The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

Book #332 of 2021:

A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow (Fractured Fables #1)

This delightful novella is one of the more original fairy tale retellings that I’ve seen, pitching its version of Sleeping Beauty as a young woman from our world, suffering from a debilitating illness predicted to kill her within a year, who has always been drawn to that legend in all its various permutations. When her friends throw her a themed party for her twenty-first and presumably last birthday, she pricks a finger against a spindle and finds herself instantly transported to a strange magical land, just in time to prevent another girl from injuring herself the same way. Our heroine has crossed to the alternate reality of a different Sleeping Beauty, and soon she is caught up in her adventure, trying to see if the wicked fairy of this realm can send her home and/or cure her disease.

The plot takes some unexpected directions that I won’t spoil, but I can at least tell you a few of the things I love about it. First, the three most significant characters are all queer women, with Zinnia and her best friend in particular sharing a romantic history that is firmly in the past and not a driver of any current jealousy, tension, or pining. Second, the princess lives in a kingdom that the others recognize only makes sense according to its own bizarre tropes, sort of like where Amy Adams comes from in Enchanted. It’s tough to write people who are self-aware enough to spot that without the commentary feeling too archly meta, but author Alix E. Harrow threads the needle (sorry) nicely. Third, I’m pretty sure this is the only portal fantasy I’ve read where a cell phone still has service and can text back home, which adds a further charming distinctiveness to the affair — as well as a ticking clock, since there’s no way to charge the thing. And fourth, the book is clearly written with the online fandom community in mind, as shown by an incredible stop-the-wedding scene and a gloriously well-placed “Harold, they’re lesbians” reference.

This is advertised as volume one of a series, and I have no clue if the idea is to spin (again, sorry) other ‘fractured fables’ in their own right or stick with this protagonist to see where her story goes next. But I am fully on-board regardless.

[Content warning for rape.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Star Wars Resistance, season 2

TV #84 of 2021:

Star Wars Resistance, season 2

This batch of episodes is a marked improvement over the first, with main character Kazuda far less irritating now that he’s no longer juggling his poorly-disguised espionage missions with equally inept racing and mechanic work. I think that’s due partly to personal growth and partly just to the updated parameters of the premise: the Colossus refueling station on the run from the First Order, and everyone aware of Kaz et al.’s involvement with the Resistance.

The show is still sort of blandly generic from week to week, though, so I’m not too disappointed that it went off the air following this finale. The most interesting subplot this season is in Tam’s abandonment of her friends in the face of their “betrayal” — aka, not telling her the truth all last year — and swift realization that her new stormtrooper allies might not be such good people themselves after all. But it’s hard to have much sympathy for a person who stayed so clueless until then, and the storyline basically plays out as expected with her conflicted loyalties, growing disillusionment, and eventual return to the fold.

Ultimately this series never seems to add anything substantial to the wider Star Wars canon, and although it more or less works as a slice-of-life adventure during the latest film trilogy with no Jedi anywhere around, it doesn’t make a terribly strong case for itself even at its best.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 2 > 1

Book Review: The Experiment by K. A. Applegate

Book #331 of 2021:

The Experiment by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #28)

“In the annals of stupid, screwed-up, pointless missions that was the stupidest, most pointless of them all,” says Marco at the end of this title, and it’s hard to really argue with him. 32 books into my decades-later reread of this series (including the Chronicles and Megamorphs volumes), and it’s the first entry that I’m feeling no better than lukewarm about on the whole. Our third ghostwritten story, this one is by newcomer Amy Garvey, who does not appear to have subsequently contributed again. And to her credit she basically nails the goofy humor aspect of the franchise, but the plot is so riddled with illogical decision-making on everyone’s part that I’ve found it an exercise in frustration to read.

We start with Erek the android risking a hologram of a truck rather than his regular appearance for no particular reason, all to give the Animorphs the vaguest of hints that the Yeerks are doing something with an animal-testing site and meatpacking facility. To infiltrate the former, the team breaks into the vehicle delivering a group of chimpanzees, a Fast and Furious stunt in full view of other drivers that culminates in releasing the animals out the back while stopped at a traffic light so that the teens can take their place. (As someone who used to volunteer at a chimp sanctuary, let me just say that that would be incredibly dangerous for the human and nonhuman apes in the area alike.) Later to bypass a Gleet Bio-Filter and enter the slaughterhouse, Tobias and Ax morph into bulls — they thought they were acquiring steers, forgetting that castration isn’t included in the DNA — with their friends as flies carried deep inside their nostrils. Also the Andalite accidentally acquires a cow at first, a bizarre mistake given the emphasis on their needing to replace specific tagged individuals.

