The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Happy Endings, season 2

TV #50 of 2022:

Happy Endings, season 2

This is probably never going to be one of my favorite shows, but it’s improved so much between seasons that I’m willing to round up my rating accordingly. Every single character feels more sharply defined, and while Penny frequently proclaims this the “year of Penny,” it’s really Alex who’s been transformed the most, landing on a ditzy yet profound personality that…. doesn’t exactly jive with the romantic heroine of season 1, but is more than funny enough to forgive the retcon. Dave’s the only member of the cast that the writers still don’t seem to have cracked, as he often ends up alone against the other five friends: either as straight man to their shenanigans or as stubborn maker of bad decisions that the rest of them soundly mock. But at least he’s less of an ostensible lead by now, and is easier to put up with in the smaller doses that ensue from that restructuring.

The series is still not particularly serialized — maybe even less now, given the distance from the wedding that initially kicked everything off — but there are a few running threads this year like Max’s unlicensed limo service or Alex and Penny moving in together that add some semblance of momentum to the proceedings. Most of all, though, this is simply a funnier and more creative sitcom in season 2. The jokes are great, and they’re coming at a breakneck pace a la 30 Rock or Arrested Development that almost merits a second viewing just to catch them all. More callbacks and recurring characters. Less gay stereotyping. Overall I’m quite pleased with the improvement from one year to the next, and way more understanding of why some folks seem to like this show so much.

[Content warning for gaslighting and jokes about office shootings.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Book #156 of 2022:

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

An unexpected misfire from acclaimed author Celeste Ng. While it’s clear this novel is a very personal project that she’s poured a lot of herself into, and the anti-Asian bigotry throughout is as painful to read as intended, there’s just not much story or character here. The setting of a dystopian near-future America is chilling enough, in an ‘It Can’t Happen Here‘ sense, as the writer has absolutely captured the ways in which overt fascism could take root under the guise of patriotic U.S. values (to a greater extent than it already has, of course). But it’s not a great sign that that’s the strongest part of the title, since it has significant issues itself.

The basic premise is that a trade war with China has led domestic xenophobia to spike and oppressive legislation to be passed, tightening government control over school / library materials and mandating that children can be removed from parents deemed unsuitable along any ambiguous ideological criteria. It’s all scarily plausible, with plenty of historical and modern parallels, although there’s weirdly no discussion of some of the marginalized populations who in reality would be hurt the most by such a move: queer, non-Christian, disabled, etc. Child separation in the book is seemingly motivated only by racism, which feels like a real misunderstanding of how right-wing extremism tends to target and harm all minority identities alike even when some are more of a locus than others.

Against this backdrop, we are presented with two protagonists. The first, a twelve-year-old boy, has no particular plot arc other than experiencing the uneasy times and vaguely searching for more information about his mother, who walked out on him and his dad three years ago and now appears to be a public enemy of some kind. Then midway through the text when he finds her, we switch mostly to her perspective, filling in the family and society backstory more fully.

And she’s a pretty odious person, in a way that the narrative never seems to understand or confront. Her major crime, beyond being Chinese American, turns out to have been writing a bit of poetry that’s caught on amongst protesters and subsequently been banned. Justifiably afraid that the authorities would seize her son if she continued her regular life, she leaves her husband to raise him alone, with no reason given for why the two couldn’t have simply accompanied her wherever she’s fled. Shortly thereafter, she knocks on the door of a Black couple whose daughter was shot and killed at a march holding a sign with her words on it, centering her own pain despite how minuscule it must be compared to theirs. She even characterizes herself to them as having lost a child too, when, again, she is the one who walked away from her very much still living nine-year-old!

It’s hard to believe we’re meant to sympathize with this angsty poet and deadbeat mom, despite how she reads like an uncritical author stand-in. When she first reconnects with her boy, she’s engaged in a mysterious project involving hiding things on the street when the police aren’t looking. Has she joined a terrorist / resistance cell? Is this some sort of violent direct-action praxis against the horrible status quo? Spoiler alert: no, not really. She’s merely putting out a network of portable speakers, which culminates in her broadcasting stories of missing children until the connection is traced back and she’s (presumably) detained. That’s the big achievement she’s thrown away her family and years of her life for — a brief address that only a limited number of passersby could have even heard, and which could have been easily printed or distributed online to a wider audience with a fraction of the effort, time, and risk. It would be a strange development even if it led to a reckoning with her negligent parenting behavior, but instead it’s cast as a bittersweet triumph that may someday contribute to a shift in the tide of public opinion.

