The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman

Book #30 of 2022:

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman (Tess of the Road #1)

My original review from when I read an Advance Reader’s Copy of this book in 2018:

Practically from the start, I’ve been reeling over the emotional journey that the heroine makes in this intensely personal fantasy novel. Largely eschewing the traditional genre focus on epic quests, author Rachel Hartman has instead written a powerful meditation on trauma, grief, and healing that only happens to take place in a world with dragons. (It’s technically a follow-up to her Seraphina duology, but this novel tells an independent story that doesn’t require having read the previous two books first.)
The tale of a young woman who takes to travel in order to escape her past and find a reason to keep living is incredibly cathartic, and is suffused with an uplifting moral philosophy that finds Tess ultimately letting down her barriers to affirm the goodness of life in all its diversity. We need more stories like this, and I can already tell this is one I’ll be revisiting in the future.

Further thoughts, in 2022:

And here I am, revisiting it! I decided to refresh my memory of this title now that its long-awaited sequel has arrived, and to see whether it still strikes me as powerfully — which it does. I stand by everything I wrote four years ago, but I also wanted to speak a bit more on this book’s fairly radical compassion that’s modeled throughout.

It’s a feminist picaresque that abhors sexism and rape culture but doesn’t judge a girl for dressing in men’s clothing while traveling alone. It celebrates consensual relations among adults, without placing any shame on sex workers or on anyone who abstains for any reason. It gently meets people with senility where they are, rejecting the overt mistreatment sometimes directed their way along with the well-meaning urge to try wrenching them back into the clarity of the present. And it understands the importance of making space and time for safely processing trauma, while stressing that no magical cure can ever erase our worst experiences. As one disabled character who now requires assistance to walk reflects, “I wouldn’t wish for this, Tess, but I’m not sure I’d wish it away, either.”

I’ll give a special shout-out to the delightful quigutl too, that inquisitive and friendly race of small dragons who are always taken seriously by the text and the protagonist, whether in pursuing their inscrutable investigations into the mysteries of the universe or in changing from female to male to an ungendered ‘ko.’ Tess loves them, Hartman loves them, and I love them too. They’re part of why this volume has stayed lodged in my heart, and I’m so excited to see how they continue to play a role in the heroine’s journey over the next one.

[Content warning for rape, alcohol abuse, depression, suicidal ideation, gore, premature childbirth, and death of a newborn.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly

Book #29 of 2022:

Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly

Another three short stories featuring detective Harry Bosch, published just one month after the previous collection Suicide Run in 2011. (It remains unclear to me why they were not combined.) This one I like a little bit better on average, so I’ll bump my rating up accordingly. “Father’s Day” is a tough read about a man whose disabled fifteen-month-old son has died from being left in a hot car, as the police try to determine whether it was truly an accident. “Christmas Even” loses track of its own homicide investigation in favor of the protagonist returning a stolen saxophone to a jazz musician he once saw perform back in his military days, and is therefore the weak spot of the book in my opinion, although it’s not too bad overall. And the title entry finds the hero revisiting the first murder he ever worked as a cop 33 years later, when new evidence comes to light that might finally solve it.

In that last story and collectively across this volume, we see Harry at several different stages of his career, which together offers a neat retrospective on the character. All of that adds up to a stronger interlude than before, even if there’s still nothing here that would really impact the broader plot or continuity of the novel series.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Weakness by K. A. Applegate

Book #28 of 2022:

The Weakness by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #37)

I’ve used the word “goofy” in the past to describe the handful of Animorphs volumes that I haven’t really cared for in this reread, reflecting those one-off premises that are simply too outlandish to take seriously even in the context of a YA franchise about teens turning into animals to fight alien parasites. This story, by contrast, is pretty well-grounded in its setup: Jake is out of town on a family matter, and when the opportunity for a time-sensitive mission comes up before he’s back, the group agrees to let Rachel lead them in his stead. The execution, however, is just terrible, with plot holes aplenty and the protagonist feeling very out-of-character to me. Under ghostwriter Elise Smith, she reads more like her shortsighted and megalomaniacal ‘Mean Rachel’ persona from #32 The Separation than our regular heroine, a frustrating development that’s neither called-out nor justified in the text. I enjoy this series so much overall that I can generally come up with enough redeeming elements to give most books at least a three-out-of-five-star rating, but this one is too compromised by its inadvertently-titular weaknesses.

