The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Boy Who Lost His Birthday: A Memoir of Loss, Survival, and Triumph by Laszlo Berkowits with Robert W. Kenny

Book #20 of 2022:

The Boy Who Lost His Birthday: A Memoir of Loss, Survival, and Triumph by Laszlo Berkowits with Robert W. Kenny

[Disclaimer: Although I did not meet him until 2016 and never knew him especially well, I am a member of the temple where Laszlo Berkowits served as Rabbi Emeritus until his death in 2020. He was a comforting presence and his memory remains a blessing.]

Nearly eight decades after the Holocaust, with denialism and other forms of antisemitism again on the rise, it is imperative for the world to listen to survivors and the testimony they have left behind. In this 2008 memoir, author Laszlo Berkowits relates his own experience as a Jewish teen in 1940s Hungary, presenting a snapshot of his vanished pre-war community and his time in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other Nazi concentration camps. Imprisoned there simply for being a Jew, he faced brutal dehumanization, verbal and physical abuse, starvation, exposure to the elements, the murder of relatives and friends, and the acute psychological torture of never knowing when another round of executions was to begin or whether he’d be selected for it.

If you’ve never heard such torments described firsthand, then you really should, either from this source or from another. Even for readers familiar with other accounts of the regime’s atrocities, the future rabbi’s ordeal was uniquely his own, and there is value in adding its specificity to your understanding of the German extermination program. Young Laszlo bonded closely with two boys from his hometown in the camps, for example, recognizing that their friendship was a fount of strength that nevertheless wouldn’t drain him emotionally the way constantly seeing and worrying about his father several barracks away would have done. When the older man was removed suddenly on a work assignment and did not return, his son realized that he must have died but had no way of determining exactly where or when.

All told, it’s an unfathomably harrowing affair, in which the writer avoided death by sheer chance on multiple occasions, as when a guard happened to pick the boy standing next to him to shoot or looked away for just long enough for Laszlo and his friends to sneak from the shorter and weaker group in which they’d been sorted and hide among the taller prisoners, correctly intuiting that the former were soon to face the gas chambers. When the camp was finally liberated and Berkowits was emigrating to America, he discovered that he no longer remembered the date of his own birthday, and had no remaining family left to ask.

At under 100 pages, this book is a bit thin, and there’s certainly much more that could have been shared about the rabbi’s long years and life’s work following the war. It’s not the smoothest text either, with diction that’s occasionally stilted and repetitive, as is often the case for older non-native speakers. But it’s a heartbreaking narrative in a genre of nonfiction that deserves to be more widely-read, if we are truly going to live up to the ideal of Never Again letting injustice to a minority population reach such a horrifying stage.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Book #19 of 2022:

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

This is less a novel than a sequence of tangentially-related chapter-length stories, and although individual moments either tug at the heartstrings or pose some intriguing sci-fi concepts, I’m pretty lukewarm on the project as a whole. It’s a book about a debilitating and deadly global pandemic of the near-future that primarily afflicts children, and there’s a lot of parental anguish over helplessly watching that suffering and experiencing such loss. And that’s powerful to an extent, but the approach often feels miscalibrated as dark satire, like the talking pig bred for organ harvest or the euthanasia theme park where people can give their kids one last day of happiness before putting them on a fatal roller coaster. Author Sequoia Nagamatsu also includes several characters pining for a dead acquaintance they think could have become a soulmate, a problematic projection which isn’t especially interesting on its face and tends to reinforce the idea that the grieving parents didn’t know their children all too well, either. The cumulative effect is more bitter than bittersweet.

On top of those issues, the text is somewhat repetitive too, spinning minute variations on its basic plot and themes as it goes along instead of branching out or building to something substantial. We see glimpses of potential avenues that the narrative might explore in greater depth, like Neanderthal death rituals, immortal aliens, colony starships, the afterlife, and even the sinking of Atlantis, yet they all appear merely to be dismissed with a shrug and a return to the typical angst of the 2030s.

Three-out-of-five stars — “I liked it” on the Goodreads scale — may seem high for such a critical review, but I do like certain pieces in isolation, and I appreciate the unusual format and scope of the work overall. Moreover, I can’t quite shake the feeling that it just hasn’t been a good title for me in particular. Other readers may well receive this altogether differently, so I wouldn’t want to write the venture off completely despite not really enjoying my own experience with it here.

