The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Amend: The Fight for America

TV #34 of 2021:

Amend: The Fight for America

This Netflix show is an informative six-part series on how the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution established a standard for equal treatment under the law that everything from civil rights to abortion access to interracial and gay marriage would later build upon — as well as a blueprint to further justice movements for today’s undocumented immigrants and other marginalized peoples.

And that’s all interesting and educational, but the program makes a few stylistic choices that I find frustrating, like a colloquial talking-down-to-teens approach and an inconsistent use of on-screen labeling for who the various speakers are. (It actually really matters whether we’re hearing from a law professor, a historian, an activist, or just someone with relevant personal experience! But the production flattens their testimony into a single narrative as though they all speak with the same authority.)

The gimmick of getting celebrity actors to read out statements from historical figures is tiring too — I don’t especially need to hear Joseph Gordon-Levitt performing old hate speech at me, or to waste time distractedly staring at Bobby Cannavale trying to remember where I know him from.

I suppose this would be a good title to screen for a middle or high school social studies class, but the casual tone and loose regard for sourcing its arguments bugs me. I feel like I’d want to verify a lot of the claims here independently, which is not the best impression for a documentary to leave.

[Content warning for racism including slurs and lynching.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Game Changer by Neal Shusterman

Book #98 of 2021:

Game Changer by Neal Shusterman

Overall, this YA novel strikes me as a well-meaning but clumsy effort to awaken its audience to societal problems like racism and homophobia that may not affect them directly. It specifically feels aimed at young, straight, white, male jocks like its hero, who suffers a brain injury on the football field and finds himself changing reality to create parallel worlds where he is less privileged in a variety of ways (even while being assured by his pandimensional guides that he is now literally the center of the universe).

Again, I think I get what author Neal Shusterman is going for with this walk-a-mile-in-someone-else’s-shoes business, but it plays out more as marginalization tourism: I’ve made myself gay and now I understand how hard it is to be gay! I’ve made myself a girl and now I understand how hard it is to be a girl! If the narrative had limited itself to just one of these shifts to explore in-depth that might have been meaningful, but as written, it’s difficult to accept that the protagonist is learning anything at all from the experience. It seems like a missed opportunity to discuss body dysmorphia and other trans issues too, although maybe that’s for the best given how poorly-executed the story is overall.

Speaking of odd gaps: this title came out in February 2021, and though I can’t tell when it’s supposed to be set (or when the writing was finished), it’s the first piece of fiction I’ve seen in an explicitly post-COVID period, where the pandemic is referenced as a thing of the past. Yet I can detect no lasting influence on mask behaviors, outdoor options, social distancing, remote work and school opportunities, etc., which feels strange to me. The writer could have placed his tale in a nebulous timeframe and not included the disease at all, but mentioning it opens a door that he does not appear to have particularly thought through.

Finally, I simply have a tough time with the fact that this kid’s special ability is triggered by getting struck hard in the head, which he then willfully repeats again and again throughout the text. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily glamorizing that sort of physical trauma, but at a bare minimum it’s irresponsibly downplaying the very real danger of CTE in violent sports. Like the flaws above, that suggests a work that may hold promise as an early draft but should probably not have been allowed to reach publication in this present state.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, whitesplaining, racial profiling, segregation — yes, he undoes Brown v. Board of Education at one point — gaslighting, and forced outing.]

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Julie and the Phantoms, season 1

TV #33 of 2021:

Julie and the Phantoms, season 1

Okay, the concept here is a little convoluted and ludicrous — three members of a boy band die in the 90s, then get brought back as ghosts by a girl in the present who can see them at all times, whereas they only appear to anyone else when they’re playing music, so she has to pretend the new group they form together is made up of holograms — but the resulting adventure is really sweet and fun. And the original songs, coming at one or two tracks per episode, aren’t half-bad, either! The series is clearly aimed at a younger audience, so everyone is doing that stylized overacting common in children’s programming and the plot challenges can seem a tad cartoonish, but overall, this is a solid piece of entertainment with an Afro-Latinx lead and a cute gay subplot. Watch it with your kids.

And hope that Netflix decides to renew the show for another season, because there’s a whole lot in this first run that doesn’t get wrapped up or explained very well. It’s fine in the moment for what it is, but I think I’ll like it less if it turns out this is all we’re getting.

