The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy

Book #151 of 2025:

Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy

This is a cute middle-grade novel about two thirteen-year-old boys who are stuck repeating their common bar mitzvah weekend over and over again. I like the distinctiveness of the two protagonists, who narrate in alternating chapters: hyperactive Finn is an overachieving only child from a more secular family, while the reserved Ezra is the third of five kids in his observant household. The #ownvoices aspect that gives the story its texture is most welcome, with author Joshua S. Levy striking a good balance between not explaining every last detail and not overwhelming non-Jewish readers with elements irrelevant to the plot. I also appreciate how the teenage heroes and their respective communities are completely accepting of their differing traditions and degrees of engagement with Judaism, which sadly isn’t always the case in either fiction or real life.

Time loop tropes abound — although just one of the teens is familiar with them — but it’s fun to see characters this young scrambling to do the usual strategies like convincing someone of their situation or trying to secure funds for something they think would help. (Sure, any of us could probably rob a bank if we had infinite attempts to hone our strategy, but a seventh-grader is going to find it substantially harder!) The guys compare such challenges to a difficult video game level, which seems pretty apt for their age.

Unfortunately, I do feel like the piece falls apart a little in the end. We never really learn what started the cycle in the first place or why they’re eventually able to bust out of it, though at least there’s an emotional breakthrough that more or less tracks. The ending packs in a few too many twists in not enough space, however, bringing down my overall enjoyment. The work is so strong before then to still award it four-out-of-five stars, especially considering the audience, but I like the beginning and middle far more than what passes for any resolution at the close.

★★★★☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/lesserjoke
–Or click here to browse through all my reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Book #150 of 2025:

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

This 2023 title is an informative popular science book, with a handful of caveats. My first issue is that it’s really two works in one, and that those halves don’t naturally fit together as a single cohesive whole. Roughly two-thirds of this text is spent detailing the logistical challenges that would be involved in setting up a sizable population anywhere offworld, which is a fair overview even if I’d prefer a more objective assessment rather than the authors’ snarky pessimism. This larger section is also somewhat familiar / unoriginal — while the Weinersmiths have plainly done their research and synthesized their own important takeaways, it’s overall a subject that plenty of writers have opined on over the years. This volume follows in the footsteps of previous releases like Mary Roach’s 2010 Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (which is quoted from repeatedly here) without ever feeling like a necessary addition to that body of writing.

The remainder near the middle of this book spins off in a different direction, however, and one that I’ve personally found far more fascinating and insightful. There the married cowriters provide a thorough account of the status of laws in outer space: what so far seems to be accepted among the current and prospective spacefaring nations, what’s still in dispute, and what more dubious interpretations various parties have asserted at one point or another. They bemoan how legality is often brushed aside by would-be futurists, and proceed to make a case for why these questions matter and how they might be resolved. In the process, they consider as possible precedents how international law has handled other uninhabited regions like Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean, which offer their own benefits and shortcomings.

If the entire piece were focused on that latter topic, or if the separate parts were integrated more clearly, or if the tone were less jokey throughout, I could see myself rating this as highly as four-out-of-five stars. But with those flaws detracting from the experience, I’m going to go with a neutral three instead.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland

Book #149 of 2025:

Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland

This Star Wars novel is misleadingly labeled, and I suspect I would have given it a pass if it had been correctly identified as a part of the franchise’s High Republic line — which I largely haven’t read — rather than a prequel tie-in to the show The Acolyte. True, the characters Vernestra and Indara from that Disney+ series are the protagonists here, but the former originated as a High Republic creation (from author Justina Ireland, even), and the work as a whole seems aimed more at giving closure to the associated plot arcs there than at engaging with anything shown onscreen.

That’s a particularly frustrating turn of events because The Acolyte itself feels so sadly unfinished as a story. I enjoyed watching the title as it aired last year, but its first season ended on a sequence of revelations and cliffhangers that were plainly intended to carry on into another chapter that didn’t materialize. Instead the program was canceled, leaving plenty of open questions in its wake. What happens to Osha and Mae next, after their respective shocking changes of circumstance in the finale? What’s the full backstory that led the Stranger down his path? These are matters that a wider universe of licensed canon media should be perfect to explore — and yet this release eschews all that to deliver a wacky adventure of the two warrior women, decades before the show, hunting down the pirates and black market dealers who’ve discovered a new lightsaber-disabling technology, which the book never really manages to sell as a problem for anyone in the galaxy but the Jedi Order themselves.

