The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

Book #315 of 2021:

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

This horror thriller isn’t an absolute trainwreck, and it undeniably picks up near the end, but the whole thing is built around a series of twists that are painfully obvious from the start and tiresome in their dragged-out execution. Ostensibly the plot concerns a man who may have kidnapped a young girl, and her sister who moves in next to him years later convinced the police were wrong to clear him of the crime, but there are heavy-handed clues throughout that all is not what it seems on Needless Street. Multiple characters experiencing foggy memories / time gaps and other signs of instability inevitably turn out to be repressing various traumas from their past, and although author Catriona Ward’s sympathies seem to be on their side, the novel still tends to treat mental illness as a spectacle and intended fuel for big gotcha reveals.

Like, there is a possible version of this story that lays its cards on the table earlier and could actually get me to invest in these people and their troubles, even the viewpoint figure who is — sigh — a bible-reading and priggish housecat. But all that pain has instead been forced into this awkward alternate narrative shape, clumsily aiming to fool readers into one set of beliefs before yanking the rug out from under us. And that’s probably about as much as I can safely say without full-fledged spoilers, so I’ll just reiterate that this has been a pretty disappointing and frustrating read overall. 1.5 stars, grudgingly rounded up.

[Content warning for suicide, domestic abuse, child abuse, and cruelty to animals.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Book #314 of 2021:

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan (The Radiant Emperor #1)

This incredible debut is a queer fantasy retelling of the founding of China’s Ming Dynasty, in which a penniless 14th-century monk-turned-rebel helped topple the Yuan Mongol rulers and forged a new empire with himself at the head. Only in this version, that figure begins life as a nameless starving peasant girl, abused by her family and told by a local fortune-teller that she has no particular destiny. Her brother, in contrast, is said to carry a shining fate, but when bandits raid their home and orphan the children, he soon dies of despair. Taking his name for her own, she enters a monastery and becomes determined to live so fully as him that even the heavens will be convinced.

Presenting as a man but always referred to in text as she/her, this protagonist is uncomfortable thinking of herself as either gender, an element of dysphoria that separates the story from that classic genre of crossdressing Mulan-type adventures where a female identity is merely temporarily hidden under armor and later revealed / restored. There is no point at which the new Zhu Chongba can go back to being a girl, even among intimates like her eventual wife who learn the truth of her body. A similar consideration extends to the novel’s other main character too, a eunuch general on the opposite side of the war who is seen as something unnatural by all. Together and apart, these two antiheroes make any number of cutthroat and cruel choices in their desperate respective quests to seize power in a world that doesn’t have a defined place for someone like them.

It’s a tale I’ve really enjoyed, although I think a few of the minor viewpoint chapters and the presence of magic in this setting are unnecessary distractions that don’t add much to the plot. (Does the heroine need to see ghosts, for instance? That ability doesn’t seem to ever matter as anything but spooky flavoring.) But it’s overall a great start to a series I’ll definitely keep reading.

[Content warning for sexism, homophobia, sexual slavery, amputation, gore, and child murder.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Extreme by K. A. Applegate

Book #313 of 2021:

The Extreme by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #25)

As a kid, I never knew that many of the latter Animorphs books were ghostwritten, with credited series author K. A. Applegate — already a pen name for the joint efforts of Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant, likewise unknown to younger me — providing simply an outline and editing for someone else’s work. I had kind of been dreading reaching that stage in my adult reread here, expecting to find a precipitous drop-off in quality with a different writer at the helm. But at least in this first outing, penned by Jeffrey Zeuhlke, that hasn’t happened yet. I feel better for not having originally detected any deviation in authorial voice.

The premise is simple — our heroes stow away on a Yeerk craft to an unidentified base that turns out to be in the Arctic — but brutal in execution. Most of the volume consists of a survival tale of the extreme temperature, and how difficult it is for children in leotards and bike shorts to endure there even with their special powers. None of their existing morphs are exactly built for the climate either, and so they must keep demorphing and remorphing, not just to prolong the two-hour limit in which they can stay as animals with some slight degree of protection against the environment, but also to refresh the frostbite damage that those bodies are experiencing. At one point, Rachel in grizzly form takes a step forward and leaves an entire paw snapped off behind her on the ice. It’s pretty gruesome stuff.

