherish. They probably won't read it to their children, though -- at least, not until those children are themselves parents.  Every fan of Judith Viorst needs to read this book, be they parent or spectator.  But preferebly not to children old enough the repeat the words.

Villains by necessity / Eve Forward

This is a must-read for any serious D&D player just for the way it plays with alignments. The Good Guys have won the War and have spent the last century and a half forcibly changing everyone's alignment. All is sweetness and light, flourishing life, yet as even death is banished from the world, what's a villain to eat? The last druid (seeking a perfect neutral balance, the druids sided with evil as good began to win the War, and got slaughtered) gathers the last villains in a desperate quest to save the world for darkness before it is consumed by its own growing Light. The players are almost audible behind the characters (especially the one speaking the execrable dialect) as they face a series of tests... excuse me, Tests, to collect the Segments of a Key that will undo the work of certain Heroes... you get the idea. Like any good game, the novel is not without its (ahem) lighter moments, and is almost worth reading entirely for the encounter with thinly disguised Smurfs and the budding romantic attraction between the evil assassin and the goal-driven druid.

You might also like to dip into The initiate by Louise Cooper, which makes a revealing but far less humorous examination of the Law/Chaos spectrum, stripped of its associations with good and evil.  The series is a little long for what it has to say, though.

I want my hat back / Jon Klassen

OK, I wasn't going to review little kids' books -- there are plenty of selection services and librarians' guides and parents' lists out there -- but I have to tell you about this one:

Have you seen my hat?
No. Why are you asking me. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen any hats anywhere. I would not steal a hat. Don't ask me any more questions.
OK. Thank you anyway.

It's cute; the good kind of cute. Mind you, I'm not sure I would read this to a small child I was responsible for, given the fate of the thief and the subtle advice on how to lie that it offers the reader (well, OK, I probably would; it's cute, after all). But in a genre replete with sickeningly cute lessons in naïveté, this one is a breath of fresh, if slightly reality-scented, air. Find it in your library or bookstore and read it right there in the aisle, it'll only take a minute.

Then buy it for a coffee-table book and make your friends wonder about you.

Dog days / John Levitt

This is basic urban fantasy, with familiars.  Excuse me; they're called ifrits.  Is anybody fooled?  They're familiars, and the dog is cute, the relationship between wizard and familiar is handled well, and there's nothing earth-shaking in this book.  The most notable thing about this novel is that there's nothing wrong with it (c.f. Phoenix rising).  Sometimes, all you want is a nice book to read, and an author who can give you that is worth collecting.

Phoenix rising (Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novel ; v. 1) / Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris

If you enjoy the sort of extended word-substitution puzzle Pat Conroy writes, this is the novel for you.  While the plot is clever and the characters interesting, the actual prose is heavy going.  They may not go as far as using a verb as an adjective (they do, however, use a noun as a verb), but the almost Germanic word order and the random selection of prepositions seem designed for obfuscation.  Compared to sentences like "This was also necessary in order to make certain alongside charges of treason to the Crown those survivors in league with the Phoenix Society were held accountable for the deaths of [their victims]," minor issues of word usage pale to insignificance.  Calling a prescription an apothecary, a badge a moniker (a word I do not associate with the Victorian era, but since I have no access to the OED these days I can't check up on it), a motto a mantra, and a watch a fob are merely loose cobbles in a street with far more serious repair issues.  It's a pity, because with fewer pretensions and a great deal more editing, this could have been a very good book.

Confessions of a demon / S.L. Wright

At the heart of this tale of power-mongering is an interesting group of (theoretical) immortals who survive by feeding off emotion and life energy. The system of patronage and creation is rather similar to the usual vampire structure and it is possible that this book started out as yet another of those. Demons don't have to worry about daylight, however, nor, under normal circumstances, about getting bloodstains out of their clothes. They can even be beneficial: while some like to "drink" anger or pain, others like to "drink" relief or even ecstasy. For this one it was easiest to come up with a scorecard to track its finer points:

+1 for not making it a vampire novel, although there are enough similarities between the popular image of vampires and Wright's demons to make me think the novel may have started out that way

-1/2 each for 1) the implication that the Dark Ages involved the whole world, and 2) the universal naive acceptance by all the demons, even the one with the human background and the one who lived through the Burning Times, that humans confronted with a proven miracle would all rush to join the religion that produced it (rather than, for instance, breaking out the torches and screaming "Satanism!")

-1 for making the demon pour over the newspaper (that particular misspelling always gives me the most distracting mental image)

+1 for the correct plural, passersby

Oh, and don't let the cover art fool you; she doesn't actually seem very Goth, and spends a significant portion of the story in a flowered skirt.

Death most definite / Trent Jamieson

I don't usually like stories written in the present tense -- in fact, I would never have bought this one if I'd noticed it.  However, it's not quite as bad when it's also in the first person -- makes it seem less like a dream tale and more like the narrator just isn't very articulate.  So, like, I have this book and I think, well, I might as well read it, right?  I can at least give it my traditional 40-page chance before I chuck it in the resale pile, you know?  It turned out to be pretty clever, one of the few novels dealing with life, death, and afterlife I've found that doesn't stick with the conventional Western/Abrahamic paradigm of heaven, hell, and the rest of the duotheistic trappings.  The main character works for one of 13 regional Deaths as a collector of souls and guards against "stirrers" who want to take over the living world by animating the recently dead.  He's got a sweet deal... until someone starts killing off his coworkers.  The writing itself could be better, but the story's good enough to cover for it.