The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson

Book #350 of 2021:

Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #3)

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

I love author Brandon Sanderson’s work in general, and I’ve been enjoying this YA space opera, but I have to admit to finding this latest volume a bit perfunctory. There are big worldbuilding reveals of the kind the writer likes to spring on us, and even though they reduce to his typical pattern of ‘legendary thing X is actually commonplace thing Y’ I do appreciate the greater context to the series that they provide. (We even get a flashback cameo appearance from Jason Write of the original 2008 Defending Elysium prequel story!) Unfortunately, however, there’s not much of an actual plot here in the lead-up, just our returning protagonist wandering the barren landscapes of matter on the outskirts of the Nowhere dimension, searching for those answers and trying to retain her memories as the void eats away at them. While this is not a Cosmere title, there’s a definite Shadesmar / Cognitive Realm vibe to the affair, which is another disappointing trope to see repeated.

This is also the second Skyward novel in a row that has suddenly flung its heroine into a brand-new situation far from most of the previously-established characters, and I don’t think its lightweight pirate romp succeeds on the level of Starsight‘s interesting alien species and galactic politics. Although Spensa meets new allies in her time outside our universe, everything feels very removed from the main stakes of the conflict with the Superiority, and it’s getting harder to remember why those prior relationships matter the longer she stays away. Even more than the recent Sunreach and ReDawn novellas, this book seems designed primarily to deliver exposition — which it accomplishes effectively and with a few fun action scenes, but doesn’t ever meaningfully transcend.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The First Journey by K. A. Applegate

Book #349 of 2021:

The First Journey by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Alternamorphs #1)

I went into my adult reread of this choose-your-own-adventure Animorphs title with pretty low expectations, and yet it somehow still managed to disappoint. Who exactly is the audience here? The tone is more juvenile than the main novels, with lots of exclamation marks and a focus on the surface-level action rather than any deeper themes of sacrifice or the toll of trauma on child guerilla soldiers. The heroes are flat too, not to mention remarkably out-of-character throughout. (Ax’s dialogue alone is a travesty.) And Yeerk Controllers can suddenly be confused by earth customs and detected just by watching to see who’s acting strangely, despite how they’ve always had complete access to their host minds and blended in seamlessly to the environment before.

That all suggests a project that maybe wasn’t designed for the fans, but the story takes so many unexplained leaps that I can’t imagine a newcomer being able to follow along instead. The plot holes and contradictions like that nonsensical sario rip are weird even if you have a general sense of how the continuity “should” go, and lacking that context would surely make everything worse. Perhaps the as-yet-anonymous ghostwriter was likewise unfamiliar with the series, although that doesn’t explain why credited author K. A. Applegate or her editors let the resulting text go to print in such a flawed state. In any event, it’s a missed opportunity both to reward long-time readers by truly immersing them in the world of this franchise and to offer a compelling alternate on-ramp for anyone drawn to check out this volume first.

Structurally, it’s not much of a gamebook either; there are a total of six points at which we’re invited to pick among two or three options of what animal to morph, and in every case, all but one choice leads to death within a few pages. Really great choosable-path fiction offers a branching narrative that develops multiple competing throughlines and would take significant dedication to map out entirely. This book has only one correct plot to it, and it’s not a particularly enjoyable one at that. At least the whole thing is non-canon, and thus can be safely dismissed as a simple low-quality cash grab.

[Content warning for body horror and gun violence.]

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: Strange Dreams edited by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #348 of 2021:

Strange Dreams edited by Stephen R. Donaldson

Rating each story in this 1993 collection individually, they average out to just three-out-of-five stars overall for me. It’s an uneven bunch, yet there are still some winners among the lot. (No fives, but 10 fours, along with 11 threes, 5 twos, and 2 ones.) I also like the idea behind the project: rather than a call for submissions to meet a particular prompt or theme, editor Stephen R. Donaldson has gathered together an assortment of tales he’d already read that have stuck with him over the years. It’s nearly all science-fiction and fantasy, as with his own work, with contributors ranging from Franz Kafka and Rudyard Kipling to more contemporary authors like Patricia A. McKillip and Nancy Kress. Excepting “Air Raid” by John Varley, every piece has been new to me, so I appreciate the exposure especially to those older titles.

Although I haven’t loved all the entries — and have actually hated a couple — in general, I would say the book is worth checking out for fans like me interested in seeing what kind of fiction has sparked a lasting impression on the genre stalwart. I can detect no clear lines of influence between anything here and Donaldson’s own Thomas Covenant or other writing, but I do feel there’s insight to be gained in exploring the material a favorite writer finds favorable to read in turn.

[Content warning for rape, gore, amputation, torture, incest, pedophilia, gun violence, racism, and domestic abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby

Book #347 of 2021:

Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby

Between this novel and author S. A. Cosby’s later Razorblade Tears, I am fully ready to crown him the Elmore Leonard of the state of Virginia, demonstrating that late crime writer’s same flair for action scenes, local dialect, and colorful characters with particular codes of outlaw conduct. (In fact, I’ve found it practically impossible not to picture the hapless robber Ronnie Sessions in this title as Dewey Crowe from the Leonard TV adaptation Justified.) Here, a former getaway driver and all-around hard case is reluctantly brought back into the business for one last job, which of course goes south when his new partners don’t prove as reliably professional as he is. I admire how Cosby adopts almost a classic tragic structure for this tale, showing how the protagonist’s uber-competence is repeatedly derailed by the petty flaws of weaker men. It’s like Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, if Camelot were a criminal underworld in the dusty rural roads an hour outside Richmond.

