The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis

Book #138 of 2021:

The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis (The Initial Insult #1)

This first volume of a planned YA duology is a fun but kind of goofy modern spin on The Cask of Amontillado, playing out against a broad pastiche of several other Poe stories as well. So you’ve got the teenage girl bricking up her former best friend in the basement, but it’s at a house party that’s one part Usher and one part Red Death, while at the nearby roadside zoo, a black panther and an orangutan stalk menacingly. The protagonist’s dead parents are named Annabelle and Lee. The high school mascot is a raven. Et cetera.

It’s a bit too silly to be fully macabre — and vice versa — but I’ve had a good time spotting all the references. I’ll probably check out the sequel (exploring some Tell-Tale Heart type guilt, I presume) when it comes out.

[Content warning for racism, drug abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo

Book #137 of 2021:

Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo (King of Scars #2)

This is a much busier volume than its predecessor in the King of Scars duology, but author Leigh Bardugo impressively manages to bring it all together in the end (which is a welcome change from how disconnected Nina’s storyline felt before). The narrative could certainly have been tightened up in places — there’s a fun but random excursion to Kerch for a quick Six of Crows cameo heist and a wholly unnecessary redemption plot for the Darkling of all people — but it generally zips around the warring realms with a confident touch and builds to a moving focus on setting vengeance aside to work on healing the strife of the world at last.

Nikolai also gets to be rather clever in terms of strategy for his beleaguered and outmatched nation, and the two main romantic threads each blossom nicely into mutual tender caring for folks who really deserve that after all they’ve been through. There’s even a lovely trans coming-out moment for a major character, joining the LGB representation that Bardugo has gradually been adding into this fantasy franchise. And we get our most significant look yet at Shu Han culture and politics too, a long-overdue exploration of the Chinese-analogue country on the borders of the Russian-inspired Ravka.

As Netflix viewers are now discovering, the ‘Grishaverse‘ is a wonderful setting brimming with story possibilities, and although the writer could maybe have trimmed back her ambitions of everything to cram into this seventh novel, it’s hard to argue with the overall effectiveness of the text.

[Content warning for racism, medical experimentation, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2

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TV Review: Dawson’s Creek, season 3

TV #44 of 2021:

Dawson’s Creek, season 3

Pacey Witter is the beating heart of this show, and the third season gets better as it goes along by leaning into the prickly attraction between him and Joey. That’s still not perfect storytelling — it’s a major disconnect from their dynamic the year before, and the writers again seem interested in the Potter girl only as an object of pursuit or an ex, never as an equal partner in a steady relationship or someone not defined by romance at all — but it’s far preferable to Dawson’s entitled Nice Guy sociopathy. I am honestly flabbergasted at how the creative team continues to think that the titular petulant manchild is any sort of compelling leading figure for the drama around him (which is not to say that a mindful exploration of his flaws couldn’t succeed, but that’s clearly not where the narrative is rooted here). This run also gives us the character of Eve, a bizarre teenage temptress whose tenure is thankfully brief but who nevertheless somehow beats out the star for the prize of most odious person in Capeside.

Elsewhere the plot is largely fine. Andie’s return and promotion to the main cast is a surprise, but she’s not really given the best material to work with this time and generally ends up reduced to an afterthought. There are good but episodic and somewhat clumsy attempts to talk about homophobia and white privilege. Jen remains isolated from the rest of the group, with her newest boytoy just a younger and slightly less infuriating version of Dawson, but at least she occasionally gets to dispense some inspiring heart-to-heart moments with her nominal friends.

Will I keep watching? Sure. The stronger elements mostly balance out the weak, and at the halfway point of the program now, I’m hopeful that Pacey levels of maturity might even be on the horizon for the other rising seniors. I’m not exactly holding my breath, though.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

Book #136 of 2021:

The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

Among the more unexpected surprises of 2021 has been this publication of a new novel by Richard Wright, eighty years after it was rejected by publishers and made available only as a heavily-truncated short story. In this full version, it’s a text as challenging and timeless / timely as one might imagine, especially in its early pages, when a young black man is arrested for a rape and murder he didn’t commit, beaten and tortured by his police interrogators, and ultimately coerced into signing a false confession. It’s not clear if the cops truly believe he’s guilty, or whether that even matters. Similarly, once the protagonist manages to escape through an open manhole and begins to witness a surreal sequence of scenes that move with the logic of dreams and bear a distinct resemblance to some of his own recent experiences, it’s possible that everything on display is simply the traumatic hallucination of an unreliable narrator.

