The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Scandal, season 3

TV #79 of 2021:

Scandal, season 3

This series is becoming ever more of a soap opera, such that when Fitz replaces his treacherous VP with a running mate he says is the one man he trusts, it’s almost inevitable that that new fellow will end up in a love triangle with him and the first lady. It’s also a sign of the program’s ludicrous idea of politics that these two politicians are supposed to represent a competitive presidential ticket as two white men from the same state — and that the race soon comes down to a contest between them and the sitting veep running as an independent.

Outside of that campaign nonsense, there’s a lot of further nonsense on a general plot and interpersonal level, too. The show is still churning through its material at lightspeed, but roughly speaking, this season is half about Olivia’s parents and half about her mission to take down B613, the secretive assassination agency that makes less sense with every new retcon we discover. (The leader sneers at one point that they exist beyond the White House jurisdiction in order to serve the country more purely. The president responds by somehow firing him and appointing a lackey in his place.) The stuff with Mr. and Mrs. Pope is likewise ridiculous, although harder to discuss without spoilers. And of course, everyone continues to talk about top-secret and/ or potentially career-ending scandals in crowded public settings where anyone could overhear.

Overall, though, that’s maybe not a big difference from the first two years, and at its most focused, this latest iteration feels like a deliberately sordid tale of awful individuals being awful to one another. I do appreciate a particular storyline given to Mellie that really helps clarify her characterization and personal arc, as well as the belated attention to how race and racism have shaped our main heroine and her relationship with the media. And I have no complaints regarding the acting, as the cast members continue to gamely throw themselves into these absurd scenarios left and right.

What’s frustrating, however, is that all their characters seem to have the memory of a goldfish by now, amiably teaming up with people who were recently torturing them, threatening to shoot them, murdering their spouse, etc. The sudden pivots in allegiance I think are intended to be surprising each time, but they’re just exhausting to encounter in quick succession, hindering any actual engagement in the theoretical stakes here. “Oh, that happened,” I find myself reacting a lot. Certain developments are fun enough for the sheer spectacle, but there’s no deeper core of consistency to get me invested even to the minimal degree that I had been before.

[Content warning for gun violence, rape, self-harm, suicide, death of a child, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Pretender by K. A. Applegate

Book #301 of 2021:

The Pretender by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #23)

This Animorphs title feels built around a single scene near the end, when our current narrator sits down to hear a piece of news about his family that most readers likely already learned in The Andalite Chronicles, published the previous year. He is there in his Ellimist-restored human body, functionally incognito amid enemies watching to see if he shows signs of extraterrestrial knowledge, and able to keep his face neutral despite his roiling emotions thanks to his time as an expressionless hawk. Later when he’s alone, he again morphs into his temporary person form in order to cry as he regularly now can’t.

It’s a powerful moment, but the book until then is a little meandering. Before this meeting and its revelations in the lawyer’s office, Tobias is wondering whether a woman claiming to be his older cousin is genuine and debating her offer to take him in, which would probably mean giving up his ability to morph. At this stage in the series, it seems like a foregone conclusion that he will stay in the fight instead, and so his indecision never really registers as particularly meaningful. He hates the Yeerks and has grown to accept and even welcome his identity as part-bird and part-boy, so why would he be tempted to give all that up to go live with a stranger? Some touching exchanges with Rachel, in which she explicitly casts their relationship as romantic via comparison to Romeo and Juliet (and their friends Jake and Cassie) constitute a partial explanation, but still don’t provide the dilemma enough heft, in my opinion.

Likewise, the subplot where the protagonist is starving and under territorial threat from a different animal is rather odd. He’s feeling insecure before his rival, and he keeps getting unexplained flashes where he switches places with his prey anytime he tries to make a kill. At the lowest point it drives him to feed on roadkill, where he’s seen by Rachel to the embarrassment of them both. The teen’s own bizarre interpretation that these visions represent his two natures trying to tell him something about his hybrid self is unlikely, but we’re not given any alternate answer like Ellimist intervention, either. It’s just a weird unnatural experience he’s going through for no apparent reason, which is not a very satisfying development.

