The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

Movie #1 of 2022:

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

A fun Marvel movie with a mostly Asian cast, built around setpiece homages to a variety of martial arts films of the past, from Jackie Chan’s work to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Mortal Kombat of all things. It’s sad that the MCU took so long to center a protagonist like Shang-Chi, and that this adaptation only gets here after a sequence of ‘Mighty Whitey’ franchise characters like Danny Rand and Dr. Strange who benefit from the vague orientalist wisdom of their mentors. But on its own terms, this is pretty great. (And it is a strong rebuke to how poorly the Iron Fist show handled similar plot material, as well as finally retconning the Mandarin stuff from Iron Man and Iron Man 3 to be a little less problematic.)

The 2:12 runtime could have definitely been cut down some — I personally think Trevor should have been limited to his first scene alone; he’s not nearly as entertaining as the script seems to believe — and I prefer the action-comedy vibe of the beginning of the flick to the mystic fantasy of the end. But overall, I’ve really enjoyed this. It manages to blend the kung fu and superhero genres nicely, and represents exactly the sort of distinctive and diverse storytelling that this cinematic universe needs as it continues to move forward.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Reave the Just and Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #375 of 2021:

Reave the Just and Other Tales by Stephen R. Donaldson

This reread is the final book I’ll finish in 2021, and since that’s a bit of an occasion and author Stephen R. Donaldson is one of my favorites, I decided to review each of the stories in the collection individually. As a whole, though, I would say it’s a big step up from his previous anthology Daughter of Regals, which in my opinion has a wide range of hits and misses. Here, even the weaker efforts are pretty good. So without further ado…

Reave the Just: A phenomenal choice for title story and volume opener. I love the folkloric campfire tone and the characters that only Donaldson could write, following their obscure moral strictures to a natural conclusion that still manages to surprise. The worldbuilding would be stronger without the mentions of Satan and Hell, but that’s a minor critique. ★★★★★

The Djinn Who Watches Over the Accursed: I like the sense of place and the surprising narrator, but the scenes of slaughter get a bit repetitive and the closing beat of logic doesn’t quite track for me. As a result it feels both too long and unfinished, I think. ★★★☆☆

The Killing Stroke: Sharp characters, a society that feels fully crafted despite how little we get to see of it, a plot with unexpected depth and twists, and interesting philosophical conversations. As in his novel The Man Who Fought Alone, Donaldson’s own experience with martial arts is invaluable for presenting these schools of fighting and how their differing perspectives would affect combat with one another. This is just all-around great. ★★★★★

The Kings of Tarshish Shall Bring Gifts: I think this one relies a bit too heavily on implicature, but only just. It has the structure of a fable, which helps, and a few striking visuals. I wish the characters had more heart to them, as they never quite feel like real people to me, but as figures for embodying a moral theme, they serve the plot well. ★★★★☆

Penance: I don’t love that the only woman in this tale is relegated to the protagonist’s recounting of his backstory, where she’s horribly abused and ultimately fridged to fuel his manpain. But that unfortunate and overused trope aside, it’s a phenomenal piece and a great spin on the classic vampire mythos. It’s also a seriously pointed jab at abuses of organized religion like the Inquisition that diverge from the traditional tenets of faith to suit the corrupted whims of the powerful. I think Scriven is probably tied in my mind with the nameless narrator of Unworthy of the Angel from the writer’s previous collection as the quintessential Donaldson hero, a downtrodden figure striving endlessly for redemption. And in that context, the twist at the end delivers stunning catharsis. I want this to be a whole novel, to see how the wider conflict resolves once this particular crisis has passed. ★★★★★

The Woman Who Loved Pigs: An interesting fantasy version of Flowers for Algernon that casts the transformation as a violation of consent and refuses to ever let its perpetrator off the hook. Considering abuse in terms of personal autonomy and disability rights allows Donaldson to explore the topic without overtly sexualizing the victim here, a feat that sometimes gives him difficulty elsewhere. I don’t exactly love the ambiguous ending, though. ★★★★☆

What Makes Us Human: This is a solid piece of science-fiction, but it doesn’t quite have enough depth or plot to it, at least presented in isolation like this. I haven’t read any of the other stories that make up the loose multi-author novel Berserker Base from which this chapter is excerpted, let alone the rest of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series. Perhaps the entry would work better situated in that broader context, but here, it seems a pretty straightforward tale of a colony-world spaceship encountering a malevolent AI out in deep space. ★★★☆☆

By Any Under Name: I like the decision to bookend the volume with its title story and this parallel one, each of which deals with a figure of mystery and power who willingly takes on a debt to a seemingly undeserving protagonist. Yet the comparison inevitably hurts the latter tale, as the nameless stranger is so much more inscrutable in his sense of justice and the nature of his obligation than Reave. The desert setting and the creepy necromancy of the villain are effective, but hero and reader alike spend the entire time confused about the savior’s intentions, which cuts against the narrative overall. ★★★☆☆

[Content warning for torture, gore, slavery, rape, victim-blaming, necrophilia, and animal abuse.]