A few coincidences in the plot seem artificially tidy, and it’s somewhat frustrating how several otherwise-smart torturers kill off their victims before even corroborating their information, when it’s fairly well-known that confessions made under duress aren’t always reliable. Or rather, it’s the fact that the narrative doesn’t ever punish or call out this assumption by having the intel turn out to be wrong that’s disappointing, I guess. But if you’re looking for a literary Fast and the Furious, a propulsive thriller that still finds time amid its heists and car chases to meditate on toxic masculinity and black fatherhood, this is absolutely the book for you.

[Content warning for gun violence including to a child, domestic abuse, gore, and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson

Book #346 of 2021:

You Feel It Just Below the Ribs by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson

This novel technically takes place in the dystopian setting of authors Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson’s “Within the Wires” podcast, but you don’t need to have listened to that first in order to enjoy it — all I’ve ever heard is the handful of sample episodes once shared on the “Welcome to Night Vale” feed, and even those don’t seem to hold any necessary continuity context or worldbuilding cues. I’m sure regular subscribers will pick up on references that I’ve missed, but overall, the volume stands fine on its own as a creepy alternate history and intimate character study of a woman whose research helped forge that society.

The book is presented as a found document, a memoir with added footnotes from its (fictitious) publisher. This format is rather clever, as it allows for multiple layers of unreliable narration when the two sources diverge. If the editor points out that some particular claim is contrary to the historical record — as occurs regularly throughout the text — it could be that the doctor is misremembering, that she is willfully obscuring the truth, that the official documentation of events is in error, or that someone else has intentionally suppressed the matter. Or even that the supposedly objective fact-checkers have their own fallibility and/or agenda, I suppose. There’s a delightfully tense ambiguity there, and readers may well suspect different possible interpretations at various junctures.

The story concerns the protagonist’s early life in the devastation of her version of World War I, which appears to have been even more cataclysmic than ours, followed by her subsequent career studying hypnosis and ways to break family ties as a way of dissolving ‘tribalism’ and thereby strengthening the state. That’s obviously horrific from our perspective, but I appreciate how the writers don’t go the easy route of making her a power-hungry mad scientist and antihero type. This is instead a tale of the banality of evil, where our viewpoint figure is a small cog in a vast machine who simply doesn’t fully realize how her findings are being used until it’s far too late to stop anything. It’s a nuanced portrait, no less gripping than the initial presentation of her childhood in the numbing day-to-day midst of a prolonged catastrophe.

Finally, the treatment of gender in this universe is subtle but noteworthy. Nearly all of the major players are women, including the heroine’s wife and other romantic partners, with no evidence for any strong discrimination. That’s never explicitly highlighted, but it helps to give the narrative a distinctive feel. And I just love the idea of an utterly noncontroversial mid-twentieth-century lesbian wedding, despite everything clearly wrong with the world around it by then.

[Content warning for medical experimentation, child abduction, death by trampling, gaslighting, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Gods of Riverworld by Philip José Farmer

Book #345 of 2021:

Gods of Riverworld by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #5)

This somewhat-vestigial sequel to the core Riverworld plot is actually an improvement over the past couple titles, although it’s still not great. Having finally reached the grand tower at the head of the river in the previous story, the remaining protagonists spend this one living amid its technological wealth, using its computers to view recorded memories, create android servants, resurrect their friends, and more. There are some interesting scenes here, and a general exploration of how godlike power corrupts whether you choose to share it or not, but the main problem is that everything seems so aimless, and so unconcerned with the developing civilization outside. The umpteenth retcon of the stakes and purpose of this world is rather frustrating, too.

The first quarter of the text at least deals with the threat of a stranger and/or secret traitor potentially stalking the group from hiding, but beyond that, we largely just get a sequence of disjointed episodes with no particular narrative momentum. In one chapter the characters are solving the Jack the Ripper case by raising the victims and prime suspects from the grave; in the next they’re being attacked by themed robots at an Alice in Wonderland tea party gone awry. These incidents are variably entertaining, but they don’t really connect to anything important or add up to much that would justify the book’s existence in the end.

[Content warning for sexism, fatphobia, homophobia, racism including slurs, rape, incest, pedophilia, and domestic abuse.]

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★☆☆☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1 > 5 > 3 > 4

Book Review: Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly

Book #344 of 2021:

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #14)

The Liam Neeson movie Taken came out in 2008, and it sure seems like author Michael Connelly was trying to ride its coattails for this Bosch novel the following year. The start of the story concerns a liquor store robbery-homicide that may have Triad connections, but when the detective starts looking into that, he receives a hostage video of his teenage daughter in Hong Kong, resulting in him hopping on the next available flight to track her down. She’s been moved to different sites within the city as her captors prepare to sell her for human trafficking and/or organ harvesting, but he’s able to use his police skills to retrace her steps (in an unofficial capacity, as the local authorities refuse to assist), leaving a huge casualty count in his wake.