Meanwhile, the team is investigating the disappearance of a child from the free Hork-Bajir colony, who could be abused by humans or lead the Yeerks back home if not found quickly. I appreciate the returning focus to this section of the franchise, especially for its tense note of the former Controllers looking out for their own interests and not wanting to share all their information with the Animorphs, whose mission doesn’t necessarily align with their own. Under the guidance of the young seer Toby, our hero’s namesake, the aliens want to continue raiding enemy installations for new recruits so that they can grow to a sizable force to defend themselves against earth’s natives in the far future. It’s a cold calculation and one of the better elements of the novel, but it’s ultimately a peripheral detail on a slower installment.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Verdigris Pawn by Alysa Wishingrad

Book #300 of 2021:

The Verdigris Pawn by Alysa Wishingrad

A solid children’s fantasy adventure. I think the metaphor of the chess-like board game that recurs throughout would have been stronger with a clearer explanation of its rules, and I wish the protagonists had a greater sense of personal agency, rather than seeming fated to act out rigidly-prescribed roles within that structure. (Indeed, those two issues exacerbate one another, as we’re often told that someone is a perfect example of a particular piece without actually understanding what that means the way the characters do.)

On the other hand, the general idea of a subversive pastime secretly teaching the peasant folk how to rise up against their oppressive king is pretty cool, and I like that his son / our main hero’s choice of a certain ally proves to be a costly mistake, providing the sharp lesson that not all rebels are necessarily better than the tyrant they’re seeking to replace. Similarly, it’s a neat detail that everyone initially believes the prince must be as awful as his father, when in reality he’s simply been sheltered and emotionally abused by the man. Such misconceptions get shattered as the plot unfolds, which is a nice sign of depth for the genre. With a little more polish to lean into those strengths, this title could have been an all-ages modern classic. But as written, I suspect that younger readers will ultimately comprise its core audience.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian

Book #299 of 2021:

Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian

An entertaining if not particularly deep airport thriller. I enjoy the college setting of this story, since that’s a rarity in fiction overall and especially this genre, but the plot has its share of weaknesses and the characters are a squirrelly and amoral lot. That’s by design — the premise is that a group of students with psychopathic tendencies are being anonymously studied by the university psych department, only for some unknown agent(s) to start killing them off — but it results in protagonists who are clearly keeping secrets from one another and from us, and thus are rather difficult to wholly root for. I don’t even mind the murder aspect, as the subplot of the main heroine planning to stalk and take out the upperclassman who raped her when she was twelve is a definite highlight of the novel. But for the most part, everything plays out like a typical slasher flick.

[Content warning for gore, gun violence, child porn, and revenge porn.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

Book #298 of 2021:

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

Powerful and uncompromisingly uncomfortable as the title suggests, this debut novel depicts an exhausted and infuriated young mother who is either having a psychotic break or legitimately experiencing herself turning into some sort of canine-human hybrid. Her body hair is growing coarse, her teeth are sharpening, she’s craving raw meat, and she’s feeling the urge to run naked through her neighbors’ muddy yards at night and howl at the moon. She kills wild rabbits and even her pet cat, in one particularly gruesome moment. Or maybe, none of those things are happening anywhere outside her head. It’s American Psycho crossed with Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

The story artfully maintains the tension of that ambiguity, while tapping into a lot of uneasy truths about modern parenting and expected gender roles. I hope to never feel a fraction of the rage and resentment this nameless protagonist carries for my own partner or children, but her grievances are legitimate against a society that demands so much of mothers by default and gaslights us all into believing that’s normal. Raising a kid today can sometimes seem unspokenly draining and isolating no matter how dearly you love them, and author Rachel Yoder channels that knowledge into a white-hot feminist fury.