Ng has enough baseline competence as an author, sympathy for families in turmoil, and pointed observations about how close we are to a full-on McCarthyist nightmare that the resulting novel is not a complete loss, but it’s nowhere near the quality of her previous work. I give this 1.5 stars, reluctantly rounded up.

[Content warning for rape.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers season 9

TV #49 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers season 9

After watching roughly an episode a day for the past eight months, I’m now caught up to the point I was at in 2019 when I quit this program before. I noted back then:

“As expected for an animated sitcom this far into its run, Bob’s Burgers is still amusing but rarely delighting in this most recent season. The series has put in the character work for so many years that its humor can still go to some fantastically weird specifics, but no one seems to be growing much anymore, which is a big part of what I look for in a show.”

In other words, this is a quintessential three-star, like-but-don’t-love title for me, and while I’m planning to stick with it this time around to see season 10 and beyond (including that whole movie they finally made!), I’m tempering my expectations significantly. Funny comfort-watch television is fine for what it is, but I’m not sure Bob’s Burgers has any genuine surprises left in it by now.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Book #155 of 2022:

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik (The Scholomance #3)

Because of the way that this YA fantasy trilogy has been structured, the concluding volume is at a bit of a disadvantage right from the start. Book one introduced a magical boarding school in a pocket dimension where Lovecraftian monsters feed on unwary students, and book two brought the conflict there to a crescendo as our prickly heroine and her classmates / reluctant friends approached the end of their senior year and battled their way through to the graduation portal. When this final novel picks up immediately afterwards with El back in the relatively safe and mundane real world, it’s hard not to long for the dark and claustrophobic halls of the familiar Scholomance setting and the perpetual underlying thrum of tension that shepherded us through the previous stories.

There are a few continuing plot points — some drama with the enclave wizard communities here on the outside; the old family prophecy that the protagonist is going to turn evil someday; her trauma and grief over the companion who stayed behind in the last title and is now presumed dead yet eternally suffering — but in general, this is a big reset for the series. New characters, concerns, and narrative rhythms are all required, and it’s a somewhat uneven transition until author Naomi Novik finds her footing again. Which she eventually does, to be clear! Once this finale settles into itself, it’s every bit as fun and violent as what’s come before, and it furthers the streak of righteous indignation at unjust systems that fueled El’s actions at school.

The writer has saved some wickedly Sandersonian worldbuilding twists for the last, as the whole enterprise of conventional magic in this universe turns out to rest on exploited children to a degree we never could have realized, and Galadriel Higgins is the perfect catalyst for upending everything about that dynamic whilst remaining sympathetic to the privileged individuals who didn’t know any better and will inevitably be hurt by the fallout. In one great early scene, a group of people she’s rescued are flabbergasted when she declines any personal reward to instead demand as payment that they open up their beautiful enchanted gardens to the public. There’s so much about this society of sorcerers that’s cravenly transactional in a not-especially-veiled metaphor for capitalism, and I love how our viewpoint figure rejects that compulsion so utterly throughout, in an ever-escalating sense of outrage and determination to find a kinder alternative. Not since Red Rising have I cheered this much for a character ripping a civilization’s sins out at the root.

So I can forgive the meandering filler in the initial stages of this volume, like those interminable visits to one enclave after another or some weightless speculation about the nature of unreal spaces, since the endgame works so well once it finally arrives. (And El gets a new female partner too, bringing a note of queerness to her story that fits perfectly but I don’t remember being indicated beforehand.) On balance I’d have to say that this is my least favorite of the three books — I just miss the Scholomance itself so much! — but it’s a fittingly epic and satisfying conclusion to this remarkable coming-of-age saga.

[Content warning for gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1 > 3

TV Review: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, season 1

TV #48 of 2022:

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, season 1

Origin story. Spinoff. Legal comedy. Rom-com. Fourth-wall-breaking commentary on typical TV and comic-book tropes. Straightforward MCU entry itself. Feminist critique of chauvinism in fandom. This first season of She-Hulk is trying to be a lot of different things all at once, and they unfortunately cut against one another in their effectiveness at times. But generally speaking: what a rush!

I’ve had a blast with this introduction to Bruce Banner’s cousin Jen, and both the looseness of the plotting and the sometimes-dodgy effects work on her are helped immeasurably by the decision to cast as charismatic an actress as Tatiana Maslany in that role. It’s the big break for the performer that Orphan Black fans have been clamoring for ever since that show ended, and her practice playing off alternate clones of herself surely helps her sell whatever motion-capture wizardry is employed for her Hulk form here. Even seven-foot tall, green, and bulging with muscles, the star has effortless chemistry with everyone else on the screen.