I’m sure there’s an audience for this, and it’s all told competently enough (give or take your opinion on first-person narration in Star Wars) but it’s pretty far from the volume it’s been marketed as. I’ll hand it two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: The Bourne Identity (2002)

Movie #11 of 2025:

The Bourne Identity (2002)

I haven’t seen this movie in a solid decade or two, but it caught my eye on a recent flight and I decided to give it a go. (I’m still undecided if I’ll continue on with the sequels or not, some of which I know I missed at the time. I will certainly not be watching the 2019 spinoff show, which looks absolutely awful.) Its premise of an amnesiac hero with deadly skills that he doesn’t remember acquiring remains fantastic, and the babyfaced Matt Damon turns in an electric performance as that competent but clueless lead, scrambling to work out what’s going on amidst police and various agents from his former life now hunting him down. I love all the little signs of him instantly sizing up a situation and strategizing how to escape, even if the action scenes grow a tad repetitive by the end.

The film doesn’t come close to passing the Bechdel test, but it offers two sizable female roles, and the romance feels believable as Marie visibly thaws towards the protagonist and ultimately makes agentive choices to stay with him even when she’s given a possible out. The script is decent too — shoutout to future Andor creator Tony Gilroy — especially for how it simplifies the convoluted plot of the 1980 Robert Ludlum novel it’s adapting. In the original version, Bourne was a CIA operative with a cover story as an assassin, who falls for the lie after losing his memories. It’s much cleaner to have him simply be a trained government killer in the first place, although the writers are careful to establish that Treadstone is a rogue program that the higher-ups don’t know anything about (or at least can maintain plausible deniability over) and wouldn’t officially condone. Still, this is an America that obviously conducts clandestine missions in friendly foreign countries with impunity, and though filming was all conducted pre-War on Terror, there’s an implicit critique of the modern surveillance state and unchecked U.S. imperialism in those themes.

One surprise for me on this rewatch — in addition to the minor presence of Walton Goggins — is that there’s no real mention of brainwashing at this point in the series besides Bourne and one of his colleagues both happening to suffer from headaches, which might not be related. For an element that eventually looms so large in the franchise mythos, it’s surprising to realize that it wasn’t intended from the start. But overall this is a fun character-driven spectacle, concluding with the titular figure free in the wind and the whole business swept under the rug by the remaining powers that be. Subsequent installments would undo that happy ending and re-open the can of worms, but it’s easy enough to be satisfied when the credits roll on this one that it really could be the end of things.

[Content warning for suicide, gun violence, gore, child endangerment, and implied death of a family dog.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Crusade, season 1

TV #48 of 2025:

Crusade, season 1

A pretty underwhelming spinoff to Babylon 5 following the events of the TV movie A Call to Arms, which ended with an alien plague infecting everyone on earth. That’s an effective cliffhanger, and its resolution was supposed to be provided by the characters on this 1999 series, who are on a spaceship searching for a cure. In practice, however, the show never really gels together, and it got canceled midway through its first season without any conclusion at all. I’m not the biggest B5 fan to begin with, and yet this semi-sequel still strikes me as a significant step down, playing out vaguely like Star Trek: Enterprise or any other generic sci-fi of the era. Even its serialized elements prove a contradictory mess, with competing episode orders championed by fans that all have continuity issues to some degree or another.

It’s a waste of a solid cast headed up by Gary Cole, whose Captain Gideon isn’t an easy guy to like. (At one point he realizes a subordinate has accidentally submitted embarrassing pornographic material to him along with a requested report. He keeps it playing on the screen during a subsequent conversation with another junior officer for some reason, then plays bullying mindgames with the inadvertent offender over it.) At least the program gives us the exemplary episode “Visitors from Down the Street,” a delightfully unexpected X-Files riff that’s somehow become one of my favorite things in the whole franchise. It’s possible the writers could have delivered more offbeat scripts like that if they’d only been given the chance, but sadly this experiment ends before they’d managed to crack the winning formula.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab

Book #148 of 2025:

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab

This 2025 horror title is going to be one of those books that some readers absolutely devour, but I couldn’t shake the impression throughout that it was just warmed-over Anne Rice rewritten to include toxic sapphic relationships — The Vampire Chronicles meets Killing Eve, basically. You’ve got your centuries-old murderers feeling angsty about their continued cursed existence, the power and knowledge imbalance between undead sire and progeny, and the usual genre concerns over immortality destroying one’s humanity. Author V. E. Schwab introduces a few new lore distinctions, like grave dirt causing extreme lethargy and paralysis, but I never really feel like she’s made the worldbuilding mythos her own. Besides their sexuality, these characters seem wholly like stock types to me.