And it’s unrelenting, too. I really like the detail that the Chee androids are covering for the team by taking their place with hologram emitters — and I hope it sticks around; it’s a great use for these allies that doesn’t violate their pacifism and removes the sneaking-behind-the-parents’-back element that was threatening to grow stale — but the primary benefit for this title is that it allows the mission to extend far longer than any before. Despite the horror of combat and trauma that’s always been a part of this franchise, there was something quaintly safe about the idea that fighting off the enemy invasion was an extracurricular for these teens, a passion project they could fit in around their homework assignments and temporarily ignore during the school day. But this plot wouldn’t work nearly so effectively without the staggering immensity of it, grinding down the protagonists until they are weary and frozen to the bone. It’s a good (by which I mean horrifying) look for the steadily maturing young warriors.

There’s a new alien species on the horizon as well, although this will be their sole appearance. The Venber were the victims of an ancient genocide, and while merely a small number have been brought back as mindless hybrids programmed to obey their Yeerk masters, that makes it all the more poignant when the Animorphs are forced to slaughter them. They are effective antagonists earlier on too, unflaggingly stalking their prey Terminator-like across the tundra. Only the intervention of a friendly Inuit boy directing Marco and the others to a polar bear they are able to wrestle into submission and acquire finally enables them to gain the upper hand over their deadly foes and succeed in destroying their target and hijacking a ship home.

All in all, I’ve enjoyed this adventure. If I had been asked to guess the ghostwriter novels without looking at a list, I doubt I would have considered this one, and that’s fairly high praise given how much I love the strictly Applegate entries.

[Content warning for body horror.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: ReBoot, season 2

TV #81 of 2021:

ReBoot, season 2

The first four episodes this season are about on par with the previous year: competent yet disposable pieces of 90s children’s entertainment, more notable for the technological graphics achievement of the time than for any appreciable complexity or storytelling ambitions. (And in the initial airing of the show, this run started literally one week after the last one ended. So maybe they did indeed share a common production block.)

From “Painted Windows” on however, the series really turns over a new leaf. The final six installments of this bunch feel richer in their worldbuilding and characterization, cleverer in their puns and sly cultural references — some of which I’m only getting now as an adult — and impressively serialized, with each adventure self-contained and yet moving a larger narrative forward. That was a rarity back in 1995, and it’s no less striking today, especially in that Empire Strikes Back-style downbeat cliffhanger finale. Honestly, those two hours would be worthy of a five-star rating if they stood alone, and I regret that I have to dock them somewhat for the slighter material that comes beforehand. By the end with AndrAIa and Mouse around we’ve even reached gender parity in our main cast, a far cry from the days when Dot could easily be the sole woman in a given script. Plenty of contemporary features still struggle to pass the Bechdel Test; ReBoot was already putting in the work a quarter-century ago to make that level of female representation commonplace.

So here’s where the expanses of the program start to open up, with a clarified premise that Mainframe is one remote system that can potentially connect not only to the Supercomputer (where Bob is from and evil virus Megabyte wants to go) but also to the strange and lawless Web, a Lovecraftian realm full of dangers beyond any sprite’s understanding. The threats have well-defined stakes, and the humor is deeper for being generally rooted in distinctive personalities, rather than relying on slapstick gags and archetypes. This is the era that made so many of us love this title, and the reason that that eventual semi-sequel The Guardian Code stung so much in its mediocrity. I almost wonder whether those writers watched merely the early stuff, and so missed out on what was actually special about the franchise they’d inherited.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen this cartoon before or simply just not in a while, I highly recommend diving in with 2×5 “Painted Windows.” The whole thing is available free at https://www.shoutfactorytv.com/series/reboot; you can thank me later.

★★★★☆

Book Review: My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Book #312 of 2021:

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

An electrifying debut, made up of the title novella and five unrelated short stories. Each entry is set somewhere in my adopted home of Virginia, and finds a black protagonist struggling with our country’s legacy and contemporary expressions of racism. In the main event, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings seeks refuge in the former’s famous estate as society crumbles amid a nationwide power outage and armed white supremacists backed by the remnants of the police department set fire to her neighborhood. In the opening piece “Control Negro” — performed by an excellent LeVar Burton for the audiobook — a jaded professor archly describes how his efforts to provide the perfect life for his son still haven’t given the boy equal opportunities to the average white students he sees in his class. All throughout the collection, such characters are clear-eyed about the bleakness and alienation of their circumstances yet determined to push forward as best they can nonetheless.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom by Sangu Mandanna

Book #311 of 2021:

Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom by Sangu Mandanna

Another title in the popular recent mini-genre of Percy Jackson-inspired #ownvoices fantasy stories involving a middle-grade protagonist coming face-to-face with certain mythological beings drawn from the writer’s cultural heritage. In this novel, the Hindu gods and demons are joined by a fun Inkheart sort of element, as it’s the heroine’s drawings of them (along with some of her own inventions) that have unexpectedly come to life and dragged her into their world. That gives the project a rather unique atmosphere, as does the frank and non-stigmatized approach to mental illness in discussing her anxiety / borderline OCD.

