The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Andalite’s Gift by K. A. Applegate

Book #187 of 2021:

The Andalite’s Gift by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Megamorphs #1)

The first Animorphs release outside of the main series is this ‘Megamorphs’ title, which is supersized both in literal page count and in including all six potential narrators, rather than just one. (Even Ax the resident alien gets a voice, right before anchoring his own full novel next.) There are probably a greater number of different animal morphs than usual too, although I haven’t exactly been counting along that dimension.

Theoretically this should also be a bigger and wilder adventure than the typical team missions, but it’s here that the story falters for me. The threat of a tornado-like creature that can hunt down and capture anyone who uses the morphing technology never quite justifies the blockbuster treatment, and a subplot involving a temporarily amnesiac Rachel is as eye-rollingly trite and conveniently resolved as it sounds. Subsequent companion books would embrace the weirder possibilities of this franchise to explore extraterrestrial worlds, time travel, and beyond, but this initial experiment plays out as a somewhat unremarkable side event instead.

It’s not all bad per se, and in fact, we get some action sequences like Marco jumping off a Yeerk ship and having to quickly make his way from a gorilla into a more suitable form while plummeting towards the ground that are downright thrilling. But nothing in this volume seems to matter for the ongoing narrative — I wouldn’t be surprised if many readers inadvertently miss it between #7 and #8 — and the territory it stakes out feels grander than what author K. A. Applegate ultimately does within that space.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Mothers by Brit Bennett

Book #186 of 2021:

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

This novel strikes me as a great example of how talented writing and character work can elevate old tropes beyond their familiar patterns. When I try to summarize the plot — a 17-year-old hides her romance with a college guy and subsequent abortion from her best friend, who later goes on to marry him — it sounds a bit tired and dramatically overwrought. But in debut author Brit Bennett’s hands, the people in this love triangle feel fleshed-out and compelling, particularly in their evolving dynamics with one another and their complicated relationships to the mothers and other maternal figures in their lives. The nearly-all-black cast lends a further air of distinction and authenticity to the story, and the Greek chorus of church ladies voicing the latest community gossip between chapters is a welcome frame of meta-narrative. Although the ending of the book is a bit open for my tastes, I’ve really enjoyed most everything leading up to that point.

[Content warning for suicide, death of a parent, domestic abuse, sexual assault, incest, and racism.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin

Book #185 of 2021:

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life by Steve Martin

The most surprising thing about this 2007 memoir by comedian Steve Martin is that it’s not particularly funny. I don’t mean that the author is attempting jokes which fall flat, merely that it’s a fairly serious reflection on his early career, featuring some classic on-stage gags but no new punchlines to present that personal history in an amusing fashion. Instead we get a dry account of his evolving comic sensibility, and how leaning into anti-humor, physicality, and a projected confidence that the material is good even when the audience isn’t laughing helped catapult him to national success. That’s interesting enough as a thesis, but it’s not nearly as entertaining as I would have expected from this writer.

[Content warning for domestic abuse.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien

Book #184 of 2021:

Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien

The final book by children’s author Robert C. O’Brien was this 1974 post-apocalyptic thriller, published posthumously after being completed from his notes by his (uncredited) wife Sally M. Conly and daughter Jane Leslie Conly. Whether due to their contribution or not, it has a very different feel from the writer’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which I believe is the only work of his that I’ve previously read.

This one is a taut and small-scale epistolary narrative, with just a pair of characters in and around a rural valley that happens to shelter its farmstead from the radioactive fallout of a recent nuclear war. The heroine keeping the diary is an almost-sixteen-year-old who doesn’t know any other survivors, eventually joined by a scientist twice her age who’s been traveling across the wasteland in a protective suit from his lab. As far as either figure or the reader is aware, they may be all that’s left of humanity. But the stranger is more unstable and controlling than he at first appears, and the action gradually slips from slice-of-life subsistence into the deadly threat that he represents.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed the piece. It sets a mood unburdened by need for worldbuilding detail; all we have to understand is that Ann is utterly cut off from any fragments of civilization that might still exist. We’re explicitly invited to consider Garden of Eden parallels, as well as male entitlement and the lawlessness that can reign between any two people absent a larger social order. There are inherently no authorities in this premise for the girl to appeal to, which places her as a capable and quick-thinking protagonist who must solve all her problems for herself.