The plot has its ups and downs. The supporting cast could have been fleshed out better, particularly a criminally under-utilized Renée Elise Goldsberry, but the program does a great job at welcoming back into the franchise both Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky / Abomination and Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock / Daredevil — 14 and 4 years respectively since their last proper MCU outings, albeit with brief film cameos last year for each. And I appreciate how often the scripts live up to the series subtitle and center the fact that their protagonist is a working lawyer rather than a superhero, finding neat legal avenues to explore in most episodes.

I’m sure that the very meta ending is going to prove divisive, but I like it, up to a certain degree. It is definitely an unexpected and thrilling take that we haven’t seen from Marvel before, but its winking playfulness masks how the creators are essentially scoring points by critiquing their own writing decisions. There’s something a little too self-congratulatory in calling out the flaws in a story you’ve just spent nine weeks building up, you know? Like, Jen is right when she complains that the premise of a villain stealing her blood to copy her powers is overdone… but we still devoted a lot of time to the development of that angle week over week that could have been used more productively instead. If the only reason to include an element is to ultimately acknowledge that it’s a dud, why not simply steer the season in a different direction all along?

So I’m not ready to call this experiment an unmitigated success, but it mostly acquits itself — attorney pun! — and skates by on charm when it can’t. Overall, I’ve enjoyed the show’s spunky ambitions and am looking forward to a hopefully more relaxed and confident round two.

[Content warning for stalking, revenge porn, and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: After the Funeral by Agatha Christie

Book #154 of 2022:

After the Funeral by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #26)

The setting: a wealthy man’s funeral, at which his estranged family has gathered to hear the will, when his sister awkwardly suggests that his death of apparent illness might in fact have been a murder. The next morning, she is found brutally killed herself, with no clear motive beyond that tenuous link to her brother. Everyone’s unrelated lies and secrets form the usual red herrings, and about halfway through this book — published under the title Funerals are Fatal in the US — Hercule Poirot is brought in to investigate and resolve the case(s).

It’s another Agatha Christie story that I like but don’t love, in part because I can’t buy that a) the killer would go to the elaborate lengths eventually revealed, b) such a deception would have actually fooled anyone, or c) once pulled off successfully, it could have ever been deduced in the manner described. Even though my hunch toward a suspect proved correct, I haven’t enjoyed seeing the puzzle of this mystery come together as much as I’d prefer. The author’s typical assortment of big personalities and British class drama suffices to entertain, but the spark exhibited by her best creations is lacking.

[Content warning for sexism and ableism.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Black Bird, Blue Road by Sofiya Pasternack

Book #153 of 2022:

Black Bird, Blue Road by Sofiya Pasternack

Another outstanding middle-grade Jewish fantasy novel from #ownvoices author Sofiya Pasternack, who had previously dazzled me with her Anya and the Dragon debut. I love this one even more, from all the subtle authentic touches of lived-in Judaism and lesser-known mythological nods to the fierce twelve-year-old heroine willing to take on the entire world and the literal Angel of Death for a chance to heal her twin’s leprosy. I appreciate how there’s no discernible antisemitism anywhere here too, after that was such a major tension in the Anya series. (Realistic bigotries in fiction have their place, as it can be empowering to see characters overcoming obstacles similar to our own. But it’s also nice for some works about marginalized identities to not depict their oppression, and reassuring to note that this particular writer can do either effectively.)

My biggest concern about the disability plot of this book was that Pesah would be problematically healed by magic and/or reduced to an inspirational figure with no agency of his own, but Pasternack skillfully avoids both those traps throughout. The fantasy element doesn’t even arrive until a quarter of the way through the text, giving us ample time to settle in with the blunt reality of the boy’s condition. Although this is largely Ziva’s story — we open on her grimly preparing to amputate another of his fingers, as the only family member still comfortable getting close enough to care for him like that — the narrative always finds space for her brother to assert his own preferences for his life and treatment, which are often quite different from hers.

When the children learn that their parents will be sending Pesah off to an isolated leper colony, they run away together, looking for a doctor who might be able to cure him. Instead they cross paths with a shedim (a folkloric being somewhat analogous to an Islamic djinn), who encourages them to find the mystical city of Luz, where no one ever dies. There the milcham (a giant bird granted immortality in the Garden of Eden) is said to protect its fellow inhabitants, while the angel Azrael waits patiently outside. But reaching that destination isn’t necessarily the solution to their crisis that it seems to be, as the unlikely trio of companions eventually discover.