Even outside of the narrator pumping herself up with mantras like “I was Rachel! Hero warrior and interim king!” the storyline is a mess. There’s a new Yeerk overseer on earth, in a host body too fast to be effectively fought. The team barely escape from their first encounter with their lives, but decide at Rachel’s urging that since the Inspector is here to evaluate Visser Three on behalf of his superiors, they’ll carry out a rapid sequence of high-profile attacks on known Controllers, to make the enemy leader look bad. Cassie and the others rightfully worry about civilian casualties, which Rachel overrules and then agonizes over once an old man dies of a heart attack in front of her, but the whole strategy is bizarre. The kids are basically just barging into businesses with infested employees, causing some property damage, and leaving. On two occasions, they embarrass the Yeerks by forcibly stripping them, with no explanation of why an extraterrestrial slug would care about that or consideration of how the helpless human hosts might feel at this latest invasion of privacy and autonomy.

Indeed, the heroes are totally nonchalant here about the humans inside their foes, whom they usually try to avoid fighting. Rachel in bear morph squeezes one Controller so tightly his lungs are crushed, the veins in his neck stand out, and his face turns blue, yet no one says a thing. They also bring Ax on all of these public outings in his own Andalite form, even though they’ve previously gone to great lengths to keep his existence a secret from humanity. Later, when Rachel decides that they need to quickly hijack a private plane, everybody storms the airport without morphing, letting security guards and potentially cameras see their faces as they rush the tarmac and force their way onto the jet. (And then they intentionally fly that vehicle into an empty office tower to access the base hidden within, in an explosion which admittedly didn’t have the unfortunate overtones of today upon the novel’s pre-9/11 publication but is still such an extreme escalation. There would be a major investigation into something like that, with interviews of all the available witnesses! Why didn’t they just use a morph to sneak onto their target undetected like they’ve done so many times beforehand?)

Eventually, the Animorphs square off against the villainous commanders again, and manage to take down the newcomer with venom from Marco’s cobra morph, which I guess is faster than even the cheetahs that failed them at the start. And that’s it! Visser Three chooses to verify his rival’s death over finishing the slaughter of his true opponents, and the news treats everything as a fluke stampede across the city and unrelated plane crash. There’s no future mention of any other Garatrons or their physical resemblance to Andalites after this despite how effective the creature was overall, just like there’s no followup on any of the ways the gang exposed themselves here. When Jake gets back, he commiserates with Rachel on how hard it is to call the shots, and praises her for keeping everyone alive without him. It’s just such a thoroughly mediocre exercise all-around, without even the ludicrous joy of the more overtly ridiculous titles.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 1

TV #9 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 1

The 2011 launch to this animated family series is generally charming and funny, yet it doesn’t quite feel fully-formed, especially from a rewatch perspective. (I dropped the show from my regular viewing roster at some point, but I know I’ve seen at least the first nine seasons.) The essential characterizations of the five Belchers are more or less there from near the start, but the humor isn’t always driven by their particular personalities here, and the worldbuilding, the musical component, and the extended cast of recurring weirdos are all a bit rudimentary so far. We do see Hugo the Health Inspector, rival restaurateur Jimmy Pesto, landlord Mr. Fischoeder, and school counselor Mr. Frond popping up a couple times each, at least, in and among the other petty authority figures that are mostly clashing with Bob for now. I wouldn’t say any of these first thirteen episodes is an absolute classic, though, and there’s no real serialization or signs of character growth yet across the batch. But it’s a pretty solid beginning overall.