Average rating for the book: ★★★★☆

Book Review: Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott

Book #374 of 2021:

Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott

This pseudonymous (and therefore non-mystery) Agatha Christie novel from 1944 is my favorite thing I’ve read from her yet, under either byline. It’s a deceptively simple tale on its face: a middle-aged Englishwoman, delayed as the only passenger at a desert waystation whilst returning home from visiting her daughter in Baghdad, is left alone with just her thoughts for several days. Unused to solitude, she is forced for the first time to reflect upon her life, gradually coming to suspect certain truths that her mind has been hiding from her for years. Namely, that her children despise and pity her, that she has browbeaten her husband into a line of work he hates, and that he perhaps once had a passionate affair with a late friend of theirs.

What emerges is a fascinating character study of British repression, as well as a masterful demonstration of how a writer can lead her audience to clear realizations long before the protagonist gets there herself. The story lacks much of a traditional plot, but the quiet tragedy of this woman and her family is intensely gripping nonetheless, and the ending is heart-wrenchingly suspenseful despite hinging on the relatively small matter of whether she will speak her new truth or shrug it all off in the name of maintaining normality. It’s everything that I wanted but didn’t quite get from The Remains of the Day, a sublime examination of the lies we tell ourselves and the opportunities that pass us by when we’re not open about the things we really want.

[Content warning for portpartum depression, antisemitism, and racism including slurs.]

★★★★★

Book Review: The Illusion by K. A. Applegate

Book #373 of 2021:

The Illusion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #33)

Remember that Scholastic Book Fair series from the 90s with all the wacky covers of kids turning into animals? Haha, anyway, this is the volume where one of those middle-schoolers gets captured and violently tortured in excruciating detail for a good portion of the text, fouling himself and breaking his bones against the walls of his cage in agony. He’s in hawk form, and when his captor realizes he’s retreating into the animal mind as a shield from the torment, she turns the device setting to include bursts of pleasure that the bird can’t process to lure him back to his senses, which also provides a contrast to make the returning pain worse.

Hats off to Ellen Geroux, the franchise’s most prolific ghostwriter who certainly makes her debut gig memorable here. It’s one of the hardest Animorphs novels to read, especially for the additional fact that Tobias has entered this situation willingly (volunteering after recognizing Jake’s subtle maneuvering to set him up for it). He didn’t anticipate the torture machine, but the team nothlit let himself be taken by the Yeerks as a test subject for their new Anti-Morphing Ray, which could be catastrophic if deployed upon the heroes in battle. Tipped off in advance by their Chee allies in the previous story, they’re aiming for the enemies to try out the beam on his hawk body and conclude that it doesn’t work when it fails to demorph him further. He even acquires Ax so that he can be seen morphing from Andalite to redtail, leading to a few lovely scenes of nephew and uncle bonding and the boy finally getting to experience that side of his heritage directly.

Mostly, though, this is a brutal time for the protagonist. The sub-visser assaulting him is a pretty young woman reminiscent of Rachel, who’s gradually revealed to be suffering through trauma and a likely psychotic break of her own, losing track of the boundary dividing her Yeerk and human selves. Narratively, the resemblance to his girlfriend is overt and comes at a fitting moment as they navigate how to have a relationship when he is somewhere between boy and hawk and can’t seem to articulate to her why he can never be just the regular teenager she appears to want. (This is not exactly my lane, but if you’re reading Tobias as an allegory for being trans as I know people do, I think this title offers some of your best evidence yet.) The Controller Taylor in a sense reflects Tobias as well, a productive parallel for a figure situated at the crossroads of so many conflicting identities.

