The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie

Book #36 of 2022:

Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #29)

Note: This 1948 Agatha Christie offering has also been published under the title There is a Tide . . ., part of the same quote from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that forms the novel’s epigraph: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.”

By either name, the story has a few ingenious twists to its plot, but the eventual motives behind the various crimes turn out rather unconvincing, as does Hercule Poirot’s detective work throughout. When he’s not making bizarre psychological claims — people are incapable of significant change, a military man was orderly and so would have left a suicide note, etc. — he’s relying on evidence that readers aren’t privy to, like noticing a family resemblance in a photograph. (This is a longstanding complaint that I have with this author: she sometimes forgets that much of the enjoyment of mystery fiction is in attempting to solve its puzzles for oneself, not merely watching a clever and colorful personality show off.)

The characters and post-war premise involving the widow of a London Blitz victim are distinctive enough that I could almost give this book three-out-of-five stars, were it not for a horrifying finale in which — minor spoiler alert — a woman realizes she’s in love with the abuser who literally tried to strangle her to death a short while before (and who just confessed to killing someone else as well). She thought he was boring and safe until then, you see, and is now prepared to adore him wholeheartedly. It shouldn’t take an expert investigator to find something deeply wrong with this development, but there’s no textual indication that it’s meant as anything but a happily-ever-after, and it leaves a real sour taste in its wake.

[Content warning for gun violence, incest, xenophobia, ableism, and rape culture.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #35 of 2022:

Against All Things Ending by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #3)

This penultimate volume has perhaps the slowest start of any Thomas Covenant story, with literally the first five chapters — one hundred full pages, almost a fifth of the whole text — spent on an extended confrontation that’s already just a continuation of the closing scene from the book before. But author Stephen R. Donaldson’s work has always been philosophically dense, and his characters understandably have a lot to talk about by this point in their journeying. Through Lord Foul’s manipulations and Linden Avery’s own dire choices, apocalyptic forces have been brought to bear that will ravage the world in a matter of days. And Covenant himself, restored to a form of life yet often rendered insensate by the crushing weight of his memories as an immortal piece of the Arch of Time, can offer less help than either she or we might have expected.

My favorite aspect of this novel is probably the continued expansion of the Land’s past, fleshing out intriguing stray tidbits that have been previously mentioned and occasionally introducing brand-new peoples and events that nevertheless help deepen our understanding of the realm. Generally these revelations come via the ur-Lord trapped in the labyrinth of his mind, and while that’s less satisfying a narrative device than the recent incidents of time-travel, it’s still integrated into the action well enough. As the protagonists (eventually) explore hidden corners like the Lost Deep of the Viles, they find themselves face-to-face with eldritch mysteries that remind us of how lovely Donaldson’s worldbuilding has been throughout this series, and how much it would truly ache to witness its final destruction.

Not all of this wholly works for me, and I particularly struggle to see the point of “She Who Must Not Be Named,” a composite beast made up of the faces of betrayed women from across history that has always struck me as goofier than it must have been intended. But overall, this is a somber tome, with some of the most poignant on-page character deaths and ensuing grief of the entire saga. And at its finer moments, the writing is pure Donaldson, offering wrenching questions of culpability and moral failure amid a wondrous fantasy setting where heroes use their powers of intuitive reasoning to navigate a path forward more than any magic or might.

To a certain extent, all ten of these books grapple with the mingled importance and difficulty of resisting despair: of finding the will to believe that unforeseen help might yet arrive despite all hope seeming lost, and accepting that other people have the freedom to make decisions on their own part even when we personally think they’re doomed. Following the calamitous loss in this tale, as the stars wink out in the sky and the Worm of the World’s End rouses from its ancient slumber, that lesson is harder for Linden to accept than ever. But it’s the crucial issue heading into the ultimate finale.

[Content warning for body horror, self-harm, gore, and mention of rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Arrival by K. A. Applegate

Book #34 of 2022:

The Arrival by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #38)

The Andalites are here! Well, sort of. It’s not the reinforcement fleet that the Animorphs have been expecting while waging their desperate resistance war against the Yeerk occupiers. Instead, Ax’s people have sent a vanguard of just four warriors, with a stated objective to assassinate the enemy general Visser Three. Cassie is outraged, although that’s one of her moral objections that feels somewhat weak given the death and destruction that she and her friends wreak among their foes on any particular day.

