TV #55 of 2020: The Mandalorian, season 2 Beyond even its debut season, this second year of the live-action Star Wars show is an outstanding achievement on every level. The spinoff program really does feel like it’s happening in the exact same continuity as the movies — something that Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
Book #300 of 2020: The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue A heartbreakingly graphic depiction of an Irish plague ward during the 1918 influenza pandemic, told over a few days and mostly in one narrow chamber — a familiar constraint for Room author Emma Donoghue — for patients who are both infected and pregnant. …
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Book Review: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis
Book #299 of 2020: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #6) I’m not a big fan of the first half of this novel, in which the three protagonists — a returning Eustace, his classmate Jill, and a rather miserable creature named Puddleglum — are very nasty toward one another as …
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Book Review: The Way Back by Gavriel Savit
Book #298 of 2020: The Way Back by Gavriel Savit It’s probably not a good sign when a book that feels so tailor-made for me as a reader struggles to keep my attention throughout. I do love the first quarter or so of this story, which sees a pair of Jewish kids fleeing their nineteenth-century …
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Book Review: The Camelot Betrayal by Kiersten White
Book #297 of 2020: The Camelot Betrayal by Kiersten White (Camelot Rising #2) I don’t have much to say about this sequel, other than that it’s the sort of middle volume that largely treads water for its trilogy en route to a hopefully stronger conclusion. The plot and character arcs don’t really progress any further …
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Book Review: Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo
Book #296 of 2020: Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo Although I agree with nearly everything that author Ijeoma Oluo opines in these pages, I’ve found it somewhat lacking as a single cohesive argument. Her stated thesis, that white men are so privileged by American society that many of us …
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Book Review: The Poet by Michael Connelly
Book #295 of 2020: The Poet by Michael Connelly (Jack McEvoy #1) Author Michael Connelly’s fifth crime thriller, the first not to feature detective Harry Bosch, has been written to stand on its own, although it introduces concepts and characters that will later cross over with the main series. Our protagonist this time is investigative …
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Book Review: Anya and the Nightingale by Sofiya Pasternack
Book #294 of 2020: Anya and the Nightingale by Sofiya Pasternack (Anya #2) Another fun middle-grade fantasy adventure, albeit somewhat messier in plot than the first novel with this Russian Jewish heroine. Still, the representation in this series remains charming and relatable, from the opening scene with Anya building a sukkah to her pride about …
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TV Review: The Office, season 8
TV #54 of 2020: The Office, season 8 The first stretch of this show without original star Steve Carell is a real mess, immediately confirming that the producers had no idea who would be taking over for his character as branch manager when they ended the previous season on that cliffhanger of interviews. And that’s …
Book Review: The Ever Cruel Kingdom by Rin Chupeco
Book #293 of 2020: The Ever Cruel Kingdom by Rin Chupeco (The Never Tilting World #2) In the first volume of this YA fantasy duology, twin sisters raised on opposite sides of a stationary world each fall in love and get caught up in a propulsive plot that brings them and their partners hurtling together …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 