Certain parts of this text are more engaging than others; the satirical multi-level marketing element is a bit broad for my tastes, and I get extreme secondhand embarrassment from the rambling emails that the heroine sends to a professor whose book she happens across in the library. But the odd premise never slips into camp as it so easily could, and the core of the work expresses a righteous indignation on behalf of parents that we don’t see often enough in our culture.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer

Book #297 of 2021:

The Fabulous Riverboat by Philip José Farmer (Riverworld #2)

It’s two decades later in the Riverworld, that strange place where everyone from earth’s history woke up restored to their 25-year-old bodies, which have not gotten any older in the meantime. (The children have likewise stopped aging after catching up to the rest, thankfully removing the element of pedophilia that was mentioned offhand in the first title.) Readers wanting to hear more about Sir Richard Burton’s quest for answers to the mysteries of the world will have to wait, as we have a largely new set of characters to follow for this sequel, headed up by Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain himself.

Author Philip José Farmer continues to seem preoccupied with how great men would react to this setting, so that protagonist is joined by other luminaries ranging from Odysseus to Mozart to England’s wicked King John. And I do mean men, since the women in this story are all off on the periphery, functioning mostly as passive objects of desire. The most central and well-defined is Sam’s former wife, and even she is there primarily for a love triangle with Cyrano de Bergerac.

Equally dated is the 1971 treatment of race, with an awkward explanation of why it’s not fair to call the hero a bigot (delivered by an African-American of the future) and a nearby territory run by a black nationalist who wants to expel all white people, which he insists includes the local Wahhabi Muslims. I didn’t notice those elements when I read this novel as a kid, but they sure jump out at me now.

To its credit, the plot is an interesting piece of political intrigue, and one that benefits from staying locked in the main character’s perspective on his small stretch of the river. I still don’t exactly understand what all of these folks hope to gain by drawing borders and waging war in a deathless utopia, but the depiction of a civilization essentially starting from scratch on the backs of clashing cultures from across time, not to mention the struggle to marshal the resources necessary for massive construction projects, is reasonably compelling. This whole book really is just about a single ship being built, yet I prefer it to Burton’s nebulous journeying regardless.

[Content warning for rape, slavery, gun violence, racial slurs, and Nazi apologia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

Book #296 of 2021:

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder

This slim volume was published as a very pointed commentary on the newly-inaugurated President Trump, based on his despotic-leaning words and deeds throughout the 2016 campaign. It still works outside of that context, sort of, especially in its warnings of how easily a democracy can be dismantled by the ruling party once elected. Historian Timothy Snyder cautions that no one can ever know which vote will be the last one they’ll be allowed to cast, and that there is no guarantee our own government system will endure, particularly under assault from its head. Citing examples from the early days of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, he points to actions ordinary citizens can take to resist authoritarianism and blunt the power of would-be tyrants.

I won’t dispute that the author’s worries were justified, and if some seem a touch overblown today, it could be precisely because enough people realized the gravity of the threat and took steps similar to what Snyder lays out here to strengthen America’s societal institutions. On the other hand, this title doesn’t feel as applicable as a general program for any subsequent crisis point, as so many of its specifics are directly tied to Trump. It already seems dated just one administration later. Also, despite the short length of this text, the writer finds space to repeatedly assert that physical books/newspapers and in-person organizing are inherently more trustworthy than their digital equivalent, which I consider eye-rollingly facile at best.

Three-out-of-five stars for a work that presumably served its purpose but surely has better alternatives going forward.

[Content warning for racial slurs and Nazi atrocities.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles by K. A. Applegate

Book #295 of 2021:

The Hork-Bajir Chronicles by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Chronicles #2)

This prequel is the richest and most complex entry in the Animorphs franchise yet, even more so than The Andalite Chronicles, which I believe was the last time in this series reread that I ventured that claim. It’s also the earliest installment we’ve gotten so far — not counting time-travel to the Cretaceous period! — transporting readers back to the Yeerks’ original escape from their homeworld and subsequent invasion of the Hork-Bajir planet.