The structure of the novel doesn’t help, either. We spend the first half bouncing back and forth between two protagonists: one a college student in the present day who’s just been turned and is looking for answers, and the other a medieval peasant who soon experiences the same fate. After the connection between them is finally revealed, we largely switch to a third heroine who recounts her own backstory (featuring the always-silly contrivance that she has to share the entire tale in order to convey the information that reader and listener alike are interested in at the very end). Then there’s a twist ending that theoretically builds off a sequence of flashbacks we’ve gotten along the way, but in my opinion doesn’t justify how much space they’ve taken up in the text to get there.

Again: certain folks will love this, I’m sure! Florid prose, antiheroines lashing out at the patriarchy, lovers who grow too codependent and have to tear themselves bloodily apart… it’s an often-enjoyable ride in the moment, but the odd-shaped plot and the feeling that I’ve read this all before is keeping me from embracing it completely.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, racism, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green

Book #147 of 2025:

Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green (Nightside #7)

The initial story arc of this series came to an effective crescendo in the previous volume, so it’s only fitting that this next installment feels like a bit of a breather by comparison. It’s a back-to-basics sort of plot that returns the protagonist to his private eye business, which I personally find more satisfying than the power-ramping heroics anyway. Author Simon R. Green knows his world and characters pretty well at this point, and while there’s a small bit of serialized development on the margins, we’re mostly thrown into a nicely-realized mystery case that has our detective hero questioning the wealthy members of a family of decadent near-immortals whose beloved heir has disappeared.

A note is probably merited here about transgender representation. This isn’t the first Nightside book to include gender expression among the natural human diversities on display in its urban fantasy setting, but it’s our most prominent look yet at a member of that queer community. As usual, the effect is somewhat mixed, at least from a modern perspective. Taylor’s narration reads as neutral-to-positive, but he employs a word that’s considered a slur today, and he goes back and forth in the name and pronouns he uses for a person who’s very clear about her preferred identity. It’s also hard not to notice that the teenager in question winds up killed, in an unfortunate embodiment of the ‘bury your gays’ trope that so often casts folks like her as tragic figures in someone else’s drama. Given how the novel was published in Britain in 2006, I’m still inclined to count this as a problematic but worthwhile depiction overall, though that’s obviously just one cisgender man’s opinion.

In general, however, this is another fine visit to that moonlit corner of London permanently fixed at a few hours past midnight. There are cameo appearances from Suzie Shooter and Dead Boy, but it’s largely a solo investigation into the client’s missing granddaughter and the secret behind his household’s unnatural longevity, which may or may not involve a literal deal with the devil. What follows are the typical fun setpieces and worldbuilding wrinkles in the familiar supernatural noir atmosphere, merely on a smaller scale that I for one certainly appreciate.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Book #146 of 2025:

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

This 2004 alternate history strikes me as a modernized take on Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, again imagining the United States of that era following Europe’s descent into strongman fascism. But whereas Lewis was writing contemporary fiction with invented characters, Philip Roth grounds his retrospective in actual fact. The celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh really was an isolationist and an outspoken antisemite, and while he never ran for president in real life, the author begins by considering what might have happened if he did. His 1940 election over FDR on a promise to keep us out of war sets the country on a radically different path, which Roth recounts as though from his own younger self, featuring fictionalized versions of his childhood family and friends.