Both missions rely on our heroes making foolish choices that almost get them killed, when they could easily instead use strategies that have worked for them in the past and wouldn’t involve being put in a cage. Like… everyone could have morphed insects to occupy some random creature’s nose, for instance. And I don’t mind fallible protagonists, but these incidents are never called out, and so read more like an oversight of the author(s) than the characters to me. The villains are at their most ridiculously deranged too, feverishly trying to find a way to chemically block free will and falsifying reports of success to Visser Three so that he doesn’t kill them in his displeasure. Earlier in the text, the squad fends off that vicious enemy general by flinging poop at his face in chimp form, because sigh, of course they do. It’s honestly a shock when the final battle turns suddenly into a bloody and legitimately life-threatening affair, after how unserious a romp the preceding events have seemed.

If you’re into Animorphs primarily for the laughs, you’ll probably enjoy this installment better than I have. As usual for an Aximili book, his off-kilter perspective on humanity is a great source of comedy, especially since the alien youth has a TV set now and is hooked on soap operas like The Young and the Restless as well as commercials, which he adorably calls These Messages. And there is some interesting debate over animal rights, with Cassie predictably pushing the morality of the issue harder than anyone else. But on balance too much simply doesn’t work for me here, suggesting that perhaps K. A. Applegate needed to be more hands-on to keep the quality up to its typical levels. Hopefully this is a one-off aberration and not a sign of what I should expect for the novels yet ahead.

[Content warning for cannibalism, gore, and body horror.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

Book #330 of 2021:

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #3)

A weaker offering from author Agatha Christie. The premise here is that some anonymous person is sending nasty ‘poison pen’ letters to everyone in a small English village, accusing them of adultery and similar sins. (Our narrator, an outsider temporarily renting a home there with his sister, receives a note alleging that they are an unmarried couple merely masquerading as siblings.) Around a third of the way through, one such recipient dies of apparent suicide, and if you’re wondering whether it might have been murder with the mailing campaign as an accompanying smokescreen, congratulations — you’ve just run ahead of all the characters in this book before the last chapter.

Granted, Miss Jane Marple seems to realize the truth straight away, but she only enters the text in its final quarter, and even then keeps largely to herself until it’s time to explain her deductions. In her absence, we are stuck with our random protagonist, who makes all sorts of wildly judgmental comments about people of a different race, sex, class, or educational achievement than him, not to mention insults regarding personal appearance, accent, and a certain man’s “very ladylike” nature. As a narrative presence he is both odious and wide-eyed, rarely engaging in serious investigation or even critical thought, and the less said about his sudden romantic interest in a young woman he’s previously described as ugly and childlike, the better.

The eventual solution to the mystery is fine, but by that point I simply couldn’t wait to put the whole exercise behind me.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

Book #329 of 2021:

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

This horror novella came highly recommended, and I was further intrigued by the striking cover design and promise of Japanese folklore-inspired frights within. (The title is the literal translation of ohaguro bettari, the main variety of monster encountered here.) Unfortunately, I’ve found the book too truncated to be effective, as neither the characters nor the plot feel particularly fleshed-out to me. Five vapid twenty-somethings with various romantic histories together are spending the night in a haunted manor before two of them get married, and although we can sense the tensions among the group, author Cassandra Khaw doesn’t provide enough specifics for any of the drama to register. These figures never seem real or relatable to me, which renders them as mechanical story-movers rather than protagonists worth investing in. No one ever does or says anything that appears rooted in a distinctive personality; the names could effectively be shuffled around at random without changing the course of events.

Granted, this genre has a tendency to treat people as gristle for the spectacle, especially in shorter form, with plenty of tales ending in a would-be hero’s gory demise. But there’s usually a tradeoff in the inventiveness of the situation in which they find themselves, as a memorable death scene can do much to make up for the hollowness of who’s doing the dying. In this text, however, we largely just get a bit of wandering and squabbling, a few generic apparitions, attempts at meta-humor on who survives slasher movies, and some seriously questionable prose, a la “‘I don’t know,’ Phillip said, the singsong timbre of his voice familiar, the sound of it like a coyote lying about where he’d left the sun.” I’ll give credit to the one genuinely creepy passage, of a person reading from an old tome in the house library about the human sacrifice that could save them while their friends insist that it’s a blank page covered in mold, but that was the rare moment to actually catch my interest. For the most part, this needed way more of the “blackened teeth” and a lot less of the “nothing.”