One of the biggest surprises to (re)discover as an adult is that this encounter is nevertheless set in our year 1968, a mere three decades prior to the events of the main novels. Either I didn’t pick up on that detail as a kid or it just didn’t strike me as remarkable, but the fact that the Yeerk Empire and its enslavement of multiple species has all been forged within living memory seems like a vital piece of context for their campaign against the earth and occasional strategic missteps here, not to mention their failure to contain the resistance band of our regular heroes. Although they appear to carry the advantage of superior power and technology, the alien warmongers are still somewhat figuring all this out as they go along. The Andalite morphing capability is likewise a fairly new invention at this point, not yet in widespread use and unknown to the Yeerks, and the nonintervention principle of Seerow’s Kindness is not as hard and firm as it will seem to Aximili as a child.

But back to the tale at hand. An initial framing device finds the Animorph Tobias visiting the colony of free Hork-Bajir that he helped liberate in #13 The Change, where he accepts their invitation to settle in for a campfire story. Despite these creatures’ apparent simplicity — the hawk-boy notes that he’s expecting to hear something like, “Yeerks come. Bad. Fighting. Yeerks win. We lose.” — he is somehow caught and immersed, with the three alternating perspectives of the rest of the book representing what he learns that night. There are no humans at all in the ensuing narrative, but the different extraterrestrial cultures that emerge are fleshed-out and engaging.

Following a brief scene of the Yeerks overpowering their Andalite guards to steal ships and whisk a quarter million of their slug-like population offplanet, abusing the trust of the prince who had generously shared knowledge of such things with them, we skip forward two years to that disgraced soldier’s posting in an obscure system, where he’s been assigned to study the native lifeforms and nominally be on the lookout for signs of enemy activity (but mostly stay out of the way of the distant galactic war effort). With him are his wife, son, and daughter Aldrea, the latter of whom is one of our new narrators. She strikes up a friendship with another, the Hork-Bajir Dak Hamee, who has an intelligence far beyond anything else seen in his species. He is a seer, born once in a generation to help navigate an upcoming change, or so the elders say. He already displays an advanced intellect, but with his new friend to teach him further, his mind blossoms into levels of insight and reasoning that neither of them could have predicted.

The relationship of these two figures is the core of the text, an affectionate connection that’s fraught with arrogant colonialist condescension regardless, as Dak is increasingly quick to point out. The widening gulf between him and his people is soon mirrored on her side, especially after the Yeerks do show up and slaughter her family. In the fierce-looking but gentle Hork-Bajir — their claws are designed for stripping bark off trees, not fighting — the parasites seem to have identified their perfect next host bodies. With no assistance from the Andalites expected for months, our protagonists are forced to fight back themselves and train his brethren to become guerilla warriors: a route they are happy to adopt unquestioningly but that he considers a heartbreaking yet necessary corruption.

That mixture of hope and sorrow is essential to this title, which is both bleak and suffused with a blazing spirit. It’s ultimately a tragedy, as we knew it would be from the start. The pacifistic herbivores are destined to be imperial shock troops, wholly conquered and made to serve their masters. This is a losing battle, and when reinforcements finally arrive, Aldrea is disgusted by their patronizing attitude and horrified to discover they’re developing a biological weapon to kill off Dak’s race and keep them from being used as tools for their foes. (The Arn, a civilization of genetic manipulators dwelling in cliffs deep in the planet’s interior who actually created the Hork-Bajir for environmental control, similarly opt not to commit to helping the species they see as weak children, instead simply altering their own biology to prevent infestation — a move that results in their capture as raw slave labor for the Yeerks.) But she and Dak continue waging their hopeless struggle, growing ever closer in their commitment and despair and inadvertently inspiring future Hork-Bajir like the ones Tobias knows — as well as forming a cautionary parallel for humanity’s own invasion that he’s been witnessing and attempting to resist.