[Content warning for suicide and graphic descriptions of human remains.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen

Book #18 of 2022:

Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen (Skin of the Sea #1)

I love that this YA historical fantasy novel features Black mermaids and other elements drawn from #ownvoices West African folklore, a simple fact of representation that I know is going to matter deeply to a lot of readers. I personally haven’t found the plot or characters to be as engaging, however, particularly regarding the generic quest and the rushed feelings of romance that develop between the heroine and the human boy she saves from drowning at the beginning of the story. I think I might have been more impressed with this title 5+ years ago in a less-crowded genre, but for a late-2021 release, its best parts aren’t especially revelatory.

[Content warning for slavery and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Suicide Run: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly

Book #17 of 2022:

Suicide Run: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly

A very quick read, containing just three short stories about detective Harry Bosch. (Another collection of three, Angle of Investigation, was released the following month; I have no idea why the publisher didn’t treat them as one single volume.) Of these, I like the title piece the best, for its satisfying twists and insightful investigative work as the protagonist realizes an apparent suicide is actually the victim of an illusive serial killer. In contrast, “Cielo Azul” covers a case that has already been described at some length in the main Bosch series, and “One Dollar Jackpot” seems a bit too straightforward to keep me engaged throughout. So that’s one four-star entry and two threes for this book, about on par with some of the weaker novels.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, pedophilia, and rape.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Visser by K. A. Applegate

Book #16 of 2022:

Visser by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Chronicles #3)

The Chronicles have been a consistently strong corner of the Animorphs franchise — perhaps surprisingly so, given how little they feature of our familiar teenage animal-morphing freedom fighters. In this third volume, for example, the spotlight lands on Visser One, the Yeerk commander who outranks Visser Three but has fallen on hard times after he accused her* of treason. The last time the heroes saw this foe in book #30 of the main series, she had seemingly died, right after learning that the son of her human host, Marco, was one of the so-called Andalite bandits. Yet they never found a body, and #35 ends with the cliffhanger of her calling the boy at home.

Here, we find that the visser is on trial for her life, facing charges of incompetence and conspiring with her people’s enemies. Visser Three is there as her inquisitor, although she detects that their superiors on the Council of Thirteen are displeased with him as well and she’s determined to cast the blame his way as she presents her carefully-chosen testimony (which we hear along with her thoughts and interior dialogue with Eva). The Andalite Controller has ploys of his own, however, from surprise witnesses to a staged wild animal attack for him and his guards to defeat, claiming that it’s the resistance group in morph. (And let me say, it’s a jolt for the reader to figure out what’s happening in real time, as the beasts and hapless Hork-Bajir Controllers are killed before our eyes.) When the defendant sneaks a cell phone and dials Marco, it’s to provide him and his friends with a weakness in the Yeerk pool security and encourage them to launch a strike that day, thereby discrediting her rival’s pathetic charade.

As that maneuver demonstrates, Edriss 562 remains a devious individual even at her lowest, willingly betraying and sacrificing bystanders of her species in order to save her own skin. I’d even go so far as to call her an antiheroine in this novel, a narrating presence whose perspective is both sympathetic and repulsive as she details her initial infiltration of the earth. Together with a partner, defying orders to ignore the distant planet for now, she came here in the early 90s and became the first known Yeerk to capture a human host**. She’s likewise the one who founded the front organization The Sharing, and settled on a plan of slow conquest by subterfuge, rather than the all-out war that Visser Three would prefer.

She’s also deeply conflicted, and like many secret agents behind enemy lines, finds herself drawn to the unwitting population in which she’s immersed. Despite her commitment to the mission, she knows she’s assimilated into the local culture in a way her people would never tolerate or understand, particularly regarding the bombshell revelation that she used one of her longtime hosts to get pregnant and deliver a pair of twins***. She seems to genuinely care about those children, later given up for adoption, and her true impetus for avoiding the strategy of bloody combat that the Yeerks deployed against the Hork-Bajir is to keep the two of them safe… until the occupation has spread enough that they can be captured as Controllers themselves.

It’s pretty sick, but author K. A. Applegate does a great job of leading us to root for this creature regardless, especially via contrasts with the boorish cruelty of Visser Three. She wants to live, to prove herself against her misguided detractors, and to preserve our world from outright slaughter. She calls in the good guys, who do in fact show up and ruin the prosecutor’s day. Clearly guilty, and suffering from torture and Kandrona starvation, she nevertheless manages to convince the judges to stay her execution. It’s hard not to like her as a protagonist for all that, at least a little.

