TV #37 of 2025: Galavant, season 1 This medieval-pastiche musical comedy marginally improves over the course of its first year, but it’s still pretty far from the ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend meets The Princess Bride‘ showcase that I want it to be. The songs by Alan Menken are fine — I’ve even added a few to my …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
TV Review: The Bear, season 4
TV #36 of 2025: The Bear, season 4 A welcome improvement over the previous year, but still not quite as thrilling or affecting as the first couple seasons of this show. As usual, the standout moments tend to be found in the episodes that forgo the more typical rhythms of the restaurant kitchen to spark …
Book Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Book #110 of 2025: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh A fun take on the magical school archetype. The setting reminds me a lot of Naomi Novik’s Scholomance, where the spellwork attracts hungry monsters from a terrifying hell dimension, although at least this time the teenaged students aren’t locked-in and left fending for themselves. In fact, …
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Book Review: Meltdown by John Peel
Book #109 of 2025: Meltdown by John Peel (2099 #5) After a promising start, this middle-grade sci-fi series has stalled out in a major way, and I can only hope that the sixth and final volume manages to tap into that original sense of imaginative fun that propelled the earlier books. Just like in the …
TV Review: Poker Face, season 2
TV #35 of 2025: Poker Face, season 2 I wasn’t a huge fan of this modern Columbo riff in its debut year, but it had enough charms that I gave it a grudging three-star rating overall. This followup, unfortunately, is considerably worse. I do like a few elements here and there — Giancarlo Esposito as …
Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel
Book #108 of 2025: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel (Virgin New Adventures #6) Andrew Cartmel served as the script editor for the last three seasons of Classic Doctor Who (1987-1989), which were also the years that produced the final protagonist team of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace. The author thus …
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Book Review: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho
Book #107 of 2025: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on …
Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim
Book #106 of 2025: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim Ji-won is a fun protagonist: a Korean-American college student who’s been dealing with some hard times lately, but who is even more obviously having a completely unhinged and over-the-top reaction to them. Or that’s obvious to the reader of her private thoughts, …
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Book Review: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
Book #105 of 2025: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer I read this novel back in high school, a few years after it was first published in 2000, and when I saw it recently on my mom’s shelf, I remembered it vaguely as a Michael Crichton kind of science-fiction, channeling the writer’s deep background research …
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Book Review: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson
Book #104 of 2025: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is the latest “Secret Project,” a name that author Brandon Sanderson gives to the books he’s written in his spare time outside his regular public writing schedule and produced via crowdfunding instead of traditional publishing. …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 