In the end, our hero’s friends help him escape, although not before he’s been damaged enough to blurt out a potentially-fatal confession that the Animorphs are all local children, which hopefully goes unnoticed in the melee. He’s had a delirious vision of his father that may or may not have been a genuine message left for him, and come to a new understanding with Rachel, culminating in sharing their first on-page kiss and then going off flying together. The danger of the Anti-Morphing Ray has passed, but only via a harrowing ordeal that of course brings the freedom fighters no closer to actually ending their awful bloody war.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, ableism, and injuries from fire.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang

Book #372 of 2021:

The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang

A soul-searching 2021 effort to explore the thorny issue of Asian-American identity: why it’s a problematic construct for attempting to incorporate so many diverse experiences and national origins into a theoretical monolith, and why it has generally been a poor fit within this nation’s customary binary understanding of race. (How can someone like Korean-American author Jay Caspian Kang look at scenes from the Civil Rights Era, he asks, and see himself as either the black folks denied a seat at the lunch counter or the white oppressors barring them? And why are today’s social justice activists so often silent when Asians suffer, particularly at the hands of other minorities?)

There are no easy answers to such questions, but the writer does a valuable service in raising them, as well as observing how the failure of the multiracial liberal coalition to engage with and support Asian-Americans on their own terms has led plenty in his demographic towards toxic “Men’s Rights” groups and similar outlets of reactionary politics. Even as xenophobic attacks soared in the wake of Donald Trump’s anti-Chinese rhetoric at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many recent immigrants and Asians around the world continued to view conservative America as an attractive option, and Kang forces us to consider how to address that perception of opportunity rather than just insist that it’s misguided. Part history lesson, part memoir, and part polemic, this is altogether an uncomfortable yet acutely necessary read.

[Content warning for racial slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk

Book #371 of 2021:

All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told by Douglas Wolk

This is a rollicking nonfiction attempt to grapple with the wide range of Marvel Comics titles, written by a lifelong fan after he went back to read literally all of them — the 27,000+ comic books, spanning over half a million pages, that all tie together into one massive interconnected work that’s been building for six decades now. Author Douglas Wolk is quick to note that that’s not how the stories were ever intended to be consumed, and certainly not the only way to enjoy them — and that there are many that have not stood the test of time, either due to racism and sexism more obvious in hindsight or just because they aren’t particularly good overall. But he’s a kind and welcoming guide to a world that can often seem impenetrable from the outside, walking us through the publication history and major milestones of the fictional continuity.

With so much content at hand, the writer can’t possibly feature everything, yet he does a fine job of distilling characters like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and the X-Men down to their core essences, as well as exploring how their depictions have shifted throughout the years to reflect the politics and culture of the moment. Specific issues are cited not to form any sort of best-of or required reading list, but merely to suggest potential entry points for readers whose interest is piqued by his overview. In Wolk’s opinion, the Marvel superhero canon is an inherently iterative construct, regularly referencing its long past in a way to reward eagle-eyed fans without (hopefully) alienating newcomers. If you aren’t taking in the entire enterprise as he has — and which he does not recommend — you are going to inevitably encounter callbacks you don’t understand, forming a richer experience as you read further, but you should also be able to follow along in the immediate plot at every stage, regardless.

I’ve never been especially into Marvel Comics myself, although I like their cinematic adaptations, but this project captures their wild fun and rings true to my engagement with other long-running franchises such as Star Wars or Doctor Who. With no single creator at the helm, differing visions yield odd components of a theoretically-unified universe, but there’s a certain delirious joy in watching pieces click together across lifetimes of steadily-improvised collaborative storytelling. Wolk channels that nicely here, giving all of us a taste of what it was like for him to read through Marvel in its entirety and why he loves it still.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 1

TV #90 of 2021:

Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 1

My expectations weren’t high going into this recent Clone Wars spinoff, as I generally found that parent show to be of variable quality and didn’t think these particular ‘defective clone’ figures made much of an impression beyond a gimmick during their brief appearance there. Luckily, this new series proves stronger than my fears for it. The animation inherits the stylized blockiness, but it’s never looked smoother, and the action spectacle is just as awesome as you’d get on The Mandalorian or the big-screen films. The protagonists have a fine degree of depth to them (although Tech and Echo tend to fade into the background a bit), and lead actor Dee Bradley Baker does an incredible job at differentiating their voice patterns, which has sometimes been an issue for me in his work with the Jango Fett imprints in the past.

The new addition of young girl clone Omega is well-pitched too, falling somewhere between Ezra Bridger and the Child / Baby Yoda in terms of her role in the group dynamic and effectiveness in battle. (It’s hard not to read Hunter’s relationship with her as anything but father/daughter, despite the insistence that the gang are all siblings and a late reveal that she’s actually older than the rest of them.) The faulty inhibitor chips are a neat plot device hanging over the heads of this strange family, with the brainwashing mantra of “Good soldiers follow orders” sending chills on every occasion we hear it threaten to split the team. And some fun characters from other Star Wars lines make surprise intersections with their journey, from the bounty hunters Cad Bane and Fennec Shand to future Rebel Hera Syndulla.