[Content warning for death of a parent and bullying.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: A Choir of Lies by Alexandra Rowland

Book #97 of 2021:

A Choir of Lies by Alexandra Rowland (A Conspiracy of Truths #2)

In the final analysis I think I don’t love this spinoff sequel to A Conspiracy of Truths quite as much as the original novel, but it’s a welcome return to a land where diversity in race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other traits is accepted matter-of-factly and stories in the right hands have the power to shake society. Our old protagonist Chant is nowhere to be found, but his former apprentice has taken to keeping a journal, with the text of the book made up of his entries and the accompanying footnote annotations from yet another member of their order — a woman who’s initially exasperated over the secrets he’s putting down in writing, yet grows more understanding the further she reads.

That’s a fun and distinctive structure with built-in questions of narrator reliability, and the storyline of economic speculation driving a bubble in the price of flowers is unusual for the fantasy genre as well. Mostly, though, this is a personal glimpse of a character at a crossroads in life, trying to recover from a past trauma and decide if he’s chosen the proper calling for who he wants to be in the future. It’s slower and less twistedly funny than the first volume, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear some readers prefer this one to that (or its earnest young gay man to the caustic elderly antihero from before). And I do appreciate the deeper impression of the Chants as a people that’s revealed by the differences in the three perspectives that we now have. Overall, I am beyond satisfied with this tale, and eagerly hoping author Alexandra Rowland has plans up their sleeve for the series to continue.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams

Book #96 of 2021:

The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams

This story starts off on the wrong foot — taking the first 4% to wax rhapsodic about the soul of dictionaries before we even meet a single character — and somehow grows worse from there. It’s a split timeline, with one lexicographer protagonist in Victorian times inventing words to sneak into the volume he works for (whilst inexplicably faking a lisp), and the other in the modern day tasked with rooting out those false entries for the latest edition. Neither has any great motivation for any of their actions, nor any particular stakes in the event of failure. Then hardly anything happens, a few would-be twists land with a thud, and in the end, nothing really gets resolved and the two halves of the narrative never intersect on any meaningful level of plot or theme.

Sometimes I can tell that a book is not a good fit for me right away, but still spot some potential and carry on in the hopes that I’ll settle into it as I go. In this case, I’m a bona fide word nerd who loves archaic and obscure etymologies and thinks a novel built around a hunt for mountweazels could be fun! But my optimism is dashed at every turn by the execution here, turning what might have been merely a subpar reading experience into a frankly disastrous one.

[Content warning for bomb threats and homophobia.]

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Book #95 of 2021:

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

This novel offers a beautiful assortment of character studies, although it feels less like a single coherent plot and instead an intricate mosaic of interrelated lives. Central to the web of connections are two light-skinned black girls, identical twins who seem inseparable until the day one decides to run away and reinvent herself as white. From that point their paths — and those of their eventual children — diverge, only to weave back together in surprising fashion later on.

Author Brit Bennett paints an immersive and intimate picture of mid-century southern African American existence, her narrative ultimately spanning from the 1950s to the 1990s and exploring the concept and costs of ‘passing’ as a trans issue as well as a racial one. I don’t love how, as with many such intergenerational sagas, we end up skimming through some of the years, and the fractured nature of the storytelling results in certain figures exiting the tale when I still want to follow them and see where they go next. But leaving a reader longing for more is hardly a major flaw, and the work as a whole is a remarkable achievement.

[Content warning for racism including slurs, colorism, transphobia, and domestic abuse.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as told to his brother) by David Levithan

Book #94 of 2021:

The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (as told to his brother) by David Levithan

I love a nice postmodern portal fantasy, and this middle-grade novel spins a premise I don’t think I’ve seen before, where the focus is not on a child who vanishes into another world, but on a sibling who hears that story upon their return. By rooting us to that perspective, author David Levithan is able to both explore a distinctive constellation of emotions and maintain a tense ambiguity over whether the journey happened at all. (The ending eventually does resolve that question, but I feel the majority of the text is stronger for keeping either option plausible for so long.)

