The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler

Book #273 of 2021:

Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler (Patternist #5)

Author Octavia E. Butler’s debut novel was later followed by a number of loose prequels, detailing how the world arrived at the future civilization depicted here, with humanity divided into three warring tribes: ‘Clayark’ mutants infected with an alien pathogen, regular people, and psychics linked in a global hierarchical ‘Pattern.’ These titles don’t form a series in the traditional sense, and indeed, it’s a little disappointing to read them in chronological order, reach the conclusion of this volume, and realize how poorly it functions as a capstone to the sweeping story that’s come before, spanning lightyears and millennia of history.

Still, this is a fine piece of science-fiction in its own right, presenting one telepath’s journey to free himself from the abusive coercion of a stronger foe. Race is not as central a theme as it sometimes is in this writer’s work, but there are clear parallels to antebellum slavery in the Patternist society, where subjugated individuals can be traded between households, separated from a spouse, viciously beaten, and pressed into sexual service. The protagonist ultimately learns how to wield his power to unseat one particular tyrant, but the terrible might-makes-right system overall is left unaltered and his own cruelties are excused by circumstance. The narrative thus treads a path that is triumphant on the surface yet altogether bleaker in subtext, as will become common in many of Butler’s subsequent works.

My biggest critique of this tale is that I want more from its franchise, especially sequels that explore what happens next and tie in all the diverse threads introduced elsewhere. But as a semi-standalone adventure, this is pretty great.

[Content warning for gun violence, amputation, and biphobia.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: Wild Seed > Survivor > Patternmaster > Clay’s Ark > Mind of My Mind

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TV Review: Scandal, season 2

TV #74 of 2021:

Scandal, season 2

This second year of the presidential-fixer-and-mistress show is an undeniable improvement over the first, both steadier in its storytelling and with better definition to its characters. (I still don’t really understand what Harrison and Abby’s exact skillsets are within the firm, but at least they have clearer personalities and relationships with other people now.) The early clunkiness has faded, and in its place is a propulsive, frenetic engine that burns through more plot in a single hour than some series might in an entire season. When most titles get an expanded order from their network mid-production, they come up with smaller filler adventures to space out the core narrative. Scandal just shrugs, finishes the initial thirteen-episode Defiance plan, and confidently launches off on a brand-new wild ride about the Albatross mole for the back nine.

While it’s grown into itself, however, this is not exactly a program that I love. My deep fondness for Jane the Virgin is proof that over-the-top soapy elements are not necessarily a dealbreaker for me, yet here I’m finding them to be somewhat exhausting. Maybe it’s the higher stakes inherent in a political drama, but the breakneck pace of all these twists and turns is keeping me from fully investing in the heart of the heroine and her cohort. Assassination attempts! Election-rigging! Folks coming back from the dead! Everyone having casual conversations about all of the above in public settings in DC where anyone could walk by and overhear! The president literally murders a Supreme Court justice with his bare hands at one point, and I don’t even have to worry about a spoiler alert for that because it’s so quickly overshadowed by whatever happens next.

When I sit down to write a review like this, I try to reflect and remind myself what all has happened on this particular stretch of the serialized story. In what state do the protagonists start, where do they end up, and how do they get there? Yet that’s practically impossible when there’s never any consistent status quo from scene to scene anyway. This bifurcated run of Scandal has its goals and achievements, but summarizing them more than I already have would be ludicrous, not to mention spoilery as heck. Cliffhanger endings that are shocking in the moment would need to be mentioned as background just to explain the premise a few installments later, and essential motivations behind individual actions seem dubious when considered in the light of a person’s full history that we’ve seen.

And that’s this show so far in a nutshell, I think. It’s popcorn television that provides a certain immediate satisfaction, but isn’t remotely filling whenever you zoom out to take the longer view.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, torture, murder of children, sexual assault, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #272 of 2021:

Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The best part of this historical noir adventure is its setting of 1970s Mexico City, as rendered in rich #ownvoices detail from author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I don’t love the overall story as much as her previous titles Certain Dark Things and Mexican Gothic — perhaps because those fantasy horror pieces had more genre flair — but its era of government corruption, secret police, and student protests offers both a distinctive environment and a valuable history lesson. The actual plot, however, which involves the alternating hunts for a witness by her catsitting neighbor and an intimidating gang member, feels somewhat perfunctory, and I especially don’t care for how the one protagonist falls for the other as soon as he sees her, before they even speak. This is also the sort of novel that repeatedly calls its heroine unattractive only for multiple men to suddenly avow that she’s beautiful once she gains her confidence or something, another trope I’ve never particularly enjoyed.

The hardboiled elements are fine for what they are, but the text as a whole seems to be constructed primarily as a vehicle to discuss the real time and space surrounding these inventions. And although that angle is carried out very well, it’s just not all I’m looking for in the fiction that I read.

