Book Review: The Spirit Thief by Rachel Aaron

Book #258 of 2021:

The Spirit Thief by Rachel Aaron (The Legend of Eli Monpress #1)

Eli Monpress is a very silly character — a thief pulling audacious heists and kidnappings in country after country apparently just to amass history’s largest total bounty on his head — which is not necessarily a problem, except for how the rest of this novel generally struggles to match him on that wavelength. The bare-bones fantasy worldbuilding provides no distraction either, and although the magic system shows creative promise, it’s so poorly explained that each new reveal of someone’s latest devastating counterspell isn’t particularly engaging to read. Our protagonist Miranda, the wizard detective chasing the crook only to ultimately team up with him in the face of a true villain’s threat, likewise does little to seriously distinguish herself.

This is my least favorite sort of book to review, because the overall effort isn’t especially bad, and besides some repetitive language that could have used another editing pass, author Rachel Aaron avoids any major blunders. It even has a satisfying enough ending that wraps up the main plot while keeping things open for the sequels. My three-star rating for the story reflects the middle-of-the-road Goodreads label of “I liked it,” and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that other readers have enjoyed it more. But for me personally, it’s a blandly functional text that offers no great incentive to return for the remainder of its series.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

Book #257 of 2021:

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

This standalone YA fantasy novel hasn’t completely won me over, but I like it a lot more than author Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince, which has a somewhat similar premise of fairyland intrigue. (The central romance here, for instance, strikes me as just a bit bland, whereas the other one was pretty toxic and abusive.) It helps that I really enjoy the setting of a small wooded town that’s entirely modern — complete with references to smartphones and Doctor Who — yet also normalized as to the existence of magic. The locals all know that fae creatures are a minor fact of life, that the protagonist’s love interest is a changeling and there’s an unaging horned figure asleep in an impenetrable glass coffin nearby; they simply don’t ever mention these things to outsiders.

In the actual plot of the story, that case is finally opened under mysterious circumstances, and the price of a bargain that the heroine struck as a child seems to be coming due. The writer takes a trick out of her Curse Workers series as well, with certain memories locked away from the main character until the time is right. At this point I suspect Black’s general style is never going to be a great match for my particular preferences in the genre, but I do appreciate the casual diversity she builds into her writing, which in the current title includes an interracial relationship and a gay happily-ever-after, two important real-world dynamics for younger readers to see reflected in fiction. And while I could nitpick a few of the developments in the slower middle section of this book, it’s overall one of the stronger works that I’ve read by her.

[Content warning for underage alcohol abuse, parental neglect, self-harm, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #256 of 2021:

The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

As in the detectives’ respective novels, the five stories in this collection about Hercule Poirot are of variable quality, the one about Miss Marple is a touch stronger, and the two about Parker Pyne are a bit worse. (The latter’s whole schtick is that he can effortlessly read people via sexist and racist stereotypes and sets up confidence schemes to trick his clients into fixing their own problems. When he does solve a mystery, it’s typically via key evidence that he knows and we don’t, which doesn’t yield the most satisfying reading experience.) There’s also a ninth unrelated entry, mostly interesting for the anonymous narrator and the supernatural element that author Agatha Christie generally eschews.

On average these items are on the weaker side, and the book suffers further for the disjointed feeling of the assortment overall. Were these just the latest works that the writer hadn’t already published elsewhere in 1939? They don’t appear to have any special commonalities suggesting a shared group identity, particularly given the three different series that they draw upon. Ultimately I would say that the title can safely be skipped.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, and suicide.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster

Book #255 of 2021:

The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster

So far Cribsheet is still my favorite data-driven parenting title by economist Emily Oster, but this latest one is a solid self-help book for household organizing and thorny decision-making about raising kids particularly in the five-to-twelve-year-old range. As always, the author offers valuable scientific findings on the arena of dilemmas facing modern parents, from nutrition to screentime to homework to extracurricular activities. The good news is that these studies can be reassuring; the bad news is that they are often inconclusive, with Oster quick to point out that correlation doesn’t imply causation. (Are children who sit down for family dinners each night healthier on average because of that communal experience, or because families who are able to reliably make the joint evening meal happen tend to differ in other ways from those who can’t?)