It’s a question the book dodges too, with the eventual reveal that the commandos have actually come to deliver an unstable virus that will wipe out the Yeerks completely but might mutate into something that will also prove fatal to humanity. Even ignoring the shaky science there, escalating the stakes to the level of genocide makes the story less interesting, because it turns the leader of these new arrivals into a clear villain, in a franchise that’s generally best when exploring the murky grays, tough decisions, and ensuing trauma of the child soldiers and their guerilla campaign. Whereas non-combat casualties can at least be debated on ethical grounds, a pathogen that could kill off all humans is obviously, trivially bad. And so Arbat, who as Alloran’s brother could have been a poignant tragic figure and a mirror for Jake, himself the sibling to a Controller, is instead only a shallow obstacle for everyone to overcome.

There’s also some nominal conflict as to whether our alien protagonist will keep loyal to his earth allies or the delegation of his own species — including an attractive and intelligent young female cadet, with whom he shares his first kiss in human morph — but at this point in the series, that’s a foregone conclusion as well. We are accustomed to Andalite arrogance and hypocrisy, and Ax has already made his choice to stand with the Animorphs against it. Likewise, while it’s amusing to see the team pretend to disband in a crisis of conscience, feigning weakness for a hidden audience at Cassie’s barn just as they once did to entrap David, it seems so transparent and repeated a ploy that I doubt many readers would fall for it (and I don’t consider it a major spoiler to mention here). But as a consequence of ghostwriter Kimberly Morris framing the narrative that way, the kids are absent for much of this title, leaving only Aximili and his nonstarter of a plot.

As is often the case, individual moments help save the day, to a degree. I love how the initial mission to investigate the local newspaper office turns out to be a Yeerk honeypot, and that it likely would have been the end of the “bandits” had the real Andalites not shown up right then to assist, tracking Ax’s DNA. With the group heavily outnumbered, Taxxons surging up the stairwell, and Hork-Bajir pulling back ceiling tiles to drop down from above, it’s an outstanding setpiece all-around, matched only by the final showdown at the Yeerk pool, where caged humans stand and link arms to protect the fighters from the guards attempting to shoot them. Gambling that their bodies are too valuable as hosts, those temporarily-free individuals put their lives on the line in a small yet significant act of bravery. Tobias helping to burn straight through the McDonalds overhead is pretty neat too, making this the second volume in a row in which the good guys cause serious property damage with potential for civilian collateral, in a sign of how their struggle continues to escalate.

So it’s not a complete bust. The characters are recognizably themselves, and I definitely appreciate the continuity here, following up on the battle for Leera and several other threads from earlier adventures. I just think we spend a bit too long on would-be tensions that seem fairly simple to resolve at this stage of the larger storyline.

[Content warning for body horror, cannibalism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

Book #33 of 2022:

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

This novel has its share of flaws, but I almost want to give it four stars regardless. The worldbuilding and time-travel mechanics are excellent, as is the gradual way these elements are introduced in the text. We open on a late nineteenth-century England that is merely a vassal state of France, and a figure who finds himself stepping off a train there with no memories at all. However, he does have periodic visions of things that aren’t true — buildings that don’t actually exist; the faces of familiar-looking strangers; an impossible alternate reality where his homeland is free — and in seeking answers to those mysteries, he eventually stumbles upon a gateway that leads to nearly a hundred years ago.

He’s not the only one who’s made that journey, of course, and the reason his timeline is different from ours is that the French have gained knowledge about the future that allowed them to avoid defeat at the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Once in the past, our protagonist also becomes gradually involved in a slow-burn romance with a dashing yet secretive and angry-at-the-world pirate captain — a man who moreover may have already known him back in the days he can’t remember.

