The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens

Book #342 of 2021:

Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens

An incredibly heavy yet informative read on how the modern field of gynecology was created in the age of American slavery, with enslaved black women its unwilling participants. They were involved as patients for experimental techniques, of course, lacking any ways to decline consent and often experiencing pregnancy or other consequences of rape (by men of either race). But the white doctors also drew nurses from that captive population — again without giving them a choice in the matter — thereby putting these assistants on the frontlines of developing the new knowledge, a status that has summarily been ignored by traditional histories.

Author Deirdre Cooper Owens goes into great detail about the massive indignities and small triumphs of this era, and how they still reverberate today when African Americans like her seek treatment and encounter harmful misconceptions of their ‘medical superbodies’ inaccurately believed to withstand more pain than white people. In a later chapter, she likewise explores how Irish immigrants of the same time were pathologized as non-white due to perceptions of their foreign origin, relative destitution, and participation in sex work, and were accordingly treated similarly to slaves of the south by northern practitioners. She highlights the inherent contradiction here, beyond the slipperiness of racial categories: black and Irish women were seen as fit to study by force because they were supposedly so different from their white counterparts, but they could nevertheless somehow provide object lessons on biology that were then applied in service to whites.

The book is an infuriating account despite its shorter length and occasional academic density, and the content warning for the graphic historical atrocities should hopefully be clear from my descriptions above. For those readers who can stomach all that, it’s a terrible but necessary education on where the scientific understanding of reproductive health unfortunately began.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Towards Zero by Agatha Christie

Book #341 of 2021:

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie (Superintendent Battle #5)

A delightfully twisty Agatha Christie piece, and a de facto end to her Superintendent Battle series. That investigator is more present here than he often is for his novels, but he still doesn’t dominate with an oversized personality as Poirot or Miss Marple would. The case and its suspects can instead hold our full attention, helped along by a rather distinctive narrative structure for this author: readers are warned at the start that a murder is being meticulously planned, but kept in suspense as to who the plotter or the intended target could be. As a result, we are invested throughout, yet liable to be led astray by collateral deaths and planted evidence as the story unfolds, still not sure we’ve worked it all out even past the traditional drawing room denouement. With a fun mystery and clever solution(s), this is the Battle book to pick up if you want to give him a try.

[Content warning for racism.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: Towards Zero > Murder Is Easy > The Secret of Chimneys > The Seven Dials Mystery > Cards on the Table

Book Review: Search for Senna by K. A. Applegate

Book #340 of 2021:

Search for Senna by K. A. Applegate (Everworld #1)

[I read and reviewed this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation today at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke !]

I’m a bigger fan of Animorphs than of author K. A. Applegate in general, and I had never previously read any of Everworld, her series that launched in 1999 right around when the former saga switched to being heavily ghostwritten. Based on this first volume, however, I don’t think I’ve been missing much for all these years. Although it has its bright spots and is generally fine for a YA story of its time, neither the characters, nor the worldbuilding, nor the plot has really gripped me yet.

The title figure, our narrator’s girlfriend who vanishes into a strange land of blended world mythologies, is an absolute manic pixie dream girl at this point, with him even openly acknowledging that he sees their relationship as a status symbol rather than a true partnership of mutual interest and emotion. When those two nominal lovebirds do show signs of personality in their interactions, they’re basically just angry and mean to one another, and the rest of the core cast — Senna’s ex, her half-sister, and their random other friend — seem likewise disengaged. The struggle of their adjustment to the fantasy realm and inability to break free of its hold is more compelling than the unknown location of the witchy teen who helped bring them there, at least in my opinion.

I do enjoy that Loki of Norse renown shares this domain with Aztec, Greek, and Egyptian gods as well as a few alien species, and the mid-novel reveal that our protagonists are somehow still carrying on their home life too, with a consciousness swap whenever they fall asleep, is intriguingly and unsettlingly mind-bending. But the central quest storyline feels pretty generic, and the book ends on a flimsy cliffhanger of the group rushing into battle alongside their new Viking allies, with no effort to resolve any of the arcs or issues introduced before then.

