The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Book #101 of 2021:

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

In the parlance of this novel: “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.”

Which is to say, a lot of the story is an attempt to portray what it’s like to be Extremely Online, tapped into that stream of global consciousness that delivers up milkshake ducks and memes and post-ironic viral tweets in an ever-accelerating cycle, a brilliant but toxic but mostly just weird digital ecosystem that’s hard to fully grasp from the outside. Author Patricia Lockwood captures that essence perhaps better than any novelist I’ve seen, and I can definitely relate to her protagonist’s difficulty explaining what’s made her laugh to a spouse who’s less plugged-in.

At the same time, the writer is much harsher towards that uniquely modern mode of technologically-enhanced existence than I think is entirely fair, although her critiques are largely by implication rather than expressed outright. And that’s the biggest problem with this project: it is incredibly disjointed and aimless, achieving the occasional sharp insight but couching everything in needlessly florid language. Donald Trump is called only “the dictator.” The internet itself is “the portal.” And for more than half the book, there’s no plot to speak of whatsoever.

Then a little past the midway point, our heroine gets news of complications in her sister’s pregnancy, which helps ground the narrative in emotional stakes and a structure that has been completely absent before. (It’s also based somewhat on Lockwood’s own family history, I gather.) I greatly prefer that part of the work, despite the clumsily offensive ignorance-is-bliss metaphor linking the baby born with minimal brain function to people who can manage to keep themselves off social media.

The text as a whole, though, isn’t great. The bifurcation between its separate halves is too acute, and the larger early section is a fever dream of nonsense even for those of us who can generally follow along. I’ve picked up on many references to real events, but I couldn’t rightly classify the rest as either items I happened to miss over the past few years or pure invented hyperbole standing in for them satirically. It channels the experience of virtual life in the Trump era, floundering in a tide of rising extremism egged on by the bully-in-chief and rapid-fire swings in the zeitgeist of acceptable discourse, yet it does so in a way that’s already off-putting now and seems guaranteed to age poorly from there. I can barely imagine anyone loving this title upon publication in 2021, let alone once time has robbed future readers of any easy context.

[Content warning for ableism including slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

[Review originally written 4/1/16, updated 4/10/21]

Book #100 of 2021:

Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

This novella is honestly not one of Brandon Sanderson’s strongest examples of self-contained storytelling. But that’s fine, because it’s not aiming to be. It’s instead a behind-the-scenes sort of deal, showing one particular character’s actions during the second and third Mistborn novels when they seemed to have largely left the narrative. I’m sure some readers will see this as a retcon, but the author’s note says Sanderson knew all along that this story was happening simultaneously to the others — and I can now confirm there are neat clues to it that can be spotted on a careful reread of the core volumes.

It’s hard to discuss such a hidden tale without spoilers, but aside from its initial premise, the plot isn’t particularly gripping by the usual standards of this world. I am excited for what it sets up, however. This book was released alongside Mistborn #6, the ending of which raises the idea that there’s more to the the original trilogy than might have first met the eye. (The writer in fact suggests that the ideal time to read it is right after #6, but I personally disagree, unless the forthcoming #7 goes in a very different direction. Both thematically and plotwise this one fits best before #4 so far. That moves up a certain reveal, but it doesn’t really “spoil” it any more than Revenge of the Sith spoils The Empire Strikes Back for viewers watching Star Wars in chronological order.) Anyway, the belated background subplot is well worth exploring once you know the main version of events, and will likely be of great importance in the sequels yet to come.

The work is also exciting for its revelations about the cosmere, the larger universe where most of Sanderson’s fiction takes place. There’s an epic saga going on around the fringes of his books, and it’s always been fun to try to connect together various implications of that. But Secret History is the earliest to put its cosmere business front and center, and that’s a refreshing and intriguing change of pace.

Despite being published as an ebook with minimal publicity, this piece appears pretty important to the ongoing continuity, so I’m glad it now has a more fittingly prominent position as part of the collection Arcanum Unbounded, where it’s joined by the less-essential but still worthwhile prequel “The Eleventh Metal.” Check it out if you’ve already finished the classic Mistborn series, or else between #3 and #4 when you get there.

[Content warning for ableism. And disclaimer: I’m Facebook friends with this author.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

Book #99 of 2021:

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

A searing first-hand account of author Suleika Jaouad’s experience contracting a rare form of leukemia in college, the years of medical anguish that followed, and her faltering attempts to rejoin regular life after being one of the lucky few to eventually make it out of that condition alive. Like the best memoirs, it draws us into a world that most readers will never witness for ourselves, laying bare both the awful physical pain and the spiritual / emotional toll on the writer and her close relations. Her crumbling romance with an initially-stalwart boyfriend reduced to unhappy caregiver is particularly heartbreaking, although I think Jaouad extends the selfish lout more grace and understanding than I feel inclined to myself.

For the most part this book is fairly apolitical, focusing on a few individuals’ encounters with the hospital system rather than any flaws in it as a larger whole. Yet it’s difficult to read and not be struck by how suddenly any healthy person like Suleika can lose that status and then require so much intervention and assistance just for even a chance to go on living. A parent’s insurance helped pay the mountain of bills in this case, but there’s a powerful argument implied here to support greatly expanded healthcare and disability access for anyone who needs it — because as her story makes plain, any of us easily could.

[Content warning for graphic descriptions of bodily functions and death of a friend.]

★★★★☆

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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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