[Content warning for suicide and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

Book #328 of 2021:

The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly (Jack McEvoy #2)

Reporter Jack McEvoy has been bouncing around on the periphery of the wider ‘Boschiverse‘ for a while, although he hasn’t taken center stage as a viewpoint protagonist since 14 books / 13 years back in The Poet. But he’s here again, once more stumbling across a serial killer that law enforcement has missed when he notices a homicide written up in his LA newspaper bears a striking resemblance to one from Vegas the year before: two physically similar victims, each brutally raped, killed, and left in the trunk of her car with evidence pointing to a known associate. Unfortunately for our hero, the true culprit is an expert computer hacker as well, and has set up a digital tripwire to alert him if anyone starts looking online for cases that fit his pattern.

It’s the tech stuff that is the least convincing in this story, I think, partly because it’s aged poorly since 2009 and partly because it’s just so over-the-top in the first place. The villain is canceling credit cards and cell phone plans, draining bank accounts, deleting and forging new emails, and studying documents on the journalist’s work network, all while holding down his own high-responsibility job running IT security for a data storage firm (which for some reason involves openly planting child pornography on intruding users’ systems and then calling the police on them) and continuing to abduct and murder people. Where ever does he find the time?

This is also one of those rare Michael Connelly titles that doesn’t really hold any surprise twists to it, which I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it can be clunky when such reveals are given either too little or too much support in advance, a tricky balance that the writer doesn’t always manage to strike. But on the other hand, knowing the antagonist’s identity all along makes this wholly a thriller and not a mystery, and Connelly tends to do his best work at the intersection of those genres. It’s possible this novel could have been improved if readers were kept limited to the same information Jack has, rather than periodically getting chapters from the perspective of his named opponent.

But at this point in the extended Harry Bosch series, the author can reliably spin a good crime yarn and his audience knows generally what to expect. Returning fans won’t be disappointed by this one, though it probably won’t appear on many favorites lists.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

Book #327 of 2021:

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

I like the spooky atmosphere of a Catskills boarding school where the students are dabbling in the occult with a potential side of murder, but the plot is a bit too derivative of other “dark academia” stories out there with an extracurricular club falling under the sway of a twisted yet charismatic leader. I’ve also struggled to connect with this protagonist, a girl who’s so private to the audience that we’re a fifth of the way through the title before learning that her dead best friend from the backstory was actually her girlfriend, and further still before we finally get the full details of how she died.

The #ownvoices queer representation is nice, and later includes another lesbian classmate with two moms and a nonbinary sibling, but the needless delay in revealing key information provides more frustration than suspense, in my opinion. The whole premise stinks of the old “Bury Your Gays” trope too, and while no one is saying that same-sex romances in fiction always require a happy ending — which author Victoria Lee even discusses in a post on her website — it’s disappointing to see that tired narrative pattern rearing its ugly head with seemingly so little done to subvert it.

Overall the novel isn’t bad enough for me to rate it lower than three stars, and I imagine it will find welcome readers who are perhaps less aware of how non-distinctive it feels within its genre. But for me personally, I suspect it’ll prove somewhat forgettable.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, depression, institutionalization, death and consumption of a pet, gun violence, racism, and disordered eating.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn

Book #326 of 2021:

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn

Although relatively short, this new essay collection by Jewish author Dara Horn literally took my breath away. I gasped, and I sobbed, and I felt incredibly, reassuringly seen. She cuts straight to the heart of life in the modern diaspora of our people and the insidious bigotry that values us as noble victims and not complex living individuals. (80% of those who died in Nazi concentration camps were Yiddish speakers. Names like Auschwitz are household knowledge now, but how many gentiles can name even a single Yiddish writer? They seem to matter more as symbols of martyrdom and the cruelty of their oppressors than as anyone worth honoring and listening to outside of it.) I recommend this book to Jews as a model for better articulating these frustrations in future conversations. I recommend it to others in the desperate hope that you’ll save us the need to have them.

Citing the traditional holiday stories, Horn distinguishes between Purim antisemitism — efforts to exterminate the Jewish population — and Hanukkah antisemitism — efforts to suppress aspects of Judaism to make us more palatable to a dominant culture. The Holocaust was an example of the former variety; modern insistence that we disavow connections to Israel or give up practices that confuse or inconvenience Christians and secular nonbelievers exhibits the latter. But as she ably illustrates with examples from across history, the antisemitism of pressured assimilation is almost always a mere precursor to the more extreme type. Asking us to be the good Jews, the ones who fit it and don’t raise such a fuss, is never enough, in the end. It’s a message we in the extended community grow up knowing deep in our bones: eventually, they will come for our lives again.