I’m being so critical here because I’ve seen the writer produce such higher quality material elsewhere, but my three-star rating should reflect that I like this one more than I dislike it, on balance. I simply don’t believe the work puts forth a very good argument for continuing on to the sequels to find out what happens to these kids next.

[Content warning for racial profiling, torture, gore, sexism, slavery, sexual assault, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Defending Elysium by Brandon Sanderson

Book #339 of 2021:

Defending Elysium by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

This novella from 2008 is one of author Brandon Sanderson’s earliest published works, still freely available on his website although now re-released for purchase as an official tie-in to his later Skyward / Cytoverse series. Set centuries beforehand, it inadvertently spoils certain reveals at the end of the first Skyward novel if you’re aware of the connection, so I’d recommend reading at least that one before turning to this prologue. Presumably people who had already read it when they picked up Skyward in 2018 were delighted to discover the shared continuity organically, but it’s difficult to discuss the title outside of its franchise context at this point.

Without giving away too much myself, this is a story about humanity in our near-future, in the initial stages of interplanetary colonization but having made contact with an alien federation who quietly insist that technology is the wrong path and instead developing our psychic abilities to tame our violent impulses will be key to membership with them. Or rather, that’s the background to the plot, in which an earth agent who’s been involved in those discussions investigates a few suspicious incidents at a distant space outpost.

The worldbuilding revelations here are more interesting than the specific characters or their activities, and the book lacks the length to really flesh out its themes beyond infodumping, so a three-star rating of ‘I enjoyed it but it could have been better’ seems appropriate. Nevertheless, I’d say the short text is worth checking out if you like the Spensa era of this timeline, and is a neat look back at a talented writer who was clearly still honing his craft.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Terciel and Elinor by Garth Nix

Book #338 of 2021:

Terciel and Elinor by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #6)

It’s always a pleasure to return to the Old Kingdom, that snowy landscape of necromancy and Charter Magic where the hereditary line of Abhorsens wield their seven enchanted bells to put the dead back to rest. Nevertheless, author Garth Nix has never quite managed to recapture the wonderment of the original Sabriel for me, and this latest exercise, a prequel about that initial heroine’s parents, feels particularly aimless. The two teens meet at the beginning of the story, but then spend most of it apart, only to reconnect for a quest in the final quarter. Primarily she is an orphan in Ancelstierre vaguely preparing for an excursion north of the wall to find her remaining family among the Clayr, while he is an apprentice helping his great-great-aunt seek a way to bind their current foe. There’s no specific urgency driving either of these narratives, and the returning villains Kerrigor and Hedge show little personality beyond what a reader brings from their previous appearances. Overall this is still a fine comfort read for anyone who already loves the series, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a starting place for newcomers or deem it as remotely essential in general.

[Content warning for ableism, gore, death of a parent, and gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Sickness by K. A. Applegate

Book #337 of 2021:

The Sickness by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #29)

I’m not ordinarily a fan of unrelated subplots coincidentally happening at the same time, and so I rolled my eyes a bit at the start of this novel, when two crises crash down upon the Animorphs at once. At a school dance — where Jake and Cassie have gone together, in their adorable first public appearance as a couple — Ax suddenly loses control of his human morph and is reverting back to an Andalite delirious with fever, right as a teacher pulls Cassie aside to tell her that her Yeerk friend Aftran 942 from ten books ago has been captured by Visser Three. He’s another Controller, of course, and a member of Aftran’s new Yeerk Peace Movement, and he warns the girl that the general will soon torture his prisoner for everything she knows, which includes the identities of Cassie and the others.