There’s a lot of such vacillating in these pages, along with an unfortunate reliance on problematic rough measures like IQ, BMI, and standardized test scores without necessarily unpacking their known limitations. The occasional insights are legitimately great, though, and I especially like the idea of pre-planning with your partner — if you have one — to discuss priorities and maybe even craft a business-like mission statement for the house in advance of working through a problem together. Figuring out the big picture ahead of time so that smaller choices in the moment become easier if not essentially automatic strikes me as a really smart framework to adopt. But overall, this text probably could have been a lot shorter, as I’m not sure we need to be told on topic after topic that the experts simply don’t know the best approach.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 2

TV #71 of 2021:

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 2

Just like its initial run, a lot of the bits in this season of the sketch comedy show take weird and unpredictable turns by the end — which sometimes yields absolute hilarity, but more often produces a skit I only partially enjoy. There also continues to be a lot of angry shouting and awkward / cringe humor, which isn’t always my speed. Still, the series is definitely funny (and short) enough to keep watching, and I think the first episode of this year is probably the single best one yet for “Corncob TV” alone. Elsewhere, “Tammy Craps” is another highlight, and “Diner Wink” is an inspired use of a Bob Odenkirk cameo. Overall the program is a mixed bag, but gems like that make the weaker efforts worth it.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Book #254 of 2021:

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

This provocative title relates the current scientific consensus that most weight-loss programs of diet and/or exercise simply don’t produce long-term stable results for most users, explores the systemic way that our culture is organized around the assumption of smaller body sizes or access thereto, and shares some of the awful fatphobia regularly directed at author Aubrey Gordon as a fat woman herself. We pathologize people with figures like hers, assuming a moral failing, and legally discriminate against them in domains as varied as employment, healthcare, and housing. When they’re included as characters in popular fiction, it’s almost inevitably as sidekicks and comic relief dreamed up by skinnier writers.

On a personal level, Gordon describes how she gets subjected to street harassment (which she deems “fatcalling”) from random passersby who ridicule, curse, and threaten her, take pictures without her consent, and offer unsolicited advice on what they imagine to be her lifestyle. She’s even had strangers remove groceries from her shopping cart out of a misguided sense of patronizing benevolence. Worse yet, any later complaint about this behavior to well-meaning friends typically provokes defenses of the other party’s intentions and claims that she must have misunderstood the interaction.

The goal of this book is both to provide a window into such lived experiences and to advocate for ‘body justice’ — a step beyond the ‘body positivity’ movement, which is geared toward loving and accepting oneself and can still feel exclusionary to those at the upper end of the scale. The problem, Gordon notes, is not in her own physical form or her attitude regarding it, but rather in the structural ways she’s arbitrarily kept from full participation in society due to the values and assumptions of others. The resulting text is valuable for raising issues that many readers might not have realized, educating us on the fallacy of individual accountability for fatness, and bringing attention to our own unconscious biases.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Underground by K. A. Applegate

Book #253 of 2021:

The Underground by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #17)

On the one hand, raids on the Yeerk pool already seem like the most generic and frequent Animorphs plots by this point in the series. On the other hand, this is the novel that gives us a specific variety of oatmeal as a major weakness in the alien villains, a bizarre and unrepeated detail that I’m delighted has resurfaced as a bit of a meme among nostalgic readers today. The code phrase “I’d like a Happy Meal with extra happy” to access the new secret entrance to their base within a McDonald’s walk-in freezer is pretty great, too.

Yet despite the goofiness that that might imply, this is still a story that opens with a person’s suicide attempt, features the familiar dark scenes of body horror, claustrophobia, and near-drowning, and finds the child soldiers debating the morality of dumping an addictive and mind-altering substance into their opponents’ food supply. Our protagonists are tired and increasingly traumatized by their experiences, with Rachel feeling scared to rush in, Jake unsure of the best plan, and Cassie lacking an easy ethical answer. I also appreciate the sense of escalation here, as seen in the greater security measures that require more extreme actions and severe risks from the team to sneak back in and accomplish their mission.