Eva comes through well too, as a perpetual voice of judgment — sometimes positive, usually negative — within the alien’s mind and briefly as a free woman who can speak to her son under her own volition again. After the Animorphs rescue her, she makes the heartbreaking decision to remain behind and let herself be re-taken, reasoning that the visser’s opposition to military intervention on earth is important to maintain, and that it would be too suspicious for her host to escape with the kids. At the same time, Edriss can’t turn in the team to the forces on her side, leveraging her realization that they must be mostly all humans Marco’s age, because then the Yeerks would learn how she suggested and abetted their attack on the pool. So they depart in a tense equilibrium, with the general soon sentenced to travel off-world to another developing battleground site anyway.

Overall, it’s a fun title. The temporary shift in focus allows for an interesting character study of a complicated personality, and the plot scratches a logistical itch to explain a lot of background history, the sort of confident flashback move that a series can only really do once it’s established a firm sense of itself in the present. It’s furthermore a glorious love letter to humanity: why a race like ours would matter so much to the burgeoning Yeerk Empire, and why the fighting spirit exemplified by folks like Eva and her son keeps us from being an easy pushover by a technologically-advanced civilization such as theirs. The increasingly-traumatized teens aren’t in it for very many pages, but this narrative of their opponent is a terrific addition to the wider saga.

*Yeerks don’t have a gender, but we mainly see this one infesting women and she thinks of herself as a mother, so I’m following the convention of the books in that pronoun use.

**Visser Three apparently never told anyone that Chapman and Loren were temporarily infested in The Andalite Chronicles about a decade earlier, assuming he retained those memories.

***A clear act of rape upon her host, even though the text, aimed at younger readers, doesn’t call it out as such. We’re shown horror throughout the series at the lack of control a “Controller” has over their body, but I think this is thankfully the only instance of a Yeerk canonically forcing a human into sex.

[Content warning for gore, substance abuse, gun violence, child endangerment, and drowning.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire

Book #15 of 2022:

Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #7)

I might be over this series, which initially wowed me in its considerations of children who depart from dangerous yet fulfilling fantasy worlds only to discover a mundane life that no longer understands them. There’s great pathos in that concept which author Seanan McGuire has dutifully explored, but it feels as though we’ve had diminishing returns for a while now, and a tendency for these stories to seem ill-suited for the novella length, with most ending before they’ve ever quite managed to find a good narrative rhythm.

In this latest volume, we learn of another school that takes in such pupils, designed to make them forget their experiences and graduate as repressed little cookie-cutter darlings their parents will recognize. Eventually some of the students wake up to that horror and attempt to break free, but this yet again strikes me as a plot that would have needed more room on the page to really shine. The cameos of characters and events from previous books are fun — I definitely wouldn’t recommend starting with this one — and in the end, it’s a reasonably solid and warmhearted adventure like usual. But I’m still missing that special magic that pulled me into the first few titles.

[Content warning for suicide attempt, fatphobia, disordered eating, and domestic abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

Book #14 of 2022:

The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

There’s so much to love about this novel that I hardly know where to start. It’s speculative fiction, yet thoroughly researched, with a thoughtful and detailed note at the beginning reviewing the care with which author Monica Byrne has approached this project as well as where she’s taken the liberty of educated guesses to fill in gaps in the scholarly consensus. She even cites particular experts by name, including historical linguist Lyle Campbell, whose work I was already familiar with beforehand.

As for the book itself, this is of course not the first tale spanning over multiple millennia, but I have seldom seen the process handled so well, effortlessly balancing the vastly different period settings: one group of characters in the Mayan civilization of 1012 CE, one in US and Belize of 2012, and one in a new utopian society of 3012. I wouldn’t call it nonlinear — each timeline progresses steadily on — but they amplify one another nicely, with clear impacts that nevertheless keep the resolution of each subplot a mystery for readers as we alternate among them. The casual dropping of clues across time is just superbly done too, creating a patchwork constellation of connections backwards and forwards to illuminate the text throughout.

The earliest protagonists are heirs to a waning Mesoamerican kingdom, ritualistically preparing to secure their power as their calendar foretells the dawning of a new epoch. Later they have passed into legend with their true fates unknown, and a young woman of our day travels to her father’s homeland, her mind churning with inchoate thoughts of a new world order and methods of accessing a state of spiritual transcendence. Further still, a unified nomadic culture spans the globe, its guiding principles apparently based on the teachings that same figure left behind when she vanished without a trace in our era of intensifying climate disasters so long ago. Yet even for the dwellers of that latest point, there are dogmatic tensions brewing that threaten to fundamentally rupture and collapse their familiar way of life.