The resulting tale is a fun adventure in the quasi-historical 10th-century Khazar kingdom, but also a deeply personal account of a young girl coming to terms with her sibling’s mortality. In true Jewish fashion this protagonist wrestles with pronouncements of fate again and again, and while the genre allows her to seek a miracle, Pasternack plays fair in not delivering one — and in helping her understand, to the extent that anyone can, why her kind and clever loved one will nevertheless soon die. It’s a powerful work that overcomes my natural hesitancy towards middle-grade drama by tackling such a big question, and I think I ultimately have to give it my highest rating for how it might help younger readers process illness and loss in their own lives. If every book is to be judged against the best possible version of itself, it’s hard to imagine any way that this particular title could have been improved.

★★★★★

Book Review: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw

Book #152 of 2022:

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw

With one bizarre caveat that I’ll get to below, this 2022 sequel novel to the 1993 stop-motion classic is a worthy follow-up and a great adventure in its own right. It’s certainly far better than I expected for a belated media tie-in with such an awkwardly-long full title! Centering on the somewhat-underutilized love interest from the film, this book explores newlywed Sally’s anxieties at becoming queen, a surprising retcon of her origins, and her heroic efforts to save the whole world from a threat she unknowingly unleashes. I like how author Shea Ernshaw has taken this opportunity to not only revisit the Halloween Town and Christmas Town settings of the movie, but also to depict for the first time their Thanksgiving, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, and Valentine’s counterparts. She expands the worldbuilding further as well by introducing the concept of ancient, pre-holiday lands whose portals are overgrown but still accessible, with our protagonist inadvertently opening one and letting in an eldritch monster that proceeds to put everyone else to sleep in order to steal their dreams.

It’s a fantastic premise and a strong showcase for the main character, and generally retains throughout that effervescent blend of quirky darkness that makes the original animation (and the Tim Burton brand more broadly) such a timeless delight. I don’t want to spoil the revelations about the heroine’s past, but I’ll simply note that, as with the project as a whole, I was initially skeptical yet swiftly won over. The ensuing examination of found families, conflicting heritages, and chosen home communities is very well-done, and a neat thematic extension of Jack’s old interest in bringing elements of Christmas into Halloween.

As for the clunkiness: this is going to sound ludicrous in summary, but at one point, Sally winds up in the human world, where everyone has likewise been cursed into perpetual slumber while she searches for a cure and tries to avoid the Sandman herself. Thinking thoughts about royalty, the ragdoll arrives in the bedchambers of England’s Queen Elizabeth II, and spends a few minutes marveling at how “polished” and “courtly” and “elegant” the sleeping monarch looks. As readers, we are forced to sit through several paragraphs like this, each one seemingly more cringeworthy than the last:

“There is still something about her. A magnificence that cannot be measured in the weight of the silk that makes up her gowns, or the jewels draped over her pale human skin. She has the soul of a queen, sleeping or not. Adorned and bejeweled or not. It’s in the breath that rests in her delicate lungs, the refined features of her face, the firmness in her jaw. She is dignified and stately and noble. I suppose some people are just born with it in their veins… I swear I can feel the nobility of her through her skin — like a golden, shimmery light. The strength of a woman who has seen many things, overcome much in her long life. A woman who was meant for this role.”

Published about a month before her death, that is an offensively hagiographic and simplistic treatment of a colonizer directly responsible for countless acts of bloodshed and theft around the globe, not to mention an apparent eugenicist argument for the reality of noble genes. And if you think I’m bringing politics into this cute little YA story…. No, actually Ernshaw and Disney Press did that, by literally writing a real person with a very complicated legacy into this plot only to shamelessly fawn all over her. The royal figure is not even just an obvious winking stand-in for Elizabeth; she is identified by name at several points — a distinction given to no other living soul by this franchise. It’s an embarrassing miscalculation of a scene on every level, and if the writer or editor ever sees my review, I do want you to know that you should feel bad about including it in the finished novel.

