TV #25 of 2021: The Good Fight, season 4 I want to acknowledge up-front that this latest run of the streaming Good Wife spinoff had its production cut short by the coronavirus outbreak, losing the final few episodes the writers must surely have expected they’d be able to use to wrap up various plotlines. As …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray
Book #68 of 2021: Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray I wouldn’t call this YA adventure a must-read for Star Wars fans, but it’s a big step up from Light of the Jedi, the first book in this new prequel era for the franchise, roughly two centuries before The Phantom …
Continue reading “Book Review: Star Wars: The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray”
TV Review: Community, season 3
TV #24 of 2021: Community, season 3 This stretch of Community is its most serialized yet (and possibly ever; I don’t recall the later stuff too clearly). That’s always impressive in a sitcom, and it adds a nice sense of momentum to the year as various arcs unfold. Of course, the downside is that fewer …
Book Review: Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett
Book #67 of 2021: Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #10) A weaker effort from author Terry Pratchett, and a little too dependent on referential humor, where the entire joke is something like, “Wouldn’t a Discworld version of Gone with the Wind be hilarious?” I’m also still mostly familiar with this setting through the stories …
Continue reading “Book Review: Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett”
Book Review: Chance: Escape from the Holocaust by Uri Shulevitz
Book #66 of 2021: Chance: Escape from the Holocaust by Uri Shulevitz This 2020 title is a little unusual among Holocaust memoirs, both for its aim at a middle-grade audience and for its depicting a life more distantly touched by Nazi violence. Jewish author Uri Shulevitz and his family fled German-occupied Poland into the Soviet …
Continue reading “Book Review: Chance: Escape from the Holocaust by Uri Shulevitz”
Book Review: Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han
Book #65 of 2021: Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han There’s a deep sense of sorrow pervading the four members of this novel’s Chinese-American immigrant family, all of whom seem utterly alienated — from their new country, from their homeland, and especially from one another. That estrangement is achingly rendered, and I’m sure it …
Continue reading “Book Review: Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon Han”
TV Review: WandaVision
TV #23 of 2021: WandaVision Brilliant in concept and nearly flawless in execution, I have very few critical notes for this miniseries, the debut television project under the immediate creative control of producer Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios and the premiere event in his Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four. It’s a decade-by-decade journey across American …
Book Review: Stormsong by C. L. Polk
Book #64 of 2021: Stormsong by C. L. Polk (The Kingston Cycle #2) This sequel is a decent follow-up to Witchmark, and I continue to enjoy the fantasy setting for its quasi-Edwardian trappings as well as its utter lack of homophobia and slut-shaming. Everyone maturely accepts adult relationships; the drama in this case stems from …
Book Review: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
Book #63 of 2021: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn #1) This first Mistborn novel is every bit the modern classic that I remember, although it does have a few gender issues that author Brandon Sanderson improves upon in his later works. (Nothing too egregious, but except for our teenage heroine, this is a …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson”
Book Review: American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser
Book #62 of 2021: American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser This book is centered on one (white, Jewish) family’s experience with adoption in the 1960s, but it’s also a fascinating sociological and historical account of a topic that I had previously known little about. As author …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 