[Content warning for gun violence, sexual assault, and racism including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Departure by K. A. Applegate

Book #271 of 2021:

The Departure by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #19)

Cassie is in crisis. The latest Animorphs battle wasn’t even that bad by the scale of what they’ve faced before, but as sometimes happens, it was enough to push her to a breaking point. A pacifist teen forced yet again to kill, she announces to her friends that she’s quitting their guerilla war against earth’s alien infiltrators. And that’s just the opening chapter of the book.

This heroine has always been the moral backbone of her group, so she was inevitably going to be the first one to seriously try to walk away from the fight, but I’m glad that author K. A. Applegate waited until this far into the series to pull the pin on that plot. We need to have seen all the horror and trauma these kids have experienced, not to mention their own growing ruthless effectiveness, for the decision to carry the weight it deserves. We may suspect as readers that the status quo will be restored and Cassie won’t be gone for good, but in the moment we can wholly buy into her choice to leave as we wouldn’t have been able to earlier.

And then the novel keeps going and shifts gears, stranding the protagonist in a Hatchet-esque wilderness survival story deep in the woods with only a Yeerk Controller who now knows she can morph for company. With her secret discovered, the warrior can’t be allowed to live — except Cassie is weary of killing, and her opponent is in the body of a young child who doesn’t deserve to pay that cost either. There’s simply no great answer here. The futility of the situation allows for tense but frank conversation between the two rivals, and what emerges from that dialogue is pretty remarkable.

Over the course of this volume, the human and the Yeerk bare their souls to one another, each developing a better understanding of the other’s perspective. This Enemy Mine dynamic isn’t stable, but it’s a welcome addition to a franchise that has previously avoided any real shading to the character of its bad guys. Aftran 942 confronts Cassie (and us) with the fact that her* species is made up of individuals, and that a lowly soldier doesn’t have much control over their orders. She also highlights the parasite’s biological imperative to enslave a host, and questions if that’s really any less ethical than humanity’s feeding on other animals ourselves. It’s easy to imagine a different Animorph staying unmoved by that argument, but it shakes Cassie, especially once her counterpart describes what it’s like to go through life as a blind and helpless slug.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers I won’t get into a few big twists near the end, but they continue to exhibit the protagonist’s commitment to her ideals as well as the current bleakness of her spirit. And in that context a certain scene alluded to on the cover plays out less like a cheat or a retcon as it might, and more like a beautiful metaphor for finding hope after a period of despair. The team has emerged from this ordeal shattered yet resolute. Just in time to meet David next…

*Although not addressed in the text, Aftran is alternately referred to as she, it, and he in decreasing frequency. We also learn that Yeerks procreate via a trio merging together and then dissolving into smaller pieces that grow into grubs. Space sex is weird!

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber

Book #270 of 2021:

D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber

Not bad, but a pretty typical novel of the child-goes-to-another-world-to-have-a-series-of-strange-encounters variety, a la The Phantom Tollbooth, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and so forth. The most distinctive part of this book is also its most frustrating, as there’s no consistent and coherent explanation for the disappearance of the letter D which forms the main driver of the plot. At the beginning of the story, street signs have been magically altered overnight, nobody except the heroine seems to remember that ogs and onkeys used to be dogs and donkeys, and people don’t understand when she tries to point out what’s missing from their speech. Later on, however, it’s clear that a dictator beyond the portal has simply banned the sound, and his own citizens sometimes slip up and speak a word with it even though that’s against the rules. We never do learn how the villain is affecting our dimension, why the results are different here versus there, or what’s made the protagonist immune to the spell (?) in the first place.

Granted, that haziness to the storytelling might not bother a younger reader, but the rest of the text is less memorable, offering a paint-by-numbers sequence of misadventures with little linking those random setpieces into a narrative of rising action. Some early gestures at character arcs likewise lead nowhere, and the worldbuilding in Liminus fails to develop enough gravity of detail to ever seem like a fully-formed idea of a setting. For all these middling elements yet overall competence, I give the work 2.5 out of 5 stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie

Book #269 of 2021:

Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #22)

A curious story. The first half of this Agatha Christie mystery reads almost like one of her pseudonymous Mary Westmacott romance / character studies up until the murder happens, and then when Poirot finally makes his entrance, he doesn’t spend much time investigating before we cut away to a courtroom drama, with the defense using the detective’s findings on behalf of the suspect, proceeding witness by witness to eventually reveal a more likely culprit. It’s an interesting departure from the writer’s usual style, but a pretty straightforward case overall, not to mention one where we aren’t given access to all the clues that help solve the puzzle. That’s not my favorite mode for the genre, despite the otherwise-welcome signs of creative experimentation.

[Content warning for antisemitism and assisted suicide.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 8

TV #73 of 2021:

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 8

Over the course of its history, the writers and cast on this police sitcom have appeared increasingly uneasy with its role as copaganda, leading to public statements and scripts that openly engage with institutional abuse and other social justice issues. For this last season, written in the wake of the George Floyd murder and subsequent high-profile protests, that’s been pushed even further, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some fans feel the program has grown too preachy by the end.

