Movie #11 of 2019: Cooties (2014) Even by the standards of low-budget horror schlock, this zom-com is pretty bad. There’s potential in the premise of elementary teachers fending off their infected pupils, but too much of the intended humor relies on nothing but gross-out gore effects and the inherent transgressiveness of violence to and by …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Book #205 of 2019: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner This story of a New York City Jewish family on the verge of divorce has well-drawn (albeit realistically frustrating) characters and some sharp observations on marriage, parenting, and gender roles. I like the late perspective shift that complicates our understanding of the Fleishman dynamics …
Continue reading “Book Review: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner”
Book Review: Nightbooks by J. A. White
Book #204 of 2019: Nightbooks by J. A. White In this delightfully spooky middle-grade adventure, a young horror fan keeps his witch kidnapper at bay by telling her a series of scary stories. It’s a smart modern blend of Hansel and Gretel with The Thousand and One Nights, and both the smaller nested narratives and …
Book Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
Book #203 of 2019: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall This experimental novel starts out like a cross between Memento and House of Leaves before taking a detour through Neverwhere and ending up finally at Jaws. In other words, it’s a story about an amnesiac receiving messages from his former self, wherein the actual …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall”
Book Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Book #202 of 2019: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Another entry in the burgeoning genre of #ownvoices fantasy books that draw upon the traditional folklore of their authors’ cultural heritage. In this case, that’s Mayan mythology, which I knew little about beforehand. I’d call the result a win for representation, but somewhat …
Continue reading “Book Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia”
Book Review: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Book #201 of 2019: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #1) This mature urban fantasy is a major departure for author Leigh Bardugo, both in genre and in tone. Although its college-age characters aren’t significantly older than her YA Grishaverse bunch, the traumas they face are so much darker than anything encountered in that …
Continue reading “Book Review: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo”
Book Review: The Long Blink: The True Story of Trauma, Forgiveness, and One Man’s Fight for Safer Roads by Brian Kuebler
Book #200 of 2019: The Long Blink: The True Story of Trauma, Forgiveness, and One Man’s Fight for Safer Roads by Brian Kuebler This is a true story about my cousin Ed Slattery, whose wife was killed and two boys gravely injured when a drowsy semi truck driver crashed into their car in 2010. Ed …
Book Review: The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman
Book #199 of 2019: The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman There are some lovely individual moments in this novel about characters in 1940s Europe evading and resisting the Nazis, but I’m ultimately dissatisfied by the overall shape of the narrative and by how little author Alice Hoffman has developed the various elements of …
Continue reading “Book Review: The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman”
TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 1
TV #36 of 2019: Better Call Saul, season 1 This is my first time rewatching this program from the beginning, on the heels of my first time going back through its parent show. And overall, I really think I prefer this one. Breaking Bad is an amazing piece of television storytelling on any number of …
Book Review: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman
Book #198 of 2019: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (The Book of Dust #2) I hate to foreground the matter in my review, but I think every prospective reader of this much-anticipated His Dark Materials sequel should know that it’s a book in which returning heroine Lyra Silvertongue gets sexually assaulted by a group …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 