The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green

Book #125 of 2025:

Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green (Nightside #5)

This is one of the better entries of its urban fantasy series, I think, propulsively moving the major plot arc along while also delivering immediate thrills and significant character work. After several volumes of throat-clearing on that first front, the previous novel finally revealed that the protagonist’s mysterious mother is the apocryphal Lilith, creator of the Nightside itself, who has now returned to tear it all down again. This story picks up right there, with the hero understandably desperate for answers on how she can be defeated. His plan involves requesting the help of the one local being who can facilitate targeted time-travel, so that he can visit the distant past and learn how the demoness was originally weakened and banished back then.

The case-of-the-week that gives this book its title (and keeps it nominally a work of detective fiction) is fun, but easily disposed of: a client beset by alternate versions of himself at various ages, the younger ones outraged that he’s sold out and become a corporate drone and the older ones cross that he’s prioritized his family over securing more cutthroat promotions. Relatable! Taylor rightly deduces that the matter has been thrown his way as a distraction, and once it’s resolved, he continues on with his mission, accompanied by his mercenary friend Shotgun Suzie (and initially by a PI colleague Larry Oblivion, although he doesn’t last long). Together the characters journey sequentially further and further into the Nightside’s dangerous history, getting increasingly bloodied and weary as they locate another figure at each stop with enough magic to boost them ever onward.

The ensuing tale offers some nice moments of dramatic irony and predestination paradoxes, as well as early looks at a few familiar ancient powers in their heyday. It also results in the detective and his female companion growing steadily closer over the course of their shared ordeal, transitioning her into a clear love interest for the man. In a twist, however, she also loses an eye and has half her face cauterized into scar tissue — making her resemble the potential future version of herself who once tried to murder him and said he’d be responsible for destroying the world in an earlier volume. That’s a much more ominous development now, as Taylor returns with his own Suzie to their present having figured out how to wield his mother’s power against her.

I remember the Nightside books losing steam by the end, but at this particular moment, they’re firing on all cylinders. Bring on the confrontation with Lilith, our first real “big bad” of the series.

[Content warning for sexual assault, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/lesserjoke
–Or click here to browse through all my reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic

Book #124 of 2025:

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic

I’ve been out of academia for almost a decade now, but back when I was working as a sociolinguist, I studied how people use language on the internet and how traditional emblems of group identity in speech can manifest in similar or different ways online. This new pop science book is thus firmly in my wheelhouse, although its author Adam Aleksic is of a younger generational cohort than me — he mentions being in middle school in the 2010s, when I was already a grad student — and he comes at the topic not as a fellow researcher per se, but rather as a former undergrad major who’s spun his interest in the field into a new career as a social media personality. I don’t even have a TikTok account, whereas he’s amassed over 750,000 followers on there by commentating on emerging language trends and the domain of linguistics more broadly.

That biography is important, because it ends up shaping a lot of what he has to share with us within these pages. This is a book about language, yes, and how new forms are spreading thanks to the communities that arise naturally on algorithmic apps, but it often feels more like a self-aggrandizing how-to guide on becoming an effective influencer within that space. Do we really need to parse which specific videos from the writer garnered the most views, or hear about how he used to be one of Reddit’s top-rated posters? I’m sure there’s a market for that, but it’s not a subject I’m especially interested in or would have expected to find in this sort of volume. (I also give a side-eye to anyone who claims to be chronically online in the year 2025 and yet writes cheerfully of Harry Potter without ever acknowledging how its creator’s status as a transphobic extremist has led many former fans like myself to boycott her works. Or has that honestly not made it into his particular filtered bubble?)

The content that stays more on-topic is fine. It’s a wide-ranging sampler text, containing some things I already knew, a lot that I didn’t, and nothing that pinged my sense from my existing expertise as probably being incorrect, which is exactly the balance that I look for in a title like this. I appreciate the descriptivist stress that there’s no wrong way to use language, and I found the discussion of how words like “unalive” (which are coined to get around platform censorship rules) in some ways mirror offline euphemisms (like “deceased” originating as a Latin word for departure) to be a particularly helpful framing. I do wish the writing were more disciplined throughout, and that Aleksic cited actual published studies from professional linguists instead of just his own observations and conversations with peers, but I can’t say I haven’t learned anything from it.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Derry Girls, season 2

TV #40 of 2025:

Derry Girls, season 2

Another funny year of a show that nevertheless seems like it could be doing more with its distinctive setting and its character work. There are a few recurring bits, but nothing that resembles any sort of ongoing storyline or concern that’s maintained over multiple episodes (though that’s admittedly difficult to achieve in a season that’s again comprised of only six twenty-minute installments). As a result, I still don’t feel like I know the cast especially well, which robs the humor of some potential specificity.