In either interpretation, the events that follow are disturbing and reflective of the author’s commitment to both present the horrors of racism in their totality and avoid reducing his heroes to blameless saints. Fred Daniels is no Bigger Thomas from Wright’s famous Native Son, but as he loses his grip on his identity down in the sewers — if indeed he does — he finds himself culpable in similar crimes. It all adds up to the tragic end that seems inevitable as soon as the squad car first stops him, a bleak statement which plays out amid sinister apocalyptic vibes. There’s no way of knowing how the title would have been received by critics and popular audiences back in the 1940s, but it’s a tale well worth checking out now that we finally can.

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

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Star Wars Rebels, season 2

TV #43 of 2021:

Star Wars Rebels, season 2

A definite step down from its first season, this sophomore run of the Disney Star Wars cartoon is a frustratingly meandering piece of storytelling. There are some slight attempts at character arcs, but mostly we’re given a lot of episodic filler that doesn’t really capitalize on the period setting within the franchise or the plot escalation of the previous finale. Neither Ahsoka nor Vader, each introduced with significant fanfare, actually amounts to much here until the literal last episode — which could have been a powerful moment of confrontation had those opposing figures been threaded more purposefully throughout the year, but instead relies almost entirely on preexisting viewer investment in their old relationship from The Clone Wars.

The new pair of Inquisitors make for dull and ineffective villains in their master’s stead (an unfortunate waste of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s guest stint on her husband’s show) and even the surprise return of Captain Rex for a major stretch of time doesn’t ultimately yield much payoff. And weirdly, I feel as though I have less firm a grasp on what motivations are driving our main protagonists now that they’re a cell enmeshed in the larger Rebel Alliance rather than the semi-autonomous bunch they were originally characterized as. The stakes should be markedly higher and more sharply drawn at this point in their journey, yet for some reason the narrative seems to have stalled out.

I sometimes struggle to articulate the reasoning behind a 3-star rating like this, so let me be clear: this series remains perfectly watchable, and I’m sure the younger section of the audience will enjoy it just fine. But any ambitions to take it from good to great appear rare and poorly carried out, which is disappointing from writers we’ve already seen do better than this.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman

Book #135 of 2021:

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman

This novella is a sorrowful look at an elderly man gradually losing his memories to dementia, but it’s a bit too short and disjointed to be entirely effective. The whole idea is that he’s slipping between past and present in his perception, of course, yet author Fredrik Backman never quite gives us enough to key into on a specific character level to make that loss register as fully as it should. More time spent in the perspective of the son and grandchild might have helped ground the narrative in legible emotion, rather than the roiling confusion it mostly plays out as here.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

Book #134 of 2021:

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers (Wayfarers #4)

Another lovely and warmhearted picture of alien diversity, reportedly the last in the loose Wayfarers series from author Becky Chambers. (These stories are discrete enough that there’s no internal continuity reason for this to be a conclusion, but that’s what the writer has been announcing it as, so perhaps she feels she’s simply run out of things to say about the Galactic Commons as a setting.)

Like its predecessors, this novel depicts a cosmos teeming with intelligent life, and is a great model for approaching unfamiliar lived experiences with respect and tact, with plenty of real-world analogues to disability, religion, gender expression, and beyond. This can sometimes result in conversations that are just polite exchanges of exposition on respective habits, but is generally rooted in character perspectives that add further depth to each different cultural worldview. It’s also nice to get almost no humans here after we/they were so heavily featured in the previous title, and I love the early scene where the assembled beings react with disgust and aghast amusement to a description of how our species creates and consumes cheese.

The plot is somewhat threadbare — a satellite accident forces several spaceships to stay at a podunk waystation for a while longer than intended, bringing the crews into closer contact than usual — and the stakes are largely limited to the possibility of missing out on the events everyone’s traveling for and worrying about loved ones who have now fallen out of ready reach. But Chambers finds great depths in these quiet times, and the personal conflicts that crop up demonstrate dignity on all sides with no easy villains, even in remarkably fraught political discussions. This seems like the most critical she’s yet written any protagonist towards the government of their interplanetary federation too, which is a welcome and nuanced development.

I’ve adored these books, especially the first two volumes, and I’m a little sad that this is their apparent end. But I’m grateful for the moments I’ve spent between these pages, and if real extraterrestrials ever turn out to be even half as empathetic as those herein, the universe should be in pretty good shape.