With all that being said: the entire rest of the tale is really rather good! I don’t believe the one off-moment merits changing my rating overall, so I’m going to go ahead and give this work the four stars that I feel it generally deserves. But I did hate that passage in London so much that I couldn’t in good conscience review the title without addressing it.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Werewolf by Night (2022)

Movie #17 of 2022:

Werewolf by Night (2022)

This is a weird one! Marvel Studios dropped the hour-long “special presentation” on Disney+ today with very little fanfare, but it is apparently an official Marvel Cinematic Universe release. I say apparently because, like the Moon Knight miniseries earlier this year, there are exactly zero explicit canonical ties that I can see here to anything else in the sprawling superhero continuity — or to Moon Knight either, even though that comic book character originally launched in a 1975 Werewolf by Night issue and their shared history was presumably part of the inspiration for making this adaptation now.

I learned that on Wikipedia. I don’t actually know much about this corner of comics lore, beyond the sheer fact that the improbably-named Elsa Bloodstone, Man-Thing, and (sigh) Jack Russell are all established protagonists there. And this standalone mini-film seems like a pretty clear labor of love towards them, so I’m happy that we live in a time when even such obscure figures are getting their moment of glory. I just don’t know that the result needed to be labeled and marketed as belonging to the MCU, you know? It doesn’t seem to set up the Mahershala Ali Blade movie, or tie in with anything horror-adjacent already in the canon. It’s just some random side adventure with an all-new cast.

On its own terms, then: a group of monster hunters gather together after a prominent colleague’s death, to earn the right to claim his namesake talisman (and household, I guess?) by stalking a beast that’s been let loose on the manor grounds. It’s Hammer Horror meets The Hunger Games, since the participants are encouraged to attack one another as well, and that plays out about as bloodily as you might expect. We don’t even get to learn most of their names, underscoring who we’re supposed to be rooting for but also weakening the element of interpersonal drama. It’s filmed mostly in an old-timey black and white with everyone adopting a somewhat stylized manner of clothing and speech, although the ending suggests we might be in a more contemporary period after all.

And it’s… largely fine? Probably more fun if you like creature features and/or slasher thrillers a bit better than I do, but my brain couldn’t stop niggling over the franchise thing or find enough to take away from this exercise in its absence. The MCU’s “Phase Four” has been incredibly scattered in its plot momentum anyway, so I suppose it’s both fitting and puzzling for one of its final chapters to be this self-contained throwback romp.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Book #151 of 2022:

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (The Locked Tomb #3)

I am starting to feel about this no-longer-a-trilogy the way I do towards HBO’s Westworld program, where I continue to enjoy the premise and the general vibe — in this case, snarky queer interstellar necromancers — but am often too frustrated by needlessly convoluted and obfuscating narrative choices to especially care for the story at hand. Both series also now feature body-swapping as a regular plot device, so that it’s not always clear whether a given character is actually the same individual from scene to scene — or book to book, as our newest protagonist has different names for certain people than we’ve heard before. I quit that TV show after the first two seasons when it showed no signs of ever planning to answer its big mysteries rather than spinning endlessly contradictory new ones. Author Tamsyn Muir in contrast seems to have a tight enough grasp on where everything is going that I’m willing to stick it out for the fourth and hopefully final volume. But I can’t say that I’m loving the execution here (pun very much intended).

The second novel was already pretty daring by switching to a narrator with perceptual gaps and a compromised memory of prior events, which we then witnessed through the filter of her distortions. In this third installment, which reportedly grew out of the writer’s outline for the conclusion until it needed to become its own distinct title, we are again situated with a newcomer: quite literally a person who woke up six months ago in the body of a teenage girl. She knows someone else wore this face before her and sometimes has flashes of recall, but isn’t sure whether she herself came from elsewhere or is simply amnesiac. And of course, she has her own particular way of seeing and understanding the world, with the childlike wonder and confusion of something like Piranesi or The Slow Regard of Silent Things, leaving us to read between the lines to see the wartime climate beyond her happy domesticity.

Like its immediate predecessor, this turns out to be a gamble that doesn’t entirely work for me as a reader. I like Nona a lot! She has a deep love for her family and friends that is both charming and an interesting change from the barbed and jaded dynamics that have been our only previous impression for the inhabitants of this setting. But I find I’m unable to focus on any of that when I’m spending so much time fumbling to unlock the puzzle of what should be plain plot logistics. The flashbacks explaining how our universe originally transformed into that of the Ninth aren’t even remotely necessary for my engagement with the worldbuilding as it’s been presented throughout, but they’re so relatively straightforward that they’re easily my favorite part of this book. I hope we finally have enough pieces in place that the next one isn’t nearly so taxing to parse and gets back to the core strengths of foul-mouthed skeleton magic that initially drew me into Gideon. But at this point, I have my doubts.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