It’s a fine adventure overall, although I wish there was less criticizing and guilting of Kiki throughout for her artistic choices, such as the house of rebel children with no grown-ups to look after them or a villain’s fortress protected by deadly traps. She’s thirteen and has quite reasonably never expected the things in her sketchbook to have any independent existence! Give her a break, and don’t invite young audiences to worry about the morality of their own doodles, sheesh. But that aspect aside, I have really enjoyed the book. The action is exciting, the characters feel specific and endearing, and the plot contains a few genuine surprises even for an older reader like me. It’s a great take on folklore, found family, and disability, and I’m excited to see author Sangu Mandanna is already under contract for a sequel.

[Content warning for death of a friend.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Rage by Bob Woodward

Book #310 of 2021:

Rage by Bob Woodward

This title from summer 2020 is a reasonable follow-up to author Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House of two years earlier, but I don’t find that the reporter has gained any new levels of insight into the 45th US president, despite his greater access. Drawing on 17 interviews with Donald Trump himself, plus countless more with other current and former members of the administration, he largely presents the same belligerent and impulsive figure, whom the nation knows exasperatingly well at this point. The inside details are somewhat interesting, like Jared Kushner’s attempted playbook of not just getting his father-in-law to agree to his plans but then blocking meetings with anyone who might try to convince the man otherwise, yet in a White House marked by exceptional amounts of leaking, this information had generally already made its way to the press long before publication. There’s little that’s new here about the back half of the presidential term for readers who followed the news at the time.

I do think this book has merit for posterity, although the main appeal seems to be in the coverage of Trump’s mishandling of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which in my opinion has been better described and contextualized elsewhere, like Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid. One does get the sense that the commander-in-chief was trying to listen to his advisors, but as usual, not disciplined enough to identify true subject matter experts and stay the course of following their recommendations. His natural impulse to bluster, change topics, politicize everything into a culture war of grievance, attack perceived enemies, and shift the blame ultimately rendered him, as this writer identifies, the exact wrong person for the job of navigating a crisis of that scale. I wouldn’t say that this particular text is a thorough documentation of all that, however.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Dark Design by Philip José Farmer

Book #309 of 2021:

The Dark Design by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #3)

The longest, slowest, and most inscrutable Riverworld novel yet. Another decade has passed in this strange afterlife, although technology, politics, and culture don’t seem to have changed much in the meantime. The biggest recent development is that people are no longer resurrected somewhere beside the river if they happen to die, returning death to the permanent status it held back on earth. But the characters treat that as a mere curiosity at best, perhaps because their bodies still aren’t aging, and we’re given no explanation beyond the suggestion that the Ethicals might have been studying how humanity would react to these new conditions but now have finally finished with us.

The storyline is a mess. Our various protagonists continue to seek their respective ways to the tower upstream, for motivations that remain poorly explained, while the mysterious stranger encouraging them makes no further appearance until the last chapter. We learn that everyone claiming to be born after 1983 is actually a lying agent of the race running this experiment, a retcon that provides more questions than satisfying answers and feels almost like author Philip José Farmer, now writing in the late 1970s, got spooked that his earlier predictions of the future would turn out to be incorrect.

The plot alternates between hard-to-follow combat scenes and sluggish interludes heavy with philosophical ponderings and disdainful social commentary. There’s antisemitism, biphobia, sexism, racism including slurs, drug abuse, slavery, and rape, all presented patronizingly as things that are maybe bad, yes, but hardly anything for a quasi-immortal to get worked up about. A defense of incest is offered on three separate occasions, each time seemingly apropos of nothing at all.