I also like how the disbelieving parents and other characters clearly express their worry that the protagonist’s brother is hiding or suppressing some earthbound traumatic experience to account for the week he’s been missing, rather than simply being unable to accept his report of green skies and unicorns and therefore angry that he’s lying. That adds a depth not often granted to adults in this sort of narrative, and further pushes against the default genre assumption that magic is real by reminding us how we’d likely react to someone in our own life spinning such a tale.

A quick read but a good one, with some neat normalized / non-stigmatized gay and trans representation on the margins for its middle-school audience. Definitely recommended!

[Content warning for bullying.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Star Wars Rebels, season 1

TV #32 of 2021:

Star Wars Rebels, season 1

This cartoon is definitely kid-friendly, but it offers a lot to older Star Wars fans as well, and largely avoids the sort of slapstick humor and wacky episode premises that could be so grating in The Clone Wars. As the first TV show in the franchise produced after Disney acquired the intellectual property in 2012, I’d say that bodes well for the seasons ahead. This debut year is already keeping a tight focus on its core characters, and although so far they seem only half-interested in being the titular rebels — and half in carrying out the kind of smuggling operations that can help themselves and the little guys of the galaxy at the Empire’s expense — it seems clear that the overall plot arc will involve the Alliance forming around them. Perhaps because I’m rewatching Firefly right now, I also keep seeing parallels between those two crews and the general ethos of storytelling that they represent, which speaks to how quickly the shipboard dynamic here has gelled.

The program is further strengthened by a few smart design choices, which again improve upon the previous series. Gone is the blocky animation style, and in its place is a look that evokes the classic film trilogy. (Zeb’s species is literally based on early concept art for Chewbacca!) The John Williams musical cues are there too, and even the setting, five years before the original movie, really makes the venture feel like the familiar Star Wars that we know and love. Plus as a viewer, I’m just so much more invested in that era than I’ve ever been in the Republic of the prequels.

This initial run features a fair bit of setup and mysteries teased for later, but it generally breezes past as a fun way to get acquainted with these new protagonists and their moment in history. And while neither of the big continuity reveals in the finale quite surprises me, they both reinforce how solid a foundation this has been and suggest an even brighter future yet to come.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Things My Son Needs to Know about the World by Fredrik Backman

Book #93 of 2021:

Things My Son Needs to Know about the World by Fredrik Backman

Author Fredrik Backman’s collection of parental / life wisdom, ostensibly addressed to his one-year-old, is certainly funny, but it lacks the heart and insight that I’m used to from his novels. It also relies on a few tired gender stereotypes throughout, with anecdotes that generally cast himself as the clueless but fun manchild and his wife as the more straitlaced partner who knows her way around things like picking the right sort of diaper at the store which somehow baffle him. As a book it’s short enough that it doesn’t exactly overstay its welcome, but it’s so rambling in that limited space that it doesn’t make a great case for itself either. I’ll definitely be sticking to this writer’s fiction from now on.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

Book #92 of 2021:

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

A fascinating personal glimpse into life under the repressive regime of North Korea, drawing on deep interviews with escaped citizens as well as journalist Barbara Demick’s general experience in the region. This 2009 book — focusing mainly on the two preceding decades, especially the transition from the rule of founder Kim Il-sung to his son Kim Jong-il upon the former’s death in 1994 — reminds me of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, which in depicting the American era of Jim Crow and the Great Migration similarly presents a small group of subjects at length to illuminate the larger trends that have emerged during the author’s research process. It’s astonishing to realize this level of impoverishment and absolute government control (via rigid indoctrination, panopticon, and secret police) can exist in a contemporary society, and remarkable to hear how people managed to survive and ultimately break away to become refugees in a wider world they’d been lied to about for their entire lives.

Much of this information has been new to me, and the writer does an excellent job at sketching her participants in details of shocking clarity. I’ve found it worthwhile both as a biographical account of these individuals and as a primer on their nation, and it provides valuable context for understanding the conflicts there that regularly make international news. It’s upsetting yet informative, and Demick ends on a note that has certainly proved prescient with time: that the totalitarian state shows no signs of collapse, despite what anyone might wish or assume to the contrary.

[Content warning for suicide, cannibalism, gaslighting, and sexism.]

★★★★☆

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