It’s a little artificial and convenient for these events to randomly coincide, but I admit the storylines end up dovetailing nicely. Ax’s condition at first seems like it can take a lower priority, with him simply out of action and hidden by a Chee hologram, but as the rest of the team attempts to infiltrate the Yeerk Pool (in a fun sequence as eels via the local water tower), the illness begins spreading to them. One by one the humans in the group become likewise incapacitated, although it manifests as merely extreme flu symptoms in their biology, until only Cassie is left standing. Somehow she’ll have to plan and execute a solo raid on the enemy stronghold, plus probably conduct brain surgery on an alien to remove his swollen gland, all under a third ticking clock of when she’ll likely fall sick too.

The last of these oddly never happens, which isn’t necessarily unrealistic, but does belatedly puncture the tension somewhat. (A better potential ending, in my opinion: Cassie takes ill once she’s completed the missions, and we learn that Visser Three’s host body has as well after coming into close contact with her during the rescue.) But that aside, it’s an absolute thrill to watch the protagonist rise to the occasion, succeeding alone where everyone together could not. It’s a great showcase for her character, with her moral compass and newfound empathy for Yeerks as people who can exist symbiotically with different species guiding her to acquire and morph one to infest a willing host. It’s the first and only time in the series for that act, which the other teens would presumably find repulsive, and it provides us our best look yet at the distinctive perspective of the blind slug creatures.

But that’s just the kind of capable young woman this heroine can be, successfully retrieving her target from imprisonment, escaping with both their lives, and then ruthlessly snapping into doctor mode to put Aftran in Ax’s head to help guide her bonesaw. Interestingly, it’s a move he clearly doesn’t want in his delirium and may not have accepted if asked while fully-conscious, yet Cassie overrules her patient to save his life. That’s one of those ethical dilemmas the franchise does so well, although it isn’t really explored much here.

One final big decision remains about what to do with the rescued Yeerk, who can’t risk returning to the Pool but will die of Kandrona starvation within three days if she stays away. She actually asks Cassie to kill her quickly, but the Animorphs’ alternative solution is elegantly simple, giving their unexpected ally the power to morph and helping turn her into a humpback whale nothlit. Earlier instances of individuals being stuck in a morph have been played for either horror — Tobias; Arbron; David — or dutiful acceptance — Elfangor; Cassie; Aldrea — but on this occasion, it’s a thing of sheer beauty. Assuming we ignore that Erek and the other androids have previously been established to hold the ability to generate Kandrona rays themselves, at least.

Such plot holes bother me enough on this adult reread to keep me from awarding this my highest rating, but it’s definitely been my favorite volume of the saga in quite a while. Kudos to ghostwriter Melinda Metz!

[Content warning for body horror, gore, claustrophobia, and near-drowning.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer

Book #336 of 2021:

The Matzah Ball by Jean Meltzer

Let me start with what I like about this title, as that will be a shorter list. It is #ownvoices for both Judaism and chronic fatigue, and while I can’t speak to the authentic portrayal of the latter, seeing the former means an awful lot to me. Most of the characters in this novel are Jewish, and the text is full of small details that I either recognize from my own experience (sufganiyot!) or am aware of as shared touchstones for other Jews (automatic timers for lightswitches on Shabbat!). That’s the angle that attracted me in the first place, and it’s handled competently throughout.

Unfortunately, the book is overall a real mess. I think the idea was to adapt a typical Hallmark Christmas movie plot for Hanukkah, which entails that the protagonist starts out appearing to despise the holiday / Jewish things in general, presumably to set up her rediscovery of its magic later on. Except a) she never quite seems to have that realization, just fall in love with her old summer camp crush who’s throwing a big Hanukkah party, and b) that whole narrative structure doesn’t work as well outside of the dominant cultural religion, at least in my opinion. Jews who don’t like Hanukkah read as self-hating in a way that Christians and secular gentiles don’t for not liking Christmas. Not to mention that the heroine is a Jew who secretly loves Christmas, which tends to underscore her repeated trash-talking of her own holiday. And look, I get it — certain elements of Yuletide can be a lot of fun, and are rather omnipresent in the winter. I happily celebrate the day myself with the non-Jews in my family. But it’s ugly to witness a Jewish person continually mentioning how much better it is than Hanukkah, especially in a story that feels positioned as Jewry 101 for many readers with its over-explanations of fairly basic concepts from our faith tradition.

