Book #197 of 2019: His Hideous Heart: 13 of Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Unsettling Tales Reimagined edited by Dahlia Adler I’m rounding up my rating for this collection a little bit on the strength of the original Edgar Allan Poe stories (many of which I’d never read before) that have been included along with their …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell
Book #196 of 2019: A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell The true story of how an American woman with a prosthetic leg overcame discrimination against her nationality, her gender, and her disability to become a British intelligence agent in Vichy …
Movie Review: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
Movie #10 of 2019: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) It’s an undeniable thrill to see Jesse Pinkman again (along with some other old friends), and both star Aaron Paul and writer/director Vince Gilligan seem to have grown even more adept at depicting the wayward figure’s stoic anguish in the six years since Breaking …
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Book Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
Book #195 of 2019: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow This is a lovely fantasy debut about portals to other worlds, the power of stories, and the tension between stable stagnation and unpredictable change. The prose is lyrically beautiful in the Laini Taylor fashion, and the plotline of a mixed-race girl …
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Book Review: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Book #194 of 2019: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi This is a clarifying read in many ways, and I appreciate author Ibram X. Kendi’s framing of racism as any policy or behavior that maintains or furthers inequity across racial groups. Moving the locus of activism from intention to effect is an …
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Book Review: The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling
Book #193 of 2019: The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling Debut author Caitlin Starling has delivered a stunning, claustrophobic sci-fi horror novel, the entirety of which is spent in an underground alien cave system with the protagonist locked in a mechanized suit. Her only contact is an evasive handler back on the surface, who withholds …
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Book Review: Sunshine by Robin McKinley
Book #192 of 2019: Sunshine by Robin McKinley This urban fantasy novel feels severely underbaked, like a first draft that was rushed to publication without any editor’s notes. The worldbuilding is vague, and the few details that we get generally arrive via infodump right when they become relevant, rather than threading organically throughout the text. …
Book Review: The Lost Man by Jane Harper
Book #191 of 2019: The Lost Man by Jane Harper Australian writer Jane Harper’s first two books fit explicitly within the mystery / crime thriller genre, featuring a detective protagonist and clear whodunnit cases to solve. Given such bona fides, and the fact that this third novel opens with yet another corpse, I can’t have …
Book Review: Fly Already by Etgar Keret
Book #190 of 2019: Fly Already by Etgar Keret Even in translation, Israeli author Etgar Keret’s short stories are challenging, haunting, and darkly comic. Few of them begin as explicit speculative fiction, yet they often take surreal turns in that direction as they go along, bringing in clones, or aliens, or magical transformations to an …
Book Review: Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell
Book #189 of 2019: Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell (Simon Snow #2) Somewhat appropriately given the genesis of this series, Wayward Son reads more like fanfiction than a proper sequel to the first novel Carry On. There’s no pressing danger or overarching plot for much of the story, just three friends who still suspiciously resemble …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 