And that’s where the story loses me a bit, because — spoiler alert — it is very obvious right away how these two lovers are connected, yet the narrative plays coy to save it as a big reveal near the end for some reason. So I struggle with that writing choice, as well as with a few deaths that are shrugged off too speedily and the supposed dilemma facing the hero that if he stays to explore this newfound connection and help rewrite history (again), he will likely erase his beloved young daughter from existence. I have kids that age myself, and it’s hard to imagine someone in my shoes risking their lives on a half-forgotten ghost, no matter how dreamy this particular one appears. I’m not saying that piece of plotting is inherently misguided, but I don’t feel as though author Natasha Pulley has managed to sell it convincingly enough in this exercise. Given a character who more firmly believes in the nationalistic cause or whose offspring don’t seem as dear or as threatened, and this development could maybe have worked. It just doesn’t here, at least for me as a reader.

And that’s my sense overall of this title, I guess. Certain parts are terrific. Others seem like they could have been as well, had that potential not been squandered in execution. A rushed conclusion that attempts to find a happy balance for the family/relationship conflict reads as far too easy, for instance, and thus largely unearned. I’m both impressed and frustrated by the composite result, but I think the latter sentiment wins out in the end.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, slavery, marital rape, and racism.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Girl I Was by Jeneva Rose

Book #32 of 2022:

The Girl I Was by Jeneva Rose

I dig the premise of this novel, featuring a 35-year-old from 2019 somehow transported back in time to meet herself as a college freshman in 2002, but I’ve found both versions of the character to be insufferably vapid and cruel, and I don’t buy their sudden respective personal growth at the end of the story. Older Alexis is frustratingly oblivious throughout too, as when she doesn’t realize a request to see her temp job’s HR at closing time on Friday is more likely to be for a dismissal than a promotion, or when she misses all the cues that her brother in the past has been hitting on her — unaware they’re related — until he literally moves in for a kiss.

The one area where the title transcends itself is in a trip home for Thanksgiving (with the heroine introduced as a classmate of her teenage self, leading to that awkward sibling moment), which is surprisingly poignant thanks to her knowledge, kept from young Lexi, that their mother will die the following year from an undiagnosed heart condition. Of course, that’s weakened when the protagonist later discovers that she can change her own timeline after all and doesn’t immediately run to the phone and tell her mom to see a doctor!

Still, if the family visit and parent/child relationship had made up the majority of this text — as in Helen Fisher’s excellent Faye, Faraway / Space Hopper — I would probably feel more warmly towards the project. Instead there are far too many scenes with the lower stakes of homework and school friends and trying to convince a stubborn kid to stop partying so much, and not enough justification for why such a shallow person would have been moved by the experience at either age.

[Content warning for fatphobia, alcohol abuse, disordered eating, car accident, and slut-shaming.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Stoner by John Williams

Book #31 of 2022:

Stoner by John Williams

This 1965 novel is a quiet story of a quiet life, about a turn-of-the-century man who leaves his parents’ Missouri farm to study agriculture at college but ends up discovering a fascination with literature, changing his major, and never leaving, going on to become a professor at the school after graduating and then spending the rest of his career there. It’s plainly written, and at some points, deeply affecting! I can understand the title’s modern cult following, especially in those sections that deal with petty faculty quarrels and the lingering sense that William Stoner is trapped by his circumstances and not living as his fullest self.

At the same time, however, he can be a frustratingly passive protagonist, accepting other characters’ big decisions about what he should do — pursue teaching, have a child, later give up that daughter to his jealous wife’s machinations, etc. — with minimal resistance. Although that backdrop highlights the moments when he does truly stand up and fight for what he wants, it’s neither an endearing trait nor a significant enough flaw to transform Stoner into some sort of tragic hero, in my opinion. He’s just a bit of a pushover, and one of several figures in this book who generally seem more like the automatons failing to model humanity in an Ayn Rand screed than actual breathing people. Folks here marry hated strangers on a whim, hold grudges for decades, and adopt principled stances that no one in reality would even remotely consider.

The text has aged poorly in certain ways, too. The scholar’s opponents tend to be rendered as sexist and ableist caricatures, and he himself is called “more nearly a mother than a father” for being the primary caregiver to his baby early on. When I can overlook such matters and let the melancholy of the piece sweep over me, or lose myself in the comfortable academic tedium, the effect is everything it’s reputed to be. But overall this is firmly a tale that I like rather than love.