Horn is a scholar, and raises countless items that I was previously unaware of myself, from the Chinese town of Harbin which commemorates its Jewish past without mentioning the pogroms that destroyed it, to the Persian Jews of the Maccabean era who were encouraged to painfully ‘uncircumcise’ themselves, to the fact that most Jewish American historical immigrant name changes happened not, as family legend would have it, due to confusion at Ellis Island — which relied on extensive entrance interviews and ship manifests in preparing its documents — but through later court petitions from folks experiencing discrimination in their nominally-accepting adopted homeland.

She ponders at length why Anne Frank’s diary is a worldwide phenomenon while other contemporary accounts and the testimony of survivors appears routinely overlooked. And she floats the troubling worry that by sounding the “Never Again” drumbeat and publicizing Nazi atrocities so thoroughly, we have inadvertently made it easier to dismiss everyday acts of hatred against Jews that don’t rise to that awful level. Another synagogue arson, or street attack on a Hasidic New Yorker, or graveyard vandalism? That’s no Holocaust, and therefore just a one-off event with no cause for alarm. Even the recent Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh is generally framed as one mass shooting among many, the writer argues, and not a reason for any non-Jewish reflection on what shared attitudes may have driven the killer. It’s a challenging, difficult, important read.

In its closing pages, the text returns to the question of how Jews engage with our own dead. In uttering the same ritual prayers generation after generation after generation, in bringing ancient thinkers to life via the active discussions of daily Daf Yomi or other Talmudic study, in following the commandment to treat Passover as though we ourselves were freed from bondage in Egypt: we are a people perpetually reliving the past in all its dimensions. It’s a sharp contrast to the flattened image of Jewishness that seems to exist as a simple uplifting story of hardship for far too many outsiders.

★★★★★

Book Review: The Exposed by K. A. Applegate

Book #325 of 2021:

The Exposed by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #27)

The second ghostwritten Animorphs novel offers a decent if anticlimactic adventure, most notable for the deep underwater scenes of Rachel and Tobias as sperm whales hunting and battling a giant squid to bring up to the surface for the whole team to acquire. On the relationship front, she also uses the word “boyfriend” for the first time to describe him — albeit in her thoughts alone — and turns down another guy who asks her on a date. It’s a good story for the shipping crowd!

As an episodic title, though, it has issues. Our heroes are in the ocean to find a sunken Pemalite spaceship, which has suddenly sent out a signal turning off all Chee holograms and motor functions. Rachel and Cassie are on-hand at the mall earlier when Erek’s android body becomes visible, and are able to help by temporarily posing him as a product model in Spencer Gifts and then enlisting Marco to morph his gorilla (which they pretend is a person in a suit to advertise an upcoming King Kong movie) and carry him out.

It’s all pretty slapstick, and suspiciously convenient, as the narrator herself identifies. The security cameras at the mall are mysteriously offline. The bus driver somehow doesn’t notice an ape climbing aboard his vehicle with a robot in tow. Later when they realize that they need a squid morph to reach the ship and a sperm whale to catch it, one of the humongous specimens miraculously beaches itself nearby.

It turns out, of course, that there’s some higher entity pulling the strings here. Meet the Drode, an agent of Crayak who’s messing with the Animorphs for, uh, no particular reason at all. I think I might like this plot better if it wasn’t placed immediately after #26 The Attack, but focusing again on Crayak and the Chee so soon feels a bit repetitive. It’s not as though this is the next escalation of his war with the Ellimist, either; it’s simply a random underling spreading havoc. And the conclusion comes too quickly as well; once the group has managed to enter the craft and disable its broadcast, their friend Erek swims down to activate a “hostility containment program” to suspend the raging combat with Visser Three and his forces whom the Drode also lured there.

At least the jokes are amusing. We get some fine moments of banter throughout, and I love that the ultra-trusting Pemalites use a one-digit passcode for their security protocols. The ticking clock element is welcome too, as the protagonists have to first race to rescue a motionless Chee who’s been living as a homeless woman before she’s seen in a police raid with a known Yeerk Controller and then get to the signal shut-off before another is found by his coworkers on the replacement shift at a nuclear research facility.