The pseudo-memoir is an odd approach, and my primary critique here is that we don’t get much of a sense of the protagonist narrator at all. As a Jewish child in New York, he’s able to relate to us the tenor of the times and the ways in which antisemitism becomes steadily more socially acceptable, but his presence as a concrete personality comes and goes. In hindsight, it’s also easy to object that Roth’s nightmare doesn’t reach nearly far enough, since our own political moment has seen minorities like undocumented immigrants treated far worse than this story’s Jews. Although there are violent pogroms by the end of the tale, the government’s most extreme actions are to pressure companies into relocating certain positions to force employees to move and thereby break up Jewish community enclaves. Ultimately, however, the Lindbergh presidency is short-lived and Roosevelt is elected to follow him after all, bringing the nation back in line with our familiar established events.

It’s a decent thought experiment, and I can see why liberal audiences have appreciated it from the George W. Bush years through today, but I can’t help feeling like so much more could have been done with the overall concept / premise.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Olive and the Dragon by Victoria Goddard

Book #145 of 2025:

Olive and the Dragon by Victoria Goddard

Author Victoria Goddard’s latest Nine Worlds title offers her usual brand of wholesome cozy fantasy, fleshing out a new corner of that ever-expanding saga. This time it’s a prequel to her Greenwing & Dart series, which normally centers around a young gentleman scholar named Jemis Greenwing. We find him here as a precocious nine-year-old instead, with his witchy mother — already deceased by the point when the main stories start — filling the role of protagonist in his place.

Her magic is different from anything we’ve seen before in this setting, manifesting as visions of potential futures for everyone she encounters, and it’s interesting to hear how she sensed the darkness that’s presumably the upcoming Fall of Astandalas. At the same time, however, this volume shares a certain weakness with many of the writer’s other novellas, in that the short length doesn’t provide much room in which to actually tell a satisfying plot. All that happens in this installment is that the heroine takes a walk through the woods near her ancestral home, gradually immerses herself into the fae sorceries there, and eventually meets with the titular dragon for a brief conversation.

The fairy-tale structure is neat, as is the further insight into Jemis’s family and their powers, but this is ultimately way too slim to blow me away like Goddard can do at her best.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Ripley, season 1

TV #47 of 2025:

Ripley, season 1

It’s been seven years since I read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I’ve never seen any of the previous adaptations, so I’ll mostly be judging this Netflix miniseries on its own terms. And the first thing to note is that it’s a strikingly gorgeous production, filmed on-location in Italy in stunning black-and-white. The show is practically worth a watch for that baroque cinematography alone, but it’s all in service to the tense thriller at its core, about a sociopathic conman who takes advantage of a distant acquaintance before ultimately killing him, stealing his identity, and taking over his opulent lifestyle. As the investigation closes in, our dastardly antihero must figure out how to throw the detectives off his trail whilst continuing to dodge the people who knew the real Dickie Greenleaf and thus could catch the imposter in his ever-escalating lies.

It’s an older story, but I really appreciate the creative decision to keep this a midcentury period piece instead of updating it to the modern day. The original novel was of course contemporary when it came out in 1955, but its specific plot moves and countermoves — the means by which the chameleonic Tom Ripley is able to evade detection for so long — feel so contingent on this particular time and place. As a result we get plenty of well-observed texture surrounding the minutiae of hotel check-ins, passport arrangements, and the like, bringing the setting to life in all its stark beauty. On a pretty basic level, this sort of impersonation scheme just wouldn’t work in anything approaching our current surveillance state of panopticon digital records (or not without significant changes, at least), and it’s great that the creators appear to have recognized that.

Andrew Scott is superb in the lead role, modulating his performance somewhere between its Fleabag and Sherlock extremes as the situation requires. His Ripley is a skittish creature, always convinced that police or other strangers are watching him, and there’s an undercurrent of queerness at such moments that amplifies the subtext of the book. Are men on the street clocking him as one of their own, or is it sheer Hitchcockian paranoia over his many crimes? The protagonist isn’t explicitly gay on either page or screen, but Scott is and Highsmith was, and this version openly invites us to wonder whether the connection between Dickie and Tom involves sexual attraction in either direction. Meanwhile the character of Freddie has been updated to be queer himself, in addition to being played by nonbinary actor Eliot Sumner.

In the end it’s a fun cat-and-mouse game full of noir moodiness, with an ending that even incorporates a small part for John Malkovich, who starred as Ripley in one of the movies. This appears to be a one-and-done for the streaming platform, but if the same team ever wanted to reassemble and adapt any of the sequels, I know I’d eagerly tune back in.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