So the politics of the tale are questionable, and that’s not even addressing an off-putting line of flirtatious banter regarding Mossad assassinations that I’ve seen criticized by Palestinian reviewers or Rachel comparing the prospect of openly admitting her Christmas fixation to the time her best friend came out as gay at his bar mitzvah. But the storyline is pretty abysmal, too, with the most outrageous of plot holes. The woman’s publisher is pushing her to write a Hanukkah romance instead of another (pseudonymous) Christmas one, and she’s in a panic that she won’t be able to deliver, despite being the daughter of a prominent observant rabbi. For some reason, she quickly decides that her only option to learn about the spirit of Hanukkah is to get into the exclusive Matzah Ball — a name that surely would be better for something held around Passover, nu? — and be inspired by watching other Jews celebrating the festival of lights. That draws her into the circle of her old tween frenemy planning the shindig, who is both a millionaire and somehow at risk of losing his fortune if the event doesn’t get enough buzz on social media, even though we’re told that tickets sold out a year in advance within the first 20 minutes.

These two folks are also just terrible people anyway. They have their respective sob stories — her diagnosis; his dead mom and absentee father — but they remain as prankishly mean to each other as they were as kids, they’re both still bizarrely fixated on that quasi-relationship from almost two decades ago, and they are individually incredibly self-centered. She titles her new manuscript The Hanukkah Grinch — sigh — and bases its jerk of a romantic interest upon her own, which of course blows up in standard romcom miscommunication fashion later on. In one particularly telling moment, she visits a mall Santa to vent about the problems in her life while he begs her to please just smile for a picture and keep the queue moving. That’s presented as charming and hilarious, when in reality it’s a simple exercise of abuse towards a captive underpaid service worker. No such issues are ever acknowledged as remotely problematic or unappealing.

Do I love that Jewish author Jean Meltzer got to publish a theoretically-cute Jewish piece for the holidays? Yes. Do I love anything specific that follows or find any of it actually all that cute? Not really! “Let’s put Judaism on fleek!” says the main character at one point. Um, let’s not.

[Content warning for ableism, antisemitism, and discussion of the Holocaust.]

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by Charles M. Blow

Book #335 of 2021:

The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by Charles M. Blow

This 2021 title is split between analysis and an ensuing call to action, and although I’m more struck by the former element — a comparison of racism in the U.S. North and South — I should acknowledge that I am not exactly in the target audience for the latter — a provocative exhortation for African Americans to move en masse to southern states, a reversal of the twentieth-century Great Migration with an aim of concentrating black political power. As author Charles M. Blow explains, the enactment of such an audacious plan would end the days of the Democratic Party taking that ‘captured constituency’ for granted by simple virtue of being preferable to the Republicans and in practice rarely prioritizing its needs, and result in leaders at all levels of government more directly beholden to (and likely drawn from the ranks of) black voters.

That’s a big idea worth considering on its merits, and I don’t know if I believe the writer has satisfactorily answered all of the probable objections. But in support of its utility and rationale, he has likewise penned a thoughtful treatise on how contemporary bigotry is frequently worse in the regions beyond the American South, especially in those sites that were destinations of black forebears and now have large urban populations within white-majority states. “I often think of racism as having developmental cycles,” Blow observes. “In the South, it’s an old man. There, racism hasn’t vanished (far from it), but it has come to terms with itself. In the North, particularly in destination cities, racism is a teenage boy, acting out as the old man did years ago.”

