The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Mutation by K. A. Applegate

Book #22 of 2022:

The Mutation by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #36)

Another somewhat-middling Animorphs adventure, this time by one-off ghostwriter Erica Bobone. The initial premise is fine: the Yeerks are apparently still searching for the sunken Pemalite craft from #27 The Exposed, and have built an advanced heavy-duty submarine that the heroes decide they need to take down. Halfway through the book, however, as the teens are desperately trying to dodge the vessel’s weapons and ram it with their new orca morphs, their target is suddenly hijacked by a group of strange beings… who turn out to be mutated fish-people living in a cavern deep under the sea.

It’s one of those goofy developments that this franchise regularly fits in around all the child-soldier trauma, but this one feels less motivated than usual. At this point in the series, we know that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life, that time-travel is possible, that morphing technology is unpredictable, and so on. Any plot springing from one of those directions, like a new species visiting earth, seems reasonable enough. But amphibious descendants of Atlantis, who have spent centuries seizing / causing shipwrecks, extracting DNA from their captives, and planning to wage war on us surface-dwellers? That’s a bit tougher to suspend disbelief and accept, and the story would have to work that much harder in order to sell it. In this case, I don’t think it entirely succeeds, especially with a dramatic climax involving the kids teaming up with their enemy Visser Three to escape the Nartec clutches.

I wouldn’t call this title a complete mishap. The challenges are distinctive, and the taxidermied victims left standing in their beached ships make for some effectively creepy set dressing. If nothing else, the novel gives us Jake’s amazing line, <Interesting morph, Visser. Does it work underwater?> as he floods the command bridge they’ve been sharing. (Rachel’s earlier wry comment to Tobias after he’s rescued them, <I hate it when you don’t get taken prisoner with us,> is also a delight.) But it’s hard to square this outing with the team’s typical concerns, or this version of their arch-foe with the one who generally tries to murder them on sight. And there’s not much thematic depth to the material besides a few gestures at the narrator still grappling with his role as leader, long after he seemed to have settled into that.

Ultimately, I guess it’s not the worst of the lot, but it sure is a far cry from the best.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, near-drowning, medical experimentation, and implied threat of rape.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Evershore by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson

Book #21 of 2022:

Evershore by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson (Skyward Flight #3)

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.]

This final (?) Skyward novella feels like the most perfunctory of the lot, the entry whose events would be easiest to summarize in a sentence or two for any readers who skip over it while reading the novels in the main series. Essentially: Jorgen visits the Kitsen homeworld (of the delightful full name Den of Everlasting Light Which Laps Gently upon the Shores of Time, which the humans insist on shortening for some reason) and learns how to project the telekinetic ‘mindblades’ we’ve seen other characters use before, later earning a military promotion to celebrate his new powers and his bravery. Because this adventure takes place after the book Cytonic, the protagonist is also dealing with some personal fallout of developments there, and I’m glad that co-writers Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson take his mental health seriously by showing his struggle to process and talk about things. But I’m not sure this needed to be an entire story even of this shorter length, rather than just a few chapters elsewhere.

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall novella series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

TV Review: The Book of Boba Fett, season 1

TV #7 of 2022:

The Book of Boba Fett, season 1

This spinoff title coasts by on the lingering coolness of a live-action Star Wars show and the fun of revisiting the aftermath of Jabba the Hutt’s death from Return of the Jedi, but it’s a substantial step down in quality from its parent series The Mandalorian. The weakness primarily rests with the protagonist: Boba Fett has a lengthy history in this franchise, but he’s generally been somewhat ill-defined beyond his armored aesthetic, at least as an adult (former) bounty hunter. To place him at the heart of a story, we need to have a clearer sense of what he wants and why he wants it, and that’s something that stays murky for far too long. He’s also revealed as a frustratingly poor strategist, repeatedly taking strangers at their word and having to be reminded when he’s low on soldiers that money can be used to recruit mercenaries.

I believe the idea is to pit a man of honor against a world of sin, to make a thematic statement about earned loyalty versus rule by fear and treachery. In this analysis, the new daimyo of Tatooine is meant to function as a Ned Stark figure, and the season aims to pass judgment on the worth of such nobility. The problem is, that’s a sentiment that’s only vaguely gestured at throughout, and the various betrayals across this run are weightless because we aren’t given the opportunity to know the characters behind them at all. Instead, the hero just seems weak for naively trusting hardened criminals in his circumstances. And while that can feel like a purposeful tragic flaw on a program with the strengths of early Game of Thrones, it reads as yet another inconsistency in the writing here.

The plot structure is wonky, too. We initially spend time bouncing between the present of Boba Fett trying to establish and defend his claimed authority over Jabba’s collapsed empire — which now appears to consist of nothing but a loose protection racket and an effort to stop the flow of drugs — and the past, when he was taken in by a tribe of Tusken Raiders after escaping from the Sarlacc Pit. That flashback sequence is a dull Dances with Wolves routine, a paint-by-numbers tale of the outsider gradually being welcomed into the group’s customs, learning wisdom and combat skills that will benefit him in the future once he’s left them behind. It’s not an exact case of the old Mighty Whitey trope, since lead actor Temuera Morrison is Maori and the masked sand people are aliens rather than visible members of a human minority, but it certainly has that racialized undertone to it.

Later, our star disappears for almost two full episodes — out of merely seven total — in favor of fan favorites Mando and Grogu from the previous show. I think it’s neat for Star Wars to adopt a Marvel approach of having people from one corner of the shared continuity pop up unexpectedly in another, but it needs to be done more smoothly than this, so that viewers who skipped the former don’t feel lost and the story at hand doesn’t get forgotten. (The late appearance of a recurring animated villain making his live-action debut is a great example of how to do this thing well, synthesizing him into events without alienating anyone unfamiliar.) As is, any audience watching The Book of Boba Fett alone will be thrown by the sudden departure, and any Mandalorian fans who neglect this one will miss out on key developments they’d likely care about. It’s a frustrating way to build a cinematic universe of theoretically-discrete titles, and given the characterization issues of this piece, it’s hard not to wonder if devoting that runtime to further fleshing out the nominal hero could have helped.

All in all, this is not a bad series. The action scenes are consistently entertaining, and it remains a joy to see new big-budget Star Wars content delivered on a weekly basis like this, especially with two actors of color leading the cast. But there’s no particular depth or resonance to the material, in stark contrast to what the best of this franchise can offer.

[Content warning for gun violence and genocide.]

★★★☆☆

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.

★★★★☆

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.]

★★★★★