(Plus the basic concept of the Kandrona feeding cycle, although not original to this book, remains an inspired choice by author K. A. Applegate, showing the Controller hosts regularly regaining their bodily autonomy only to beg and scream to no avail in the short window before being infested again by their revitalized captors. A typical body-snatching thriller would have the victims either subdued throughout or replaced entirely, but we’re never given that luxury of forgetting the innocent people underneath the enemy troops.)

Ultimately, three-out-of-five stars — “I liked it,” on the Goodreads scale — seems fair for this title, which is enjoyable enough but doesn’t really add anything to the larger mythos or serialized narrative or constitute much of a memorable stand-out adventure in its own right. It’s not bad, and is definitely worthwhile for the ensuing jokes online, but it’s hardly a classic of the franchise.

[Content warning for cannibalism, gore, ableism, and forced institutionalization.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Book #252 of 2021:

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Expanding on a viral New Yorker article, this short book from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares her experience with mourning her father, who passed away in June 2020. (He didn’t die of the coronavirus, but travel restrictions aimed at containing the pandemic kept her from flying home to Nigeria to be at her family’s side.) Despite the title, I think this volume works better as an ode to the man than an actual reflection on grief, and I particularly doubt it will become the definitive ‘death in the time of COVID’ memoir. Except for an early passage railing against the empty platitudes that people say to mourners, I’m not finding much insight into bereavement overall, just a portrait of a parent who was clearly deeply loved. Readers can draw their own links from that to the certain ache of his new absence, but the text rarely spells it out so explicitly.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker

Book #251 of 2021:

The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker (The Golem and the Jinni #2)

This long-awaited sequel to 2013’s The Golem and the Jinni is another lovely piece of historical fantasy, following those two beings from Jewish and Arabian folklore as they navigate the next stages of their life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City. This novel is even less plot-heavy than its predecessor, but the characters and their setting remain sharply drawn, and I trust author Helene Wecker a little more this time that the diverse narrative threads which initially seem unrelated will in fact weave together by the end. We return to the titular figures from the first book, but also Ahmad’s old flame (pun intended) Sophia, Chava’s former coworker Anna, and several new protagonists as well. Eventually the circle comes to include a female jinni / jinniyeh and a just-born male golem, whose experience proves radically different from that of the original pair.

It’s a tough story to summarize, unfolding over the decade and a half leading up to World War I, but the core of it involves a dawning realization of the cost of immortality, as these people’s human counterparts grow frailer and their own ageless features begin attracting suspicions around their respective ethnic communities. Mostly, though, such concerns are simply an excuse to revisit our familiar friends and fall deeply into this literary world of #ownvoices mythology once again.

[Content warning for gun violence, mention of sexual assault, and suicide.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Narrows by Michael Connelly

Book #250 of 2021:

The Narrows by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #10)

This is one of the more serialized Harry Bosch adventures, at least of what I’ve read so far. Terry McCaleb, protagonist of Blood Work and the detective’s reluctant partner in A Darkness More Than Night, is dead. His widow suspects foul play, and asks Harry to look into it. That investigation soon intersects with Rachel Walling, one of the FBI agents from The Poet, whose titular serial killer foe has finally resurfaced. Bosch also has a curious exchange with a secretive woman named Jane, who seems likely to be the thief Cassie Black from Void Moon, even if he doesn’t realize it. These threads all link back to the disparate corners of this franchise, increasing the sense that they share a common continuity while making this novel accordingly less inviting for newcomers. I wouldn’t suggest anyone start the series here.

It’s another fine caper, though, brought down only by the villain’s nonsensically intricate schemes and the investigators’ own periodic foolhardiness. On several occasions they rush into a scene before it’s secure, compromising potential leads when there’s not really any urgent reason to do so. This isn’t one of those stories built around genius deductive skills, flashes of insight, or plot twists either; we instead mostly just follow the procedural evidence that eventually brings the heroes to the target who’s been stalking them in return. It’s exciting as a thriller, but not a sign of author Michael Connelly at his best.

[Content warning for kidnapping, gun violence, drowning, and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

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