[Content warning for sexual harassment and transphobia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz

Book #27 of 2022:

Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz

This YA novel has a well-drawn teenage heroine at its heart: an early nineteenth-century daughter of the Scottish nobility who longs to become a medical surgeon in an era when that was considered unthinkably inappropriate for women. At first she attends lectures dressed as her dead older brother, and after that ruse is uncovered, she employs an enterprising lower-class lad to bring her live patients and recent cadavers dug up from their graves to study. (He’s the nominal love interest as well, although to call this a romance is a bit of a stretch. The subtitle is only accurate if you consider it to be between the protagonist and her chosen field.)

Anyway, the macabre tone allows for some gory gothic fun, and the critique of sexism — and to a lesser extent classism — is heavy-handed yet certainly apt. I’m more disappointed by the overall looseness of the plot, and by the fact that outside the main character, female representation is so minimal that I’m pretty sure the story fails the Bechdel test. There’s also a mad-science / fantasy element near the end that’s both introduced and dropped rather too abruptly to entirely succeed, in my opinion. I’ll probably come back for the forthcoming sequel that author Dana Schwartz has teased, but this volume carries too many issues that keep me at a distance as a reader.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Book #26 of 2022:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I would not call this experimental novel from 2004 a stone-cold classic, but it’s a surprisingly readable tome with an interesting structure of six nested narratives, each of which is reasonably compelling in its own right while offering thematic parallels forward and backwards in time to the others. The entire work is rendered symmetrically, so that we enter a successive sequence of framing devices and then ultimately exit them in the reverse order, revisiting and concluding the earlier concerns.

The story begins as the nineteenth-century journal of an American notary on a naval voyage from New Zealand to Hawaii, describing his odd illness and the racism he’s encountering, only to suddenly cut off mid-sentence. In the next section, letters from a flamboyant English composer to his friend and lover back home detail his amusing experiences aiding / cuckolding an older musician in 1930s Belgium, and include his disappointment that the engrossing travelogue he’s discovered is torn and incomplete. His tale then too stops abruptly at a moment of unresolved tension, whereupon the book turns into a 1970s conspiracy thriller featuring the recipient of those missives, who has kept them into his old age as a whistleblower about unsafe nuclear power.

And so on. When the reporter at the heart of that third plot is attacked and seemingly killed, we jump to a contemporary editor who has received a manuscript submission novelizing it. He winds up involuntarily committed to a nursing home with an abusive staff, and is reviewing the document and plotting an escape when he has a sudden stroke. We next visit a dystopian future Korea where a clone has been fighting for her kind’s rights and remembers watching a movie based on the previous protagonist’s institutionalization, one of the few pieces of media to survive from our time to hers. Finally, the title arrives at a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian society whose agrarian inhabitants worship the memory of that lady as a goddess and where, despite much knowledge of technology being lost, the holo-recorded interview between her and her government interrogator that made up the prior chapter is still preserved.

And then back out again: the end of the recording, then of the part of the resident’s memoir the woman didn’t get to see adapted, then of the novella about the journalist he resumes reading, then of the further batch of old letters she is delivered after breaking her coverage of the scandal, then of the final diary pages that the dandy mentions he has eventually managed to find. Phew!

It’s a tough aggregate to summarize more succinctly than that, but it’s not particularly challenging or confusing to read. (I understand that the 2012 film adaptation from the Wachowskis, which reuses the same cast from era to era and cuts back and forth so that they all unfold over the length of the picture, is as a result far more mindbending yet perhaps less effective.) The project is so strange that it somewhat defies critique, although I’m not always satisfied with the metatextual links across the six divisions and think that the vague suggestion of reincarnation could have been explored at a deeper level. But I do like each item independently — to an admittedly varying degree — and I can see the benefit of presenting them together, so that recurrent human ailments like slavery, intolerance, and exploitation can be highlighted as perpetual problems for every generation to overcome. The overall message does seem to be that we share a common humanity throughout time and space, and there’s a definite beauty in witnessing some of its permutations here.