Harry’s received this sort of action hero treatment before, but it never feels as grounded or interesting as his more methodical investigative work, and the whole book has some low-level xenophobia that further cuts against its effectiveness. The protagonist himself is called out at several points for racist assumptions and microaggressions, and although I guess it’s good that he’s learning, the narrative around him likewise relies on exoticizing the Asian element in L.A. and abroad and generally treating non-white bodies as disposable. The plot too involves a few frustrating coincidences and misconceptions, rather than the tighter mechanics this writer often provides. So overall I would say this is one of the weaker volumes of the series, even though it’s an important read for certain developments in the main character’s personal life.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate

Book #343 of 2021:

Elfangor’s Secret by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Megamorphs #3)

Is there any Animorphs opening more unsettling than this one, with its in-media-res presentation of an alternate universe where our heroes are still fighting the same covert alien invasion, but as citizens of a racist, slave-holding empire? Rachel is nowhere to be found, and Jake is coldly considering how to turn Cassie in to the authorities for her subversive compassion towards the nation’s ‘primitive’ enemies without the secret of their human identities making it back to the Yeerks. Luckily an entity soon appears to recall them to their true selves and set them on the task of restoring the timeline, but that’s a surprise as well — rather than the expected Ellimist, it’s Crayak’s agent the Drode, last seen taunting the group in #27 The Exposed. And he tells them now that one Animorph will have to die as a price for being allowed to set things right.

The unease lingers throughout the text, which finds the youths tumbling into the past after Visser Four, who has discovered the Time Matrix that Elfangor hid on earth in The Andalite Chronicles. He’s in the process of altering history to arrange the new reality of the present, which would apparently render humanity easier to conquer, and the team has been linked to the ancient artifact so that they follow in his wake with each successive jump. These time-travel logistics don’t quite make sense if you consider them too hard — a common detriment to the genre, much as I love it — but the ensuing carnage is effectively brutal. From Agincourt to Trafalgar to Normandy, the meddler is primarily focused on changing the outcome of important battles, and the combat scenes are a succession of bloody nightmares even for our seasoned protagonists. They may have gotten used to the idea of killing in their own struggles, but they are unprepared to be dropped into the middle of an active war zone again and again with no immediate context as to which side is supposed to win.

It’s that pervasive bloodshed that registers most in this frantic chase across the centuries, together with the moral compromises that each protagonist winds up making in turn. (This is a Megamorphs volume, so the perspective shifts regularly among them.) In an effort to survive and continue pursuing their target, they are forced to kill fellow humans as they normally never would. Tobias even threatens and then inadvertently slays Adolf Hitler, who by that point in the new chain of events is a lowly unarmed driver, not the evil dictator that everyone remembers and viscerally loathes. Oh, yes: this is also the book where Ax learns about the Holocaust and is rightfully aghast at the depravity of our species, and I believe where we get the first explicit confirmation that, as their names might suggest, Jake and Rachel’s family is Jewish. That bit of representation meant a lot to me as a younger reader, and it still does today.

As for the foreshadowed death, Jake is suddenly shot in the forehead when George Washington is ambushed crossing the Delaware, which is pretty graphic and horrifying even if you correctly predict that he will somehow be brought back to life by the end. (Once the Time Matrix has been secured, Cassie the nominal pacifist devises a plan to stop the Visser’s host from being born by preventing his parents ever meeting, thereby ensuring that the Yeerk wasn’t in a position to discover the device in the first place and resetting everything to normal.) While her cousin is gone, Rachel is likewise killed by a cannonball ripping her chimpanzee body in half, but she’s quickly healed of her wounds, leading to the realization that only one member can die on this mission — possibly due to the Ellimist’s interference, although that’s never confirmed. It’s a gruesome moment too, but the result undercuts the tension a bit much in my opinion. With the Animorphs following their enemy wherever he goes and now unable to die, the odds are stacked too high in their favor, and the eventual victory becomes a foregone conclusion. But hey, at least Rachel’s resurrection leads to her first on-page kiss with Tobias! And Cassie sweetly tells a man calling her racist slurs (not actually written out) that she can turn white for him if he wants, before morphing a polar bear and roaring right into his face.

This remains a great story overall, and one that appears liable to linger for the teens longer than #11 The Forgotten, a previous time-travel escapade that was similarly prevented before it could properly begin. But it feels a little easy in the end, particularly without any final denouement with the Drode or anyone else. Our heroes go through a terrible experience, die a few times, do some horrendous things themselves culminating in wiping an innocent man from existence, and arrive back where they started to a world that will never notice, there to await the inevitable next crisis in their unending resistance war against the Yeerks. The Time Matrix is, presumably, back underneath the construction site where anybody might stumble upon it. That’s all appropriately eerie, but it does seem like we are maybe missing a few steps along the way.

[Content warning for body horror and mention of rape and forced pregnancy.]

★★★★☆

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.

★★★★☆

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