Possibly my favorite aspect about this program, though, is how it explores the time right after Revenge of the Sith, starting when the command to “Execute Order 66” doesn’t hit our heroes with the same force as the regular troopers, setting them up as fugitives and eventual mercenaries instead of loyal grunts. From that point we see the dawning of the Empire in a way no other movie or television feature has yet depicted, and while each episode’s storyline tends to be a standard job-of-the-week, that backdrop gives the whole enterprise a current of excitement akin to how The Mandalorian has handled the era following Return of the Jedi. In my opinion the now-ended Rebels and Resistance largely missed the mark in fleshing out their own corners of the broader franchise timeline, but so far, The Bad Batch is delivering the goods.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids by Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE

Book #370 of 2021:

Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids by Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE

Like many self-help books, this 2019 title feels as though it probably could have been stripped of repetitive examples and published at magazine-article length, if not for the fact that that obviously wouldn’t make as much money. I also don’t agree with all of author Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE’s hot takes either, despite appreciating her core insight that parents should learn to recognize and resist our natural stress responses when difficult situations with our children arise. The reminder that physical and verbal violence are unproductive and harmful is good for readers too, I guess, although the writer seems way more tempted to go that disciplinary route than I ever have been myself.

Mindfulness overall still strikes me as a bit of a scam, yet in general I’d say this is a solid parenting guide that doesn’t overemphasize that practice out of any reasonable proportion. I’ll round my rating up to three-out-of-five stars due to sheer inoffensiveness, but given how common-sense most of this advice appears, I don’t know that I’d necessarily recommend the text to anyone.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood

Book #369 of 2021:

Within These Wicked Walls by Lauren Blackwood

The publisher is pitching this novel as an “Ethiopian-inspired… fantasy retelling of Jane Eyre,” which doesn’t quite seem to hit the mark, as the two books really only share a wealthy man named Mr. Rochester whose manor holds dark secrets (and a few isolated scenes like a home burning or a horse falling down, I guess). In this case, the house is haunted by a literal demon rather than a hidden wife, and the heroine is a young exorcist hired to cleanse it.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the original Charlotte Brontë story, and in many ways, I appreciate this version better. The manifestations are suitably creepy, the action is pulse-pounding, and the protagonist reads as less of a pushover, in my personal opinion. There’s a nicely complicated relationship with her emotionally-distant mentor / father figure as well, which adds good pathos to the plot.

Unfortunately, a greater portion of attention is given to the title’s romance, which is somehow simultaneously toxic and bland. Andromeda is so poor that she’d literally be back on the streets if she lost this job, while her beau is the rich employer who lies about the scale of the possession problem and inappropriately begins hitting on her at the earliest opportunity. It’s not exactly love at first sight, but it’s pretty close, with no particular demonstration of why these two folks would be drawn to each other or apparent chemistry in their interactions. I don’t mind messiness in fiction or demand characters be perfect, but this is more boring than objectionable overall.

If that element were removed or handled differently this could easily have been a four-star read for me, and I do think debut author Lauren Blackwood shows a lot of talented potential elsewhere in the text. But I just don’t care enough about the two lovers to accept how often the narrative drags to a halt for their strained declarations of emotion at one another.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, racism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Reversal by Michael Connelly

Book #368 of 2021:

The Reversal by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #3)

I enjoy both Mickey Haller and his half-brother Harry Bosch as protagonists, and a team-up is always fun for combining their respective lawyer and detective perspectives. This particular exercise feels as though it needs some further twist to really elevate the material, however, and it just never gets there for me. Instead it offers a pretty straightforward legal matter — the retrying of an accused child murderer, after his original conviction from decades ago has been overturned — that’s notable mainly for the bizarre decision to have defense attorney Haller appointed as independent prosecutor. I guess it’s interesting for him to experience a trial from the opposite side for the first time, but there’s no clear payoff for the odd premise. The alternating chapters from him and Bosch also tend to be repetitive early on, with many instances of one character informing the other about something we’ve already seen firsthand for ourselves.

Still, author Michael Connelly has a base level of workmanlike competency that comes through as usual, and the court case is readable even if not exactly a page-turner. I’m not disappointed by this novel like I was with Harry’s last story Nine Dragons; I’ve simply not been especially impressed either.

[Content warning for gun violence, drug abuse, incest, and pedophilia.]

★★★☆☆