Thus, most of the extrajudicial killings that have driven the Black Lives Matter movement of the past decade have occurred outside of the South, and the Klu Klux Klan associated with that region has seen its numbers dwindle from historic millions down to mere thousands in recent years, while white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups more common in the North and West have flourished. And although there are bias problems endemic to any American police force, southern departments with higher percentages of black officers and chiefs consequently tend to have lower rates of shooting black civilians than comparable jurisdictions elsewhere. Blow, a Louisiana-to-New-York-to-Georgia transplant, has witnessed such disparities firsthand, and he writes movingly of the greater security he feels as a black man in the South, despite its own particular drawbacks.

Overall, I see this book as an important pushback against the pervasive stereotype that the bottom half of the nation is where all the true / worst racists live, in contrast to the obviously enlightened multicultural cities up above. It may not ultimately convince many black folks to uproot their lives and migrate to the home of their ancestors — ten months post-publication, it doesn’t seem to have made much of a splash yet on that front — but it presents the proposal in reasonable fashion, and skillfully punctures the popular viewpoint of our country’s geography of racism.

[Content warning for racial slurs and graphic descriptions of lynchings.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Five Total Strangers by Natalie D. Richards

Book #334 of 2021:

Five Total Strangers by Natalie D. Richards

Parts of this road-trip thriller are certainly effective, but I think it’s ultimately trying to do too much. The initial premise: when an oncoming blizzard grounds all flights on Christmas Eve, stranding the protagonist at the airport ahead of her canceled connection, she accepts the offer of the girl from the seat next to her, who is renting a car that still has one empty spot and continuing to travel by road. (Initially our heroine assumes that the driver and the other three passengers all know one another already, with the fact that they’ve never met before treated as a big reveal at the 20% mark, despite the title clearly giving that twist away.) But although the weather reports seem overblown at first, conditions continue to worsen as the group travels along, and there are some pulse-pounding scenes that absolutely nail the terror of driving through that sort of winter storm.

And if that had been the entire story, it could have been starkly harrowing, but of course, one of the strangers is actually Mira’s stalker, whose increasingly deranged letters from the previous year we get to read every few chapters or so, though the writer’s identity remains a secret for most of the book. Unlike the snow and ice, this is obviously a fairly unrealistic development, and while that’s fine for the genre, it cuts against what feels like the actual strength of the piece to me. It doesn’t help that this person is secretly sabotaging the journey, stealing everyone’s critical possessions such as cell phones, chargers, medication, and wallets when no one is looking their way. The whole villainous plan strikes me as pretty poorly thought-out / explained in general even by the end, especially given how many times the vehicle almost goes off-road and kills them all.

I guess I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that that’s the direction the plot takes, and the novel is solidly creepy enough overall to earn a three-star Goodreads ‘I liked it’ rating from me. But I probably would have enjoyed it better as a straightforward survival tale alone.

[Content warning for depression, drug abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

Book #333 of 2021:

Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

I have a mixed reaction to this anthropological sci-fi gay romance. The cultural worldbuilding is neat, especially in its treatment of gender as performed / communicated primarily via jewelry, where the particular style denotes its wearer as either male, female, or nonbinary with no apparent biological correlation. (It’s not so much that everyone in this novel is trans, but rather that no one is cis.) I also always enjoy a plot of strangers in an arranged marriage — in this case, a prince and his cousin’s widower, whom he is ordered to wed to maintain the terms of a political treaty — coming to care for one another, and these two characters are sweet, once we reach the point in the text when each starts openly trusting the other.

But before then, there’s an awful lot of tedious miscommunication and needlessly hurt feelings. Alternating between the paired perspectives helps flesh out them both, but it likewise tends to emphasize how the protagonists keep misreading every situation, which I’ve found frustrating in the extreme to read. The investigation into the first husband’s death drags a bit as well, and perhaps reminds me too much of The Goblin Emperor, in comparison to which this title is bound to suffer.

I do like the second half of the story better than the first, so I’d probably come back if author Everina Maxwell decides to write a sequel or anything else in this setting. But as a whole, this debut doesn’t quite work for me.

[Content warning for colonialism, domestic abuse, rape, and torture.]

★★★☆☆