Personally, though, while I agree that that’s probably what this year of the show will be best known for, I think it’s gone right up to the edge of how effectively a comedy about cops can critique its own subject without sacrificing any of the humor. Rosa has quit the force to become a private eye helping people with police misconduct cases, John C. McGinley is on hand as a craven union boss doing everything in his power to shield his officers from any sort of accountability, and Amy and her fellow detectives are fighting for whatever slight reforms they can manage to get through the stodgy bureaucracy. It’s not enough, and these protagonists are called out for acting like they’re the good guys and not still part of the problematic system that is modern policing. But there are jokes to be told within that space, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine remains committed to telling them.

(Unrelatedly, Hitchcock mostly appears via video-screen — because his actor is immunocompromised, and this was also made in the time of COVID-19. Although the pandemic is soon dropped as an actual plot point, it’s another stark reminder of our current moment that will likely age differently than the earlier material.)

All in all, it’s an effective run, particularly as a farewell to a long-running series that could sometimes seem nearly out of steam and had already escaped cancellation once in the network switch from Fox to NBC. These final episodes don’t burn things to the ground as much as a defund-the-police advocate might want, but they likewise don’t shy away from certain ugly truths about the profession, in and among all the expected fun callbacks and touching resolutions to individual character arcs. It’s stronger than this title has been in a while, and a fine note to go out on. Nine-nine!

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

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

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Book Review: The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

Book #268 of 2021:

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison (The Goblin Emperor #2)

I’ve enjoyed this spinoff sequel to 2014’s The Goblin Emperor, but I don’t love it nearly as much as the original novel. Leaving the imperial palace and its lonely ruler behind, we’re instead presented with a low-stakes, street-level plot of the titular detective-cleric investigating various murders and other death-related mysteries (questions over which version of a contested will is legitimate, outbreaks of cannibalistic ghouls, etc.) around his steampunk fantasy city. This works best as a character and worldbuilding study — although the latter of course leans heavily on the foundation of its predecessor — yet somewhat less as a compelling story to house them. I might have liked it all better had my expectations not been quite so high, but this is far from the follow-up I wanted to such a charming debut.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: This Is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey

Book #267 of 2021:

This Is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey (This Is Not the Jess Show #1)

I love the premise here, which is like a YA mashup of The Truman Show with The Running Man, but I’m less sold on the execution. Partly that’s a matter of structure: our teenage protagonist spends the first half of the novel gradually figuring out that she’s been the unwitting subject of a reality show for her entire life, and then the second part on the run with the producers and complicit audience members trying to track her down. These sections feel very discrete to me, and since the ending is so open and anticlimactic with at least one sequel on its way, I think it would have been better to just split this initial volume into two and develop them both further.

And that’s needed, because the version that’s published is curiously flat in a few key areas. The early gaslighting from all sides is effective at setting an uncomfortable mood — at one point the heroine’s dog needs to be ‘recast’ and her family insists it’s the same animal even though it’s behaving differently and she can tell the markings aren’t exact — but as a result, she essentially has no one to confide in or bounce ideas off of. And then when a few of the actors finally break character to confirm her suspicions and help her escape, there’s immediate trust and no real reckoning for all their lies. It seems like an important step is missing in (re-)developing those relationships, which weakens the story around them.

The rationale and logistics of this whole situation remain somewhat murky too, such as why everyone is so invested in Jess alone not knowing the truth given that the program started with her parents before they had kids and has only recently begun ‘starring’ its sole naïf. (It turns out some of the performers and viewers even believe she’s secretly in on it! So what exactly is the benefit of keeping her in the dark?) Likewise, the fact that the year outside is actually 2037 and not 1998 is played as a big reveal, but it never has any particularly deep implications, either in cool future worldbuilding or in Kimmy Schmidt-style culture clash of eras. So while I enjoy the shape of the plot overall and the heightened genre exploration of how certain social media users exploit their children as content for views, little details like these strike me as holding the work back from reaching its full potential.

[Content warning for underage alcohol abuse and implied child pornography (cameras in the locker room, etc.).]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Book #266 of 2021:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

This 1955 novel reads as a prescient (though obviously unheeded) critique of colonialism and American-style foreign intervention, following a journalist and an intelligence officer in the ‘Indochina’ region at the start of the Vietnam War. It draws on author Graham Greene’s own experience as a war correspondent there, and is full of racism and sexism that generally seem to be consciously unflattering presentations of his characters, rather than reflections of the writer’s own bias. The most surprising thing about this book is its clear-eyed perspective on bloodthirsty Cold War diplomacy and western disdain for the third world; the least is its apparent condemnation for being ‘anti-American’ upon initial release.

The plot here unfolds over two time periods: the present, which begins when the protagonist is informed that his colleague and former romantic rival has been killed, and flashbacks to the past exploring the two men’s personal acquaintance with one another. Although fictional, it appears to capture the then-contemporary setting well — at least through this particular British chronicler’s eyes — and is just as interesting as a historical document on that front as for the story of cavalier cruelty at its heart.

[Content warning for slurs, gun violence, bomb violence, gore, war crimes including murder of children, and mention of rape.]

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

★★★★☆

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