[Content warning for attempted rape, gun violence, and death of a dog.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

Book #183 of 2021:

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

This 2008 memoir from actress Carrie Fisher — actually an adaptation of her autobiographical one-woman stage show, if we’re splitting hairs — is short but punchy, packing a lot of sensitive subjects in and around the wry comedy. She opens with her recent electroshock therapy to combat depression, bipolar disorder, and substance abuse, and never really lets up from there. The book has mentions of rape, weight loss, suicide, racism, and plenty of other potentially-triggering topics, all presented at such a whirlwind pace that it’s hard to grapple with any single item before we’re rushed on to the next.

The main focus is on the writer growing up as the child of celebrities and then becoming one in her own right following the success of Star Wars, and it’s clear that fame has been a mixed blessing (although she points out that she doesn’t exactly have anything to compare it to). I appreciate the candid look at mental health struggles and the biographical details that I hadn’t previously known, but the name-dropping is all a bit ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ and the frenetic narrative keeps the heavier material from landing with much impact. I’ve been moved while reading it, but mostly only to laughter at the jokes.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism by Don Lemon

Book #182 of 2021:

This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism by Don Lemon

Consciously modeled on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, this 2021 title from CNN anchor Don Lemon is a similar attempt to grapple with the history and ongoing problem of American racism and suggest a way to work forward beyond it. I don’t necessarily share all of the author’s political views, which strike me as naively centrist in assuming good-faith bipartisanship is still possible, and I’m pretty skeptical of his assertion that the growing inclusiveness that can be seen in corporate advertising indicates that bigots are already ‘losing the war on ideas.’ But there’s room for many voices in the choir for racial justice, and I could see Lemon’s observations and experiences as a gay black man breaking through to the older and less progressive demographic of his TV audience.

I also appreciate how often the writer cites from expert scholars like Isabel Wilkerson and Beverly Daniel Tatum, although that’s tempered by the unnecessary memoir elements about his covering the news of Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis and other irrelevant topics. Overall I think we have much better antiracist works out there for people to read, but perhaps this one’s celebrity origin will bring it a greater deal of mainstream attention.

[Content warning for slurs, slavery, and lynching.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Stranger by K. A. Applegate

Book #181 of 2021:

The Stranger by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #7)

My favorite book of this adult reread yet. The action is exciting and the dilemmas are clearly defined, and that’s even before the surprise pivot into a genuinely unexpected development around a third of the way through the text (much earlier than the twist in the previous volume, which I felt didn’t have nearly enough room to breathe). Also, despite Marco’s reputation as the group comedian, I don’t know if there’s anything funnier than Rachel at the circus dangling a cruel animal-tamer from her trunk, staring him in the eyes, and thought-speaking, “I am from the International Elephant Police. We have had some complaints about you.”

After that early throwaway encounter — no pun intended — the main plot concerns a surveillance mission back to the Yeerk pool, whereupon the young teens are visited by a powerful being known as the Ellimist, who is able to freeze time and later transport them to a dystopian future where the enemy aliens have succeeded in conquering the earth. The Animorphs are presented with the option to flee the planet with their loved ones, or else stay and continue fighting what seems like a doomed effort to resist the invasion.

These are some classic sci-fi tropes, but there’s nothing wrong with that when they are deployed so skillfully, especially in fiction marketed to children who may be less familiar with the concepts. It’s an overall rush, and the revelations about what the team’s new acquaintance can do, can’t do, and can only subtly suggest for them to work out themselves are delightfully intriguing. This adventure greatly expands the scope of what’s possible in the series, opening up the worldbuilding and the potential story engines to a degree far beyond any prior understanding that we might have had. It’s a definite departure, but a strong one, and a marker of the franchise really taking off.