[Content warning for racial slurs, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia, homophobia, torture, gore, near-drowning, gun violence, suicide, eugenics, cannibalism, and rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

Book #25 of 2022:

The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves #1)

This YA fantasy novel reads as a blend of National Treasure with Six of Crows, which is not a combination that entirely works for me. (I’m not using that latter title as a shorthand for any heist story, either: this is specifically a book with a gang of teenage master criminals, featuring a central M/F romance of long-time allies ignoring their mutual pining, a side M/M love interest involving the newcomer to the group, and a diverse yet somewhat tokenized cast, none of whom appears to hold any meaningful ties to anyone else from their respective racial or cultural backgrounds.)

It’s a competent plot, give or take the sometimes-goofy ancient traps and puzzles and the weird ultimate villain motivation, but I wish it all felt more distinctive. The characters have occasional depths, but the alternate-history nineteenth-century worldbuilding never really develops a strong identity for itself, and the magic system seems likewise cobbled-together and not too rigorously defined. I’m interested enough by how this debut volume ends to check out the sequel, but I can’t say it’s a series that’s earned a place in my heart just yet.

[Content warning for antisemitism, racism, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie

Book #24 of 2022:

The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #27)

The loose thread linking the twelve detective stories in this collection is that Hercule Poirot is planning to retire, but first wants to solve a sequence of grand cases mirroring the legendary feats of his namesake, the Greco-Roman demigod Hercules. Honestly, though, that’s largely a distraction, especially as most of the tasks that ensue represent fairly strained parallels at best. (Is convincing a town to stop gossiping about a widower they suspect of murder akin to successfully cutting off all the heads of the mythical Hydra? Sure, kind of, maybe. Is cracking a ring of dognappers like wrestling the Nemean Lion? That’s significantly harder to justify.)

Outside of the odd framing device and the fact that we know the investigator is not truly giving up his practice anytime soon, these tales fluctuate between just okay and pretty good. Of course, as ever with author Agatha Christie’s short fiction, it tends to be a bit easier to figure out the solutions yourself than in her full-length novels — look for proof that people really are who they say they are and you’re often halfway there already. But it’s a solid entry overall, and not one to miss as you work your way through the series.

[Content warning for antisemitism, sexism, racism including slurs, gun violence, suicide, drug abuse, and gaslighting.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

Movie #6 of 2022:

Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)

A solid yet ultimately unambitious Star Trek vehicle, with a title and premise that sound more exciting that what’s actually delivered. Theoretically speaking, this is a story about the Federation trying to force an indigenous(-ish) species off of their planet, so that its unique properties that keep the inhabitants perpetually rejuvenated at the height of their physical prime can be studied, extracted, and used for medical treatments throughout the galaxy. That’s an idea with some bite to it, setting up questions of the greater good, the collateral damage of empire, and the hypocrisy of the Prime Directive. Unfortunately, it never really goes anywhere, and the script plays out not as Captain Picard launching an ethical revolt against the might of his government but rather as a squabble concerning one single corrupt superior officer and his underlings and shady allies. (The vice admiral has supposedly been given approval for his actions from higher up, but he still tries to conceal what he’s doing from our protagonists and then stop them from communicating what they learn.)