Thematic parallels link these three storylines, along with repeating motifs, like a pair of estranged twins on a collision course to square off against one another. It’s even suggested that perhaps we are looking at literal reincarnation — although I think the writer is wise to maintain that ambiguous uncertainty, as she does with the existence of the divine realm of Xibalba and Maya cosmology more generally. There are competing tenets of faith across this narrative, and they are honored as shaping a genuine reality for their respective practitioners without need of any explicit objective verification. The genre is neither fantasy nor that variety of science-fiction that insists on applying cold rationality to every phenomenon on display. Experiences of the holy (however that’s personally defined) don’t need to be shunted into a category of Real or Not, and the book is made stronger by embracing that.

And the worldbuilding! The ancient moment is clearly the one that’s been most heavily-investigated, and it breathes with plausible authenticity to bring that distinctive perspective to life. The future is fascinating too, a queer socialist community that has survived via genetic engineering so that all members are born as what I suppose we’d label intersex, with individuals able to readily change their sex organs surgically (among other body modifications for disability accommodation) as they see fit — though they almost all use she/her pronouns in honor of their blessed saint. And the present, situated neatly between the two, is recognizable as today while underscoring the liminal threshold of something radically different percolating just beyond our horizons.

My one small and admittedly tangential critique, which should really be taken with a grain of salt as part of a much broader conversation about the sci-fi universe at large, is that whenever I hear a story say that every human in the future shares one common religion (or no religion at all, a la Star Trek), I start hearing alarm bells as a Jew. My people have sacred customs we’ve maintained over untold generations, and if your imagined utopia doesn’t have Judaism in it, it’s not because we would have suddenly changed our minds about that. You’ve written our extermination, and tacitly suggested that our current existence is an obstacle of backwardness for our betters to overcome on their way to perfection. Byrne at least is committed to picking at the flaws of that future society, casting it as just another temporary alignment giving way to its successor, but I feel like there are eugenicist implications for marginalized groups that she perhaps hasn’t fully realized and grappled with.

Regardless, this title is a tremendous achievement that grows in pathos as each separate element nears a joint and mindbending climax, an ambitiously dense yet approachable enterprise with an engaging cast and big ideas I can tell I’ll still be thinking about long from now. It’s only January, but this is an easy early contender for the best book I’ll read all year.

[Content warning for self-harm, gore, live human sacrifice, and incest.]

★★★★★

TV Review: Fringe, season 5

TV #6 of 2022:

Fringe, season 5

A very strange season, and a very strange ending to Fringe. Following up on the flash-forward episode “Letters of Transit” from the previous year, this final run finds the team frozen in amber for two decades, then thawed out to fight the invading Observers who have meanwhile taken over the planet. It’s a time jump of two sorts, actually — in addition to the world and some supporting characters moving dramatically on, our protagonists have lived through another four years that we didn’t get to see before they went on ice. And now here they are, no longer investigating mad-science crimes against a backdrop of uneasy relations with a parallel universe, but rather helping the resistance movement in a futuristic guerilla war and scrambling to reconstruct a half-forgotten plan to defeat the enemy altogether.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say this isn’t Fringe, but it’s Fringe in the way a film like The Wrath of Khan is still a part of Star Trek: TOS. The plot rhythms and concerns are all different, and even though the developing storyline revisits plenty of earlier cases, these loving callbacks take on completely altered significance here. But that’s Fringe too in a sense, testing the borders of everything in a perpetual Ship of Theseus experiment. If people can alter their biology, their personal timelines, and the very laws of physics on this program, then sure, let’s let the writers put the show itself through this ultimate transformation.

The transition into a sequel is admittedly bumpy. There’s a lot of new information to throw at us early on, and for a while, the setting feels a bit generically dystopian and the mission a maguffin-filled fetch quest. But it settles into itself as it goes along, clarifying into a story of loss and the appropriate human responses to that. What do we turn ourselves into next, when who and what we love is ripped away? Do the glimmering potentials of technology represent an opportunity for us to surpass our limitations with applied ingenuity, or an empty temptation that risks sacrificing our core?

Peter and Olivia explore opposite answers to those questions, and the central tension of the endgame rests less on how the good guys will win the day, and more on whether you can save humanity at large whilst abandoning your own. Walter’s wrestling with an echo of that too, torn between the arrogant genius he once was and the lighter yet addled spirit he’s become since. Only Astrid remains underserved as a protagonist, a shameful state of affairs given how she’s been present for all 100 episodes as well. (There’s an obnoxious running joke this season about Walter getting her name wrong in a variety of unlikely ways, and the late reveal that he must have been doing it intentionally out of playful affection doesn’t make it any less racist.)

