I love working in a bookstore.
Berk Brethed's new book is announced, and I've read an advance copy. They do this thing for kids books, where they release the actual pages from the book saddlebound with the dust-jacket (with no actual cover) so bookstores can preview the book but the publisher doesn't have to send out finished, salable copies. We got one for this new book, Flawed Dogs. It's a catalog of unwanted dogs at a "last chance" dog pound in a tiny (fictional) Vermont town. The poetry is a little simplistic, but you're reading the book for the drawings of grotesque dogs. I loved it.
Terry Pratchett's newest book is also very good. The story is better than early discworld, and the tendency to use (terrible) old jokes dwindles. Naturally, there are occasional slap-sticky moments and it wouldn't be a Discworld novel without bad puns, but the stories have come a long way since the beginning of the series. This newest book has some real character development (not that the last one didn't. It was also great. I get the feeling Pratchett likes Sam Vimes as a character), and introduces a whole new character set, complete with a history and a well-defined look into a future. I've been really impressed with the last seven or eight Discworld books, including the departure "The Last Hero." As the world becomes better defined, the stories only seem to get better. I liked it from the start, and the few that I honestly didn't like, I've liked better upon re-reading.
The other recent book I'm reading in advance is the Adventures of Samuel Blackthorne, Book 1, the Case of the Cat with the Missing Ear (from the notebooks of Edward R. Smithfield, D.V.M.). It's a Sherlock Holmes mystery set in San Francisco at the turn of the century, in a world peopled with talking animals. This story specifically deals with dogs mostly, but a cat appears and the suggestion is made of several other species on the burner for future books. Now, I admit, I'm not done with it yet. I'm about 4/5 of the way through, but I'm going to make a couple of judgments based on the 189 pages I've read so far (of 237 total) (in the advance reader. This does not necessarily mean that the final book will be exactly this long). The book is written very much in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. With the exception of leaving out Holmes/Blackthorne's use of opium (which Doyle didn't introduce until the second story. Emerson's Blackthorne has more in common with the first incarnation of Holmes than with the second, although he does have the later Holmes' love of all subjects and supernatural preparedness. Here I site Holmes' rolodex of every person in Europe and Blackthorne's massive index of the types of hair of every breed of dog, cat, rat, bat, moose, horse, cow, "and a number of other animals."), this could very easily have been written as a "lost Holmes" mystery and rewritten with dogs. The oddness comes in the little details. Emerson often talks about different breeds of dogs, at one point having the minute protagonist identify a group of attackers by their hair (thus being able to determine their breed), and also by having Blackthorne sniff at every crime scene. It's a great book, and I am most impressed that Emerson didn't feel the need to dumb down the language particularly. It's still a pretty high vocabulary level, especially for a kids book. If my opinion changes when I finish the book, I'll update, but until then, I'm duly impressed.

Coming up in later reviews: The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes and a new R.L.Stine book called Dangerous Girls. I guess I ought to go ahead and put a review of Wee Free Men up here, but I haven't written a good one yet.