The TNG crew eventually save the day, after some variably-charming character work involving the local atmosphere’s effect on everyone. (Good: Troi and Riker rekindling their old relationship and shaving off his beard. Bad: Warf reverting to a Klingon puberty of pimples, oversleeping, and mood swings. Weird: repeated dialogue about people’s aging body parts firming back up again.) Once the villains are defeated, there’s no real resolution to the question of how this delicate diplomatic situation will be handled going forward, or any apparent impact on the wider continuity from the discovery of a verified fountain of youth.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of human-looking aliens running across a California-looking landscape, enemy drones that hilariously just teleport their victims away instead of posing a legitimately deadly threat, a perfunctory twist about the one other faction in the film, an odd early fakeout regarding Data malfunctioning, and a shoehorned romance and requisite action hero sequence for Jean-Luc. It’s all largely fine, but not especially memorable.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #23 of 2022:

Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant #2)

This sequel is rather cleanly bifurcated by a development midway through, and although both of the resulting sections have their strengths, I think the opening is more successful than the close. (Call it a five-star passage followed by a four, for a four-star rating overall.) The shift in gears is slightly disappointing, but the novel as a whole is decidedly action-packed compared to its predecessor, while still rich in the dense worldbuilding and thematic complexities that make this series so rewarding.

And that environment is on full display at the start, as Linden Avery travels back into the history of the Land, finding herself ten-thousand years earlier in the era of Berek Heartthew, the founder of the original dynasty of Lords who was already a figure of ancient legend when her companion Thomas Covenant first traveled to this realm. As the eighth volume in an epic fantasy saga, this title arrives with a wealth of built-up backstory, and it is an unexpected thrill to suddenly be placed in the midst of those olden days alongside our familiar protagonist. People like Berek and beings like the Viles whose names have long been known to us as distant fables are now brought vividly to life, and the new Ringthane rises to their stature as she faces the dire challenges of that time. With gritted tenacity of purpose, she proves her capabilities and earns greater insights of lore and power that only those denizens of the past could teach her.

In this struggle, she is accompanied by Covenant himself, but a Covenant who feels achingly off from the man she remembers loving — and whom she has previously seen die. He is bitter and cruel, and although she initially cannot account for the alteration she detects in his spirit, a major element of this portion of the text sees the doctor growing to trust her own impressions over his callous explanations and constant belittlement of her, before finally forcing the issue into an open confrontation and devastating reveal. It’s a subplot that works on several levels, but I especially see it as a metaphorical treatment of any partner who realizes a once-healthy relationship has turned abusive and must learn to recognize a tormentor in the guise of someone yet beloved. Or in the words of this series: the only way to hurt a person who’s lost everything is to give them back something broken.

(When I hear fans of the first two Chronicles say that they don’t like this last one, I can’t help but wonder if there is some degree of sexism to blame: in discounting Linden’s hard-fought achievements in order to dismiss her as a ‘Mary Sue,’ in refusing to accept her as a protagonist worthy of the Unbeliever’s old role at the heart of the narrative, and in rejecting a tale that frames him as a potential antagonist in her eyes, even temporarily. If any of those touch on your personal reaction to this quartet, it might be worthwhile to sit and reflect on that further.)

After the Chosen has returned to the present, the latter half of the plot finds her juggling the whirling assortment of factions and individuals of conflicting motivations that populate this moment. As she weighs the daunting costs of offered alliances, makes intuitive leaps from the scant information she’s able to wrest, and seeks ways of pitting adversaries against one another for a minimum of casualties, the book develops a feeling of courtly intrigue, somewhat akin to author Stephen R. Donaldson’s previous Mordant’s Need duology. Meanwhile, the character and her friends are on the move once more — this time to the Hills of Andelain, a place of potency where the darkness of annealed intention within her could wreak terrors or wonders, befitting the old prophecy that the white gold wielder will either doom or save the world. Again the question is raised: can this antiheroine be trusted? And can good ever be accomplished by evil means?

Along the way, we learn of the existence of the Insequent, a loose confederation of sorcerers with apparently extensive roots in the Land, though we’ve never met any before, at least under that name. Their shoehorned appearance here is a bit of a retcon, but it opens up enough storytelling avenues that I can mostly quiet my grumbling on that point. Each member of this group has a distinct theurgy and objective of study, and they too can be friend or foe depending on the circumstances at hand. If nothing else, these folk offer a reminder of the secrets that remain hidden across this setting, with the ability to produce additional complications as we approach the grand conclusion ahead.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