★★★★★

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Book Review: 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino

Book #180 of 2021:

2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas by Marie-Helene Bertino

This novel follows the various residents of a Philadelphia neighborhood over the course of a single ‘Christmas Eve Eve,’ culminating in a few of their respective threads intersecting at the local jazz club. With so many characters it’s a little challenging to keep everyone straight, especially since I don’t find all of their stories to be particularly gripping. I’m most invested in the poor nine-year-old whose father is in a deep depression following the loss of her mother, and who wants to follow in the dead woman’s footsteps to become a singer. (Although the animosity and disdain she faces from her elementary school principal reaches Matilda levels of absurdity, which tends to undercut the tension in that area of her life.) A book built around this girl as a sole protagonist might have worked better for me, but as written my attention often wanders when the narrative cuts away to someone else. Debut author Marie-Helene Bertino employs some clever turns of figurative language that I appreciate throughout, but too much of the actual plot here just fails to catch my interest.

[Content warning for slut-shaming and racial slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

Book #179 of 2021:

Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

I’m getting big Midge Maisel vibes from this novel about a 1960s Jewish housewife who leaves her husband and ends up pursuing a new career as a newspaper crime reporter. I love her brashness as a person finding her own path through a tough situation, the depiction of mid-century Baltimore race relations, and especially the structure of the book, which alternates chapters from the protagonist’s perspective with ones from successive individuals whom she meets (each making a single entry without repeating). There are also interludes seemingly narrated by the ghost of the title figure, a drowned black woman whose murder the heroine begins investigating. This isn’t a mystery per se — the killer is revealed soon after their first appearance, fairly late in the text and with no particular clues ahead of time — but it’s an excellent period piece and character study.

[Content warning for sexual assault and racism.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone by Kenneth Cain, Andrew Thomson, and Heidi Postlewait

Book #178 of 2021:

Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone by Kenneth Cain, Andrew Thomson, and Heidi Postlewait

I have profoundly mixed feelings on this 2004 book, which documents its three authors’ experiences as United Nations peacekeepers in the 1990s. They initially meet while stationed together in Cambodia, but ultimately travel on to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda, sometimes reconnecting but largely stuck apart. The situations they encounter in these far-flung areas are eye-opening and awful, including graphically-detailed accounts of rape, torture, slaughter, cannibalism, and similar war crimes. It’s a horribly educational read, and I appreciate the growing critical perspective that the armchair leaders back home in Washington and New York are out-of-touch with the daily horrors of conditions on the ground.

I just wish I could like the writers better. They do grow somewhat more appealing over time as the various events around them deteriorate, but two of them are very frustrating in the early pages. Heidi Postlewait repeatedly offers fatphobic asides, casually drops the r-word, and generally seems focused on her sex life and the low cost of living abroad over any humanitarian mission at hand. Kenneth Cain objectifies her and every other woman he comes across, and is petulantly melodramatic about not knowing exactly what he wants to do now that he’s graduated Harvard Law School. Only Dr. Andrew Thomson appears mature and compelling right from the start as he seeks to uncover forensic evidence of cruelty and heal its many victims, yet his passages are sadly outnumbered by the antics of the two junior members of the team.

It’s hard to know what to do with a title like that overall. The later chapters are excellent if a bit stomach-churning — again, major content warning for gore, violence, and dead bodies — but I likely would have put the thing down well before that point had it not been picked out for me by a generous Patreon donor. I previously knew little of the geopolitics of the era or these particular crises, so I’m grateful for the firsthand view provided herein. But memoir as a genre relies on an engaging authorial voice as much as interesting circumstances, and I’m not convinced this one totally gets there for me.

[I checked out 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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