Ultimately this is not my favorite iteration of Fringe, and I really miss Lincoln and the rest of the folks on the other side, who appear for just a quick cameo here. But it’s strong in and of itself, and a fine sendoff to the entire enterprise.

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

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 2 > 4 > 5 > 1

Book Review: Reaper of Souls by Rena Barron

Book #13 of 2022:

Reaper of Souls by Rena Barron (Kingdom of Souls #2)

This #ownvoices YA fantasy novel — unrelated to the Diablo III expansion that amusingly shares its name — picks up soon after 2019’s Kingdom of Souls leaves off, with its protagonist newly empowered in the Orisha magic she never thought would be hers. Unfortunately, the explosive ending of that first book has shattered the knotty family dynamics that helped render it so interesting, and this sequel takes a little while to rebuild its narrative engine. In the end I’m rounding up to a four-star rating on the strength of another great climax where everything comes together, but this story stays a bit aimless for longer than I’d prefer.

Some of the new concerns will seem familiar to genre readers, such as the love interest whose own form of sorcery repels the heroine and may be warping him into something demonic, or the ancient creature trying to make a human teen recognize that she’s his reincarnated soulmate and agree to be with him once more. Yet author Rena Barron generally keeps these tropes feeling fresh, like when she paints that latter case as an unwanted imposition and not the star-crossed romance that many writers would depict. It all adds up to a fine continuation of the overall plot, with big twists of disguised identities and life after apparent death straight out of a spy movie. The tale closes stronger than it starts, and finds me eagerly awaiting the next volume again.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #12 of 2022:

The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #1)

While I think the first trilogy of this fantasy saga remains its most thematically brilliant segment, and the second neatly integrates a new co-protagonist for a different perspective and set of psychological issues to work through, I have a great fondness for how thoroughly author Stephen R. Donaldson has revisited the setting for this final outing. Narratively, the threat of the Sunbane in round two seems to appear out of nowhere — requiring a response yet very much feeling like a sequel to any original concerns — but in the Last Chronicles, the history of the Land has a palpable weight and texture upon the present. Delayed effects of prior developments are coming home to roost, and after 21 years away from the series, the writer has a keen eye for picking apart those implications and unraveling tidy resolutions from before, only to ultimately bind them up tighter again.

Our viewpoint figure here is the returning Linden Avery, who is wrenched from a decade of stability to find herself drawn back into that other world where she has access to daunting amounts of magical power and a physician’s deeply-felt duty of care to wield it justly. The earth heroine doesn’t believe she’ll escape alive this time, but she has come seeking her kidnapped adopted son and opposing Roger Covenant, the child of her former companion last glimpsed as an infant in Lord Foul’s Bane and now grown into a man of twisted spite. (As a young parent myself, this is an element I’m particularly curious to rediscover with fresh eyes, though it is mostly setup thus far.) Following her summoning, she is also caught up in the needs of her surroundings, moved to help the descendants of her old friends in that realm as they face the massing of apocalyptic forces and a ruling class of Haruchai who have mistakenly concluded that preventing the teaching of lore and spreading of legends will keep their ignorant subjects safe.

Although millennia have passed, the Land of this era hearkens back to a lot of what was beautiful about its initial introduction, like the majestic Ranyhyn horses that were absent during the depredations of the doctor’s earlier visit. Via those steeds, which have always had the gift of predicting when they’ll be called for and starting out far enough in advance to arrive then, this novel furthermore introduces proper time-travel — for now simply as a brief trip to a moment several centuries after the previous volume, but soon to encompass the full range of days that Donaldson has constructed across this continuity.

If this book falters, it’s in its immediate story, which doesn’t reach much of a conclusion to the threads it raises beyond a genuinely heartwarming redemption arc for the new character Stave. He and the rest of this cast, unfamiliar to Linden and us as the tale opens, grow truly dear as they journey together over these pages. I’ll grant that when you reduce the plot to its major events, it’s perhaps a bit heavy on the walking and talking, even by this author’s usual standards. But it nevertheless represents a rich return to a cherished fictional home and its philosophical arguments so unique to the genre, with plenty of intrigues planted for the titles ahead and a cliffhanger ending that would surely draw even the most recalcitrant of readers onward.

[Content warning for gun violence, self-harm, gore, and mention of rape.]

★★★★☆