Book #141 of 2019: Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix A lightweight Regency romp with a sprinkling of fantasy elements. I’d like to see more of how the magic works — especially coming from Sabriel author Garth Nix — but that fuzziness doesn’t get in the way of the quick-paced story Nix is telling. His tale …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope
Book #140 of 2019: Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope I appreciate this novel’s Israeli kibbutz setting — and debut author Jessamyn Hope’s inclusion of so many non-religious aspects of Jewish life there — but I find the characters to be a uniformly miserable bunch. It’s hard to root for any of them to do anything but …
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TV Review: Stranger Things 3
TV #30 of 2019: Stranger Things 3 My biggest issue with this series as a whole is its tendency to fracture the narrative into engaging yet isolated small-group subplots that never intersect much with one another. And that’s definitely on display in this third outing, which is especially rough at the beginning before those disparate …
TV Review: iZombie, season 5
TV #29 of 2019: iZombie, season 5 iZombie has been a bit lifeless for a while now, and it finally shambles to a rest here. I hate to say it about a series that I once loved, but the last season of this zombie-cop comedy is just awful. The case-of-the-week stuff occasionally still delivers, but …
Book Review: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Book #139 of 2019: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald Written in the wake of her father’s death, this 2014 memoir from author Helen Macdonald is an unsettling and complicated account of how she felt drawn to train a young goshawk as a way of processing her emotions. Alongside this personal narrative, she also …
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TV Review: Jane the Virgin, season 5
TV #28 of 2019: Jane the Virgin, season 5 What a beautiful send-off to a beautiful show. Jane the Virgin has gone down a few narrative dead-ends over the years, but its final season leans strongly into the character relationships that have always made its telenovela twists and heightened magical realism elements land so well. …
Book Review: Jade City by Fonda Lee
Book #138 of 2019: Jade City by Fonda Lee (The Green Bone Saga #1) Let me start with the good and say that I love the setting of this book. It doesn’t offer the most fleshed-out worldbuilding, but it’s the rare fantasy story told in a place that’s not our own yet has comparable levels …
July 2019 Recap
Over on Patreon, I just posted a recap of everything I read (and watched) in July, 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!
Book Review: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
Book #137 of 2019: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt An evocative travelogue of late-twentieth-century Savannah that could use greater structure throughout. The introduction of a certain true crime element around the midpoint adds some focus to the back half, but before then I kept wondering where this narrative was …
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Book Review: Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool by Emily Oster
Book #136 of 2019: Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool by Emily Oster One of the major challenges facing new parents is the sheer over-abundance of advice out there — which has admittedly always been somewhat of an issue, but is exacerbated by the explosion of digital resources …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 