Over on Patreon, I’ve posted a recap of everything I read and watched in August, including links to individual reviews and an update on my progress in migrating the older reviews over to this new blog site. Thanks to everyone who has already subscribed!
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams
Book #159 of 2019: The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams This is a challenging read in many ways. The two main characters are dogs who escape from an animal testing facility, and their already-alien perspective is exacerbated by the brain damage one has received from an experimental surgery. It is both difficult to fully understand …
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Book Review: The Boat People by Sharon Bala
Book #158 of 2019: The Boat People by Sharon Bala I appreciate that this novel speaks to the modern refugee experience, but there’s not a whole lot elevating its story beyond that inherently emotional subject matter. Based on a real incident from 2010 when five hundred Sri Lankans arrived on a cargo ship to seek …
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Book Review: Wanderers by Chuck Wendig
Book #157 of 2019: Wanderers by Chuck Wendig I expected this novel about a pandemic of sleepwalking to resemble Stephen King’s apocalyptic classic The Stand (or ideally Emily St. John Mandel’s elegiac Station Eleven), but it plays out more like a Michael Crichton medical thriller instead. And honestly, that’s just a difficult framework to sustain …
Book Review: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
Book #156 of 2019: The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials #2) I really like how this sequel deepens the worldbuilding of the original His Dark Materials book, expanding the action from the alternate reality of that story into a universe more like our own and one other besides. And the character moments …
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Book Review: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon
Book #155 of 2019: The Final Solution by Michael Chabon This novella offers a sparse but effective character study of an aging detective, unnamed yet clearly intended to be read as Sherlock Holmes. Feeling adrift in the new century, he comes out of retirement to help a young Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany — hence …
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Book Review: Recursion by Blake Crouch
Book #154 of 2019: Recursion by Blake Crouch At the start of this inventive sci-fi thriller, a New York City cop investigates a case of people suddenly remembering alternate lives they’ve never lived, while a tech genius a decade earlier researches a way to digitally record and retrieve the failing memories of Alzheimer’s patients. Author …
Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Book #153 of 2019: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens I really like the beginning-to-middle of this novel about a young ‘marsh girl’ growing up on the edges of a small Carolina town. It’s a slow-paced coming-of-age character study, filled with some beautiful nature descriptions and scenes of independent living. Unfortunately, the flash-forwards to …
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Book Review: Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
Book #152 of 2019: Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro Dani Shapiro writes movingly of her sense of identity being upended by an unexpected DNA test result, but I struggle to truly comprehend her viewpoint. Even setting aside the author’s odd trust in mediums, meditation gurus, and personality tests, it …
Book Review: Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb
Book #151 of 2019: Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb (The Rain Wild Chronicles #2) In my review of the first book in this Realm of the Elderlings quartet, I complained, “Not much happens, and then it just continues not happening right through the end.” Yet compared to this sequel, that original novel was action-packed. At …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 