[Content warning for rape, racism, postpartum depression, domestic abuse, gun violence, suicide, alcoholism, and cancer.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman

Book #30 of 2022:

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman (Tess of the Road #1)

My original review from when I read an Advance Reader’s Copy of this book in 2018:

Practically from the start, I’ve been reeling over the emotional journey that the heroine makes in this intensely personal fantasy novel. Largely eschewing the traditional genre focus on epic quests, author Rachel Hartman has instead written a powerful meditation on trauma, grief, and healing that only happens to take place in a world with dragons. (It’s technically a follow-up to her Seraphina duology, but this novel tells an independent story that doesn’t require having read the previous two books first.)
The tale of a young woman who takes to travel in order to escape her past and find a reason to keep living is incredibly cathartic, and is suffused with an uplifting moral philosophy that finds Tess ultimately letting down her barriers to affirm the goodness of life in all its diversity. We need more stories like this, and I can already tell this is one I’ll be revisiting in the future.

Further thoughts, in 2022:

And here I am, revisiting it! I decided to refresh my memory of this title now that its long-awaited sequel has arrived, and to see whether it still strikes me as powerfully — which it does. I stand by everything I wrote four years ago, but I also wanted to speak a bit more on this book’s fairly radical compassion that’s modeled throughout.

It’s a feminist picaresque that abhors sexism and rape culture but doesn’t judge a girl for dressing in men’s clothing while traveling alone. It celebrates consensual relations among adults, without placing any shame on sex workers or on anyone who abstains for any reason. It gently meets people with senility where they are, rejecting the overt mistreatment sometimes directed their way along with the well-meaning urge to try wrenching them back into the clarity of the present. And it understands the importance of making space and time for safely processing trauma, while stressing that no magical cure can ever erase our worst experiences. As one disabled character who now requires assistance to walk reflects, “I wouldn’t wish for this, Tess, but I’m not sure I’d wish it away, either.”

I’ll give a special shout-out to the delightful quigutl too, that inquisitive and friendly race of small dragons who are always taken seriously by the text and the protagonist, whether in pursuing their inscrutable investigations into the mysteries of the universe or in changing from female to male to an ungendered ‘ko.’ Tess loves them, Hartman loves them, and I love them too. They’re part of why this volume has stayed lodged in my heart, and I’m so excited to see how they continue to play a role in the heroine’s journey over the next one.

[Content warning for rape, alcohol abuse, depression, suicidal ideation, gore, premature childbirth, and death of a newborn.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly

Book #29 of 2022:

Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly

Another three short stories featuring detective Harry Bosch, published just one month after the previous collection Suicide Run in 2011. (It remains unclear to me why they were not combined.) This one I like a little bit better on average, so I’ll bump my rating up accordingly. “Father’s Day” is a tough read about a man whose disabled fifteen-month-old son has died from being left in a hot car, as the police try to determine whether it was truly an accident. “Christmas Even” loses track of its own homicide investigation in favor of the protagonist returning a stolen saxophone to a jazz musician he once saw perform back in his military days, and is therefore the weak spot of the book in my opinion, although it’s not too bad overall. And the title entry finds the hero revisiting the first murder he ever worked as a cop 33 years later, when new evidence comes to light that might finally solve it.

In that last story and collectively across this volume, we see Harry at several different stages of his career, which together offers a neat retrospective on the character. All of that adds up to a stronger interlude than before, even if there’s still nothing here that would really impact the broader plot or continuity of the novel series.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Weakness by K. A. Applegate

Book #28 of 2022:

The Weakness by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #37)

I’ve used the word “goofy” in the past to describe the handful of Animorphs volumes that I haven’t really cared for in this reread, reflecting those one-off premises that are simply too outlandish to take seriously even in the context of a YA franchise about teens turning into animals to fight alien parasites. This story, by contrast, is pretty well-grounded in its setup: Jake is out of town on a family matter, and when the opportunity for a time-sensitive mission comes up before he’s back, the group agrees to let Rachel lead them in his stead. The execution, however, is just terrible, with plot holes aplenty and the protagonist feeling very out-of-character to me. Under ghostwriter Elise Smith, she reads more like her shortsighted and megalomaniacal ‘Mean Rachel’ persona from #32 The Separation than our regular heroine, a frustrating development that’s neither called-out nor justified in the text. I enjoy this series so much overall that I can generally come up with enough redeeming elements to give most books at least a three-out-of-five-star rating, but this one is too compromised by its inadvertently-titular weaknesses.