The interesting premise of this setting and my vague memories of reading the series in my youth are compelling me to push on, especially during those shining moments when it really lives up to its full potential. But these appear increasingly sporadic as we go along, and this latest title is pretty dreadful overall.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

Book #308 of 2021:

Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron

I believe this is the first fairy tale retelling I’ve seen that incorporates the classic version of the text as official propaganda of a fascistically sexist (and homophobic) police state, so that’s an interesting premise to start from. Girls in this kingdom are taught the Cinderella fable as a moral of love and devotion — both for the aristocracy and for their eventual husbands — and from age sixteen are forced to attend an annual ball where men can unilaterally claim them in marriage. Any young ladies still single at the conclusion of three such events are then sent into ominous exile, never to be heard from again. The protagonist, living two centuries after the famous princess, is justifiably outraged by this system, even before she eventually discovers that its founding myth is a lie and Prince Charming a wicked fiend who’s been siphoning energy from the unclaimed women to magically prolong his own life. I get major Darkling vibes from this character, especially given how he regularly changes his name and appearance to keep his unnatural longevity a secret.

In fact, though, the overall novel is a bit too much like too many other stories that I’ve read, a piece of ultimately generic fantasy YA plotting and worldbuilding that struggles to stand out in an increasingly-crowded genre. Its most distinctive element is its queer heroine, yet I’ve nevertheless found myself wanting more from her as a change-agent of legible motivation and relationships, rather than an archetypal smash-the-patriarchy figure pushed around by the vagaries of author and plot. The book isn’t doing anything wrong here per se, and I think if it had been published five or ten years earlier I might feel more warmly about the enterprise. But as a 2020 release, it’s not breaking enough new ground in its #ownvoices representation to make up for the less remarkable aspects elsewhere.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Suspicion by K. A. Applegate

Book #307 of 2021:

The Suspicion by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #24)

If I’m being honest, this adventure is fairly inessential and a bit cartoonish, especially in its abrupt ending of Visser Three and his troops agreeing to just walk away from the ‘Andalite bandits’ in an exhausted temporary truce. But I kind of love the Helmacrons, that diminutive species of alien megalomaniacs who are introduced here. They’ve identified the blue morphing cube as a potential power source for their weapons, and they’re not going to let the fact that they’re only one-sixteenth of an inch tall stand in the way of seizing it and conquering the earth. (How would they do against the Nesk from In the Time of Dinosaurs, I wonder?) It’s a fun little detail that the Yeerks currently engaged in their own attempted conquest are already familiar with these new arrivals and find them incredibly annoying, too.

This volume is entertaining enough when the warships Galaxy Blaster and Planet Crusher are initially mistaken for Star Trek toys and completely unable to damage the relative giants staring at them in bemusement. But it gets positively delightful once the Helmacrons manage to activate their shrinking beam, reducing a few of our protagonists (and eventually some enemies) down to their level. This is a classic sci-fi premise, and author K. A. Applegate clearly has a blast showing how dirt clods and fleas and the like have been rendered into strange new problems at that scale. There are physics exploits enabled by that development that seem straight out of a Marvel Ant-Man movie. At one point, a gun is fired nearby, and our narrator Cassie describes the sight of its bullet as a Greyhound bus roaring past.

We’ve seen the team get small before as animals, of course, but never while retaining their full human faculties and senses, which is a neat change. And when they do become flies in this title, they grow tinier yet, finding themselves in a weird microscopic environment where they can perceive individual cells. I don’t know if the science is sound, but it’s pretty distinctive! Also: the shrink-ray technology brings everyone to the same height, meaning Tobias spends most of this story as an absurdly giant hawk from Cassie’s perspective. And the ultimate solution to win the upper hand and force the pests to reverse the effect is for our heroes to acquire and morph into anteaters, which are enormous by comparison — because the DNA is a new acquisition, I guess, so they turn out regular size — and able to lap up the little hellions with ease.

The whole plot is goofy as heck, but the novel charmingly seems to recognize and lean into that. Marco jokes throughout about him and Cassie having to repopulate the planet with pint-sized babies, which thankfully lands as dark humor emphasizing the absurdity of the situation rather than anything creepy (particularly given her continuing cute awkward flirtation with Jake elsewhere). The appearance of the miniature spaceships ineffectually picking fights with much larger opponents is inherently comical. And the aggressive boasting and convoluted military bureaucracy of the Helmacrons is an effective satire on our own warmongering, complete with the bizarre winkle that they immediately kill anyone awarded a position of authority, before she can make a mistake. (Ah, yes — the Helmacron women are in command with the men kept as slaves, although the Animorphs inspire a gender revolution among them by the end.)

This is all deeply silly, and probably more like a typical children’s book series than the war crimes and trauma that we usually get. But it’s that very breath of fresh air that makes it a great diversion.

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

★★★★☆