But it’s all too easy with the Drode running the show, not to mention too pointless. Rachel is dealing with her growing worry that she’s addicted to the rush of these life-or-death missions, and the message that Crayak wants to recruit her to join his side could theoretically be a nice exacerbation of that, did it not come at the ludicrous required cost of her killing Jake. But we know she’s not going to be tempted by such an offer, even more than we know she’ll reject the idea of a normal dating life with someone like T. T.

Although it’s unclear whether the greater fault is with credited author K. A. Applegate who came up with the outline or ghostwriter Laura Battyanyi-Wiess who implemented it, this volume overall just doesn’t quite work for me.

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

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Shameless, season 11

TV #83 of 2021:

Shameless, season 11

This title has always been all over the map tonally, so perhaps it’s fitting that its closing run would be produced and set during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although in practice, the only real impact on events seems to be that everyone is wearing masks and the Alibi Room is maybe a little less crowded than usual. Tami mentions having survived a case of the virus early on, but no one else we know falls ill all season — except Frank, who’s constantly in the hospital for one thing or another — and there’s no particular social distancing or anything similar at play. (Surely there were Gallagher stories to be told about work-from-home scams, right?) I’d also advise not seeking any coherent thesis behind who masks up and where and when, which appears very arbitrary from scene to scene rather than the intentional aspect of characterization that it could have been.

That aside, the year doesn’t have much of a focus, though it develops a certain momentum as it nears its ultimate finale. Ian and Mickey are adjusting to married life. Lip is trying to improve his circumstances via intensive home renovation (on a place he’s renting, a decision which will never make sense to me for such an intelligent guy). Debbie is wallowing in misery and continuing to be one of the worst people in Chicago. Carl is a rookie cop, in a storyline that actually takes institutional police malfeasance seriously and functions better than it probably should to finally rehabilitate him. Frank is diagnosed with dementia that gets progressively worse as the season goes on, and Liam is looking after the dad he still reluctantly loves to the extent a middle-schooler can, realizing that his older siblings have long since given up. Kev and V are, uh, selling marijuana edibles at the Alibi now, I guess.

In any ongoing narrative with a large number of focal protagonists, it’s gotta be tough to build towards a specific ending for them all. Particularly in a family drama where plot threads will presumably go on unseen after the credits roll for the last time, how do you arrange the pieces so that it feels like everybody’s best stopping point, the ideal parting image to leave with an audience? What’s the final, definitive statement on this extended clan of poor South Siders we’ve followed for over a decade now?

Frank’s condition obviously provides a degree of built-in pathos, and the Lip vs Debbie fight over everyone staying in the house or selling it and going their separate ways carries potential as a clash of conflicting theses on what it means to be a Gallagher. The ingredients are there for this to resonate as a farewell for long-term fans… if only the writers had actually bothered to put in the work to connect back with the established history of the series. Remember Ian’s bipolar diagnosis? Remember how shattered Lip could be by relapsing into alcoholism? Remember how Mickey had a baby before, with his ex-wife? Remember how Fiona is Liam’s legal guardian and the owner of that building their brother keeps talking about putting on the market? Heck, remember that Fiona exists at all, with meaningful relationships to the remaining cast outside of Frank occasionally saying her name in his disorientation? The show sure doesn’t!

It’s been a problem for several seasons now, this lack of attention to how the past should inform the present if we’re to care about what happens on any level deeper than a laugh at the wacky hijinks. Don’t get me wrong: this program works as a somewhat soapy, semi-serialized sitcom. (Say that ten times fast.) It’s simply not a mode that especially plays to its strengths or encourages viewers to remain invested in the characters. Even the inherent stature of a series finale can’t carry much impact if it’s functionally just concluding the very latest stretch of things and not the full inherited weight of the previous 133 episodes. Some parallels and callbacks to the original pilot suggest that the writers at least went back and rewatched that one, but while that’s better than nothing, it doesn’t make up for these scripts ignoring / forgetting so much of what’s happened since.

So Shameless ends sort of like it began, with clear untapped potential and evident confusion over how to put its best foot forward. There’s been a compelling drama possible here all along, and the show has sporadically managed to channel it effectively, most often via eldest children Fiona and Lip. Even in the isolated context of its coronavirus days, I can’t help wanting a good outcome for these self-sabotaging miscreants. But the writing has some pretty bad impulses too, and in the final analysis, those weaknesses are an unavoidable part of the season 11 tapestry.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, homophobia, gun violence, drug abuse, attempted suicide, pedophilia, and rape.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 4 > 3 > 7 > 2 > 1 > 11 > 10 > 5 > 6 > 9 > 8