The third viewpoint woven throughout this novel is that of Esplin 9466, the Yeerk who will one day be known by his military rank of Visser Three. He’s not really a sympathetic character, but he offers us our first extended look at how his race sees the universe and their role in it. Like Aftran 942 in #19 The Departure, he paints a brutal picture of life outside a host and the ecstasy of mobility and senses within one. He plays an important part in the subjugation of the Hork-Bajir too, much as we previously saw him do for the Taxxons in The Andalite Chronicles, later in his personal timeline.

Overall, this is an excellent space opera with complicated heroes and villains that strengthens the worldbuilding and history of this saga yet could also stand alone as an independent read or introduction to it, given the minimal spoilers or required background information. With war crimes of allies that are rightly condemned, heroic sacrifices in a tragically doomed cause, nuanced discussions of morality and self-determination, and a G-rated interspecies romance, it may be the single best Animorphs volume of the lot.

[Content warning for sexism and gore.]

★★★★★

TV Review: Star Wars Resistance, season 1

TV #78 of 2021:

Star Wars Resistance, season 1

The debut run of this Star Wars cartoon about the lead-up to The Force Awakens gets marginally better in its last few episodes, but for the most part, it’s a real exercise in frustration. Despite the title and the hero’s nominal role as a spy, the story has very little to do with that movement, focusing rather on life aboard an obscure shipping station / repair-yard / race site. (As this description should suggest, it’s not particularly well-defined.) And that’s a shame, because even now there’s a lot that remains murky as to the exact dynamics of the Resistance, New Republic, and First Order — and their relation to the factions of the original trilogy — that a series set in this era could have clarified. But this show instead adopts the same approach as the newer movies, basically ignoring the ending to Return of the Jedi and featuring conflicts that might as well be just Empire and Rebel Alliance under new names.

The characters are disappointing too. Our protagonist is a schlemiel continually blundering into tiresome mishaps, only to be saved more by luck or outside intervention than his own bravery or smarts. His closest friend is an obtuse alien who takes everything literally, sort of like Data or Drax but with less nuance and worse writing. Between the two of them, any given storyline typically ends up falling flat.

On the bright side: the animated visuals are great, and both Oscar Isaac and Gwendoline Christie occasionally drop by to reprise their respective live-action roles of Poe Dameron and Captain Phasma. The final arc offers a much-needed shakeup to the status quo, which could easily result in a stronger season 2. But so far, this is the worst venture I’ve seen from this franchise under the new Disney canon.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Echo Park by Michael Connelly

Book #294 of 2021:

Echo Park by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #12)

Bosch’s latest encounter with a serial killer is a bit rote, and a twist midway through — that the criminal is innocent of one particular murder, which a corrupt attorney got him to confess to as part of a secret deal — is disappointing for its implications. Before this point, the detective is distressed by the idea that he’s been focused on the wrong suspect for a decade due to circumstantial evidence blinding him to other possibilities, and that he apparently never followed up on a certain clue that could have led him to the true culprit back when he first caught the case. But then it turns out that the incriminating logbook was forged, and Harry’s initial hunch was right all along. It’s a development that justifies the character’s earlier obsession, and is far less interesting than a plot that would actually hold him accountable for his mistakes.

This is also the sort of story that singles out individual wicked members of law enforcement without commenting on problems in the profession as a whole, which author Michael Connelly is sometimes better about. I’m not thrilled that the hero yet again subtly influences events so that a bad guy gets shot to death rather than taken into custody and calls it justice, either. That’s copaganda too, in its own way.

Otherwise the novel is solid enough, and I continue to find the protagonist an engaging perspective as he resists pressures to sacrifice his integrity for the sake of his career in the LAPD. But this is not one of his finer hours overall.

[Content warning for necrophilia, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