[Content warning for hospitalization / near-death of a child.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★★

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1 > 4 > 3

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Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher

Book #133 of 2021:

Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope by Ian Doescher (William Shakespeare’s Star Wars #4)

This book is built around a cute idea, but once you get past that basic gimmick of retelling the first Star Wars movie in iambic pentameter — “In time so long ago begins our play / In star-crossed galaxy far, far away” and so on — there aren’t a whole lot of particularly original spins on the material. Debut author Ian Doescher presents the familiar script as a stageplay in faux-Elizabethan English (to mixed effect for some of the more cinematic moments reduced to exposition from a chorus), and although he includes plenty of nods at real Shakespeare lines, they generally come across as mere word-replacement reference humor rather than anything especially clever, a la Luke’s declaiming at the Rebel briefing, “And citizens in Bespin now abed, / shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.” The scansion of the meter works throughout, but the expected sort of sparkling figurative language, the wry and raunchy wordplay that makes the Bard’s work so engaging, is fairly sparse.

I think my favorite part of this text would be the audience asides that the writer has added in, including a few Puckish soliloquies in which R2-D2 breaks from his accustomed beeps and bloops to share his thoughts about his companions with us plainly. And it is the same great story as ever, presented in an admittedly fun new fashion. But overall, this strikes me as an experiment which doesn’t entirely succeed and ultimately overstays its welcome. I don’t feel I need to check out any of the franchise sequel and prequel versions (or unrelated titles like Get Thee Back to the Future or Much Ado about Mean Girls) that Doescher has subsequently produced.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Unexpected Stories by Octavia E. Butler

Book #132 of 2021:

Unexpected Stories by Octavia E. Butler

This posthumous collection by renowned African American science-fiction icon Octavia E. Butler is regrettably slim, but it lives up to its title, presenting two of her early works that had been previously unpublished. The novella A Necessary Being does not appear to have ever been submitted anywhere and was only discovered amongst her papers after death, while the short story “Childfinder” was the writer’s first sale, to a planned anthology from mentor Harlan Ellison which ran into difficulties and was famously never released. Only in this 2014 publication has either been made available to the public.

The longer piece is the more striking, depicting an alien species whose members can turn their naturally-blue fur a variety of different shades, from blindingly bright to nearly transparent, but who are sorted into a rigid caste system by the tint of each’s default hue, which is not entirely hereditary. There’s a storyline too about coercion and choice and how hierarchy restricts at all levels, yet as is often the case with Butler, the ideas seem likely to linger beyond the specific plot or characters. (The tale is also apparently connected with the novel Survivor from her loose Patternist series, although I haven’t read that one yet.)

The shorter entry is less immediately impressive, but it returns to some of the author’s regular preoccupations, like telepathic powers and earthbound racism, as it details a black woman’s efforts to shelter neighborhood children of psychic potential from the predominantly-white organization looking to abduct/recruit them. I don’t think this one is meant to tie in with any larger narrative, but it certainly feels of a similar vein to many other Butler stories. Together the paired halves of the book represent a strong reminder of the talent we lost when she passed, and are a fine addition to her existing body of writing.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Infinity Blade: Redemption by Brandon Sanderson

Book #131 of 2021:

Infinity Blade: Redemption by Brandon Sanderson

This is the second novella that author Brandon Sanderson wrote as a media tie-in for the titular videogame series, but it’s not really a sequel to his earlier Infinity Blade: Awakening. Instead, much as that story serves to bridge the plot between the first two games, this one connects the narrative from the end of the second installment to the start of the third. It also contains flashbacks to the near-future society that created the resurrection technology found in the setting’s post-apocalyptic present.

I’ve never played any of the mobile titles — and can’t now, since they were removed from the App Store in 2018 due to compatibility issues — so I don’t know how well this book fulfills its original intended function. But even more than the previous volume, it doesn’t quite hang together as a satisfying standalone adventure. The prequel interludes don’t tell us anything especially interesting about the world, and the ultimate character reveals in that thread (i.e., which of the Deathless were around back then and who they used to be) aren’t exactly revelatory either. The main timeline is a little more engaging with its tale of scheming immortals at war, but it’s still a bit generic and incomplete overall, at least without the added context of prior gameplay experience.

I’m enough of a Sanderson completionist that I don’t regret picking up this work, but I’d probably only recommend it to existing fans of the franchise.

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this writer.]

★★☆☆☆

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