Even outside of the narrator pumping herself up with mantras like “I was Rachel! Hero warrior and interim king!” the storyline is a mess. There’s a new Yeerk overseer on earth, in a host body too fast to be effectively fought. The team barely escape from their first encounter with their lives, but decide at Rachel’s urging that since the Inspector is here to evaluate Visser Three on behalf of his superiors, they’ll carry out a rapid sequence of high-profile attacks on known Controllers, to make the enemy leader look bad. Cassie and the others rightfully worry about civilian casualties, which Rachel overrules and then agonizes over once an old man dies of a heart attack in front of her, but the whole strategy is bizarre. The kids are basically just barging into businesses with infested employees, causing some property damage, and leaving. On two occasions, they embarrass the Yeerks by forcibly stripping them, with no explanation of why an extraterrestrial slug would care about that or consideration of how the helpless human hosts might feel at this latest invasion of privacy and autonomy.

Indeed, the heroes are totally nonchalant here about the humans inside their foes, whom they usually try to avoid fighting. Rachel in bear morph squeezes one Controller so tightly his lungs are crushed, the veins in his neck stand out, and his face turns blue, yet no one says a thing. They also bring Ax on all of these public outings in his own Andalite form, even though they’ve previously gone to great lengths to keep his existence a secret from humanity. Later, when Rachel decides that they need to quickly hijack a private plane, everybody storms the airport without morphing, letting security guards and potentially cameras see their faces as they rush the tarmac and force their way onto the jet. (And then they intentionally fly that vehicle into an empty office tower to access the base hidden within, in an explosion which admittedly didn’t have the unfortunate overtones of today upon the novel’s pre-9/11 publication but is still such an extreme escalation. There would be a major investigation into something like that, with interviews of all the available witnesses! Why didn’t they just use a morph to sneak onto their target undetected like they’ve done so many times beforehand?)

Eventually, the Animorphs square off against the villainous commanders again, and manage to take down the newcomer with venom from Marco’s cobra morph, which I guess is faster than even the cheetahs that failed them at the start. And that’s it! Visser Three chooses to verify his rival’s death over finishing the slaughter of his true opponents, and the news treats everything as a fluke stampede across the city and unrelated plane crash. There’s no future mention of any other Garatrons or their physical resemblance to Andalites after this despite how effective the creature was overall, just like there’s no followup on any of the ways the gang exposed themselves here. When Jake gets back, he commiserates with Rachel on how hard it is to call the shots, and praises her for keeping everyone alive without him. It’s just such a thoroughly mediocre exercise all-around, without even the ludicrous joy of the more overtly ridiculous titles.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 1

TV #9 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 1

The 2011 launch to this animated family series is generally charming and funny, yet it doesn’t quite feel fully-formed, especially from a rewatch perspective. (I dropped the show from my regular viewing roster at some point, but I know I’ve seen at least the first nine seasons.) The essential characterizations of the five Belchers are more or less there from near the start, but the humor isn’t always driven by their particular personalities here, and the worldbuilding, the musical component, and the extended cast of recurring weirdos are all a bit rudimentary so far. We do see Hugo the Health Inspector, rival restaurateur Jimmy Pesto, landlord Mr. Fischoeder, and school counselor Mr. Frond popping up a couple times each, at least, in and among the other petty authority figures that are mostly clashing with Bob for now. I wouldn’t say any of these first thirteen episodes is an absolute classic, though, and there’s no real serialization or signs of character growth yet across the batch. But it’s a pretty solid beginning overall.

[Content warning for sexual harassment and transphobia.]

★★★☆☆