The finale at least aims for big personal stakes, with the announced departure of one of the leads. The others rally together in an almost romcom fashion, and when said member doesn’t leave after all, it’s framed like a great triumph for the central friend group. But we don’t really have much of a build to explain why they suddenly care, after all the nonstop belittling that precedes this moment. I guess we’re supposed to be invested in the dynamic based on proximity and longevity alone, and not actual interactions that demonstrate what these people theoretically mean to each other?

It’s fine. It doesn’t significantly detract from the comedy, which continues to provide the requisite laughs. But this remains a solidly three-star series for me.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul by Victoria Goddard

Book #123 of 2025:

The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul by Victoria Goddard (The Red Company Reformed #2)

This is my favorite Victoria Goddard book since The Hands of the Emperor, which was the first one that I ever picked up. That earlier novel is often heralded as a great entry point to the author’s extended Nine Worlds setting, however, which this other title is categorically not. It’s instead more in the vein of a blockbuster Marvel crossover event, albeit one keyed to the writer’s particular cozy fantasy sensibilities. There are no epic battle scenes here, just long-distant characters meeting and rejoicing over discovering their common ground. Still it’s fantastic, in every sense of the word.

(The overall effect will of course be contingent on which volumes a given reader has previously explored. At a minimum, I would say that you should read this one after The Hands of the Emperor, The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, and at least some of the Greenwing & Dart sequence. The Terec novellas and the Sisters Avramapul trilogy, among others, will also provide excellent backstory for certain figures here. I personally got to this book as the 32nd entry in my winding way through the entire series — having now read everything except At the Feet of the Sun, which takes place after it — and I don’t regret that choice in the slightest.)

Our protagonist is the title heroine herself, who is both a retired adventurer / bandit folk hero and a current professor of history on Alinor — the world where the Greenwing & Dart books are set, which is remote but accessible from Zunidh, where The Hands of the Emperor takes place. Readers of that last novel will likely remember the time when she came to the imperial palace and was surprised to recognize His Radiancy as a former companion, whom she had not realized was so exalted. Here we see that moment again from her perspective, but only after she first travels to Ragnor Bella and meets Jemis Greenwing and her fellow ex-Red Company member Jullanar of the Sea (whose own alternate identity was revealed in Plum Duff and/or The Return of Fitzroy Angursell). Before traveling on, she spends time with the local innkeeper Basil White, hearing fond tales of his brilliant lost cousin Kip.

From thence her disastrous audience with the Last Emperor and her follow-up conversation with his chancellor Cliopher Mdang, whom she loathes for in her mind keeping her friend bound up in the duties of his office. A lot of reviewers seem to dislike Pali for that irrational hatred of Kip, whom of course we all love as the hero of The Hands of the Emperor. But personally I appreciate the alternative perspective on his actions and consider her a richer character for it. She’s already a rarity in the genre as an older female protagonist — her age not explicitly stated beyond being somewhere north of fifty, not to mention the passage of time occasionally going haywire after the Fall of Astandalas — and I love that she gets to be ornery and possessed of complicated human emotions to boot. In fact, it’s just those sorts of feelings that form the crux of this novel and make her personal journey so appealing.

After leaving Zunidh and making a short visit back home, she re-encounters Jullanar in the company of their other old friends Fitzroy and Masseo. This is another scene we’ve seen play out from a different viewpoint before, in this case Fitzroy’s in his own titular adventure. There’s reconciliation and recrimination alike to be had in the companions reuniting, and at this point (where The Return of Fitzroy Angursell leaves off) we’re still only halfway through the book.

I’m going into this level of plot detail because it really is impressive how seamlessly Goddard weaves in and out of her previous stories with this one, and all without the repeated moments ever seeming like a chore. The ties between the other books have often felt tangential at best, with sly allusions and bits of dramatic irony for readers in the know. This time we’re getting a true crossover capstone with payoffs galore, and yet one that doesn’t detract from the quiet griefs and reckonings powering the woman on her way.

Further adventures await once the friends set out again, including an encounter with Terec, the lost love of His Radiancy’s chief groom Conju whose origins were related in The Hands of the Emperor, The Game of Courts, and the two novellas bearing his name. Eventually they meet up with yet another old comrade, bringing the total number of reunited Red Company members to five. (As that’s still only half of their original contingent, I assume that this sub-series of The Red Company Reformed will continue on for additional sequels, at some point.)

The back half of the novel is slower and more deliberate, revolving largely around the characters of Pali and Fitzroy, who never quite found the way to accept or express their tender love for one another when they were younger and who have each now been indelibly affected by the decades of their respective lives that they were forced to spend apart. A reblossoming and belated embrace of their dynamic so long afterwards certainly seems possible, but there are hurt feelings, hard truths, and subtle misunderstandings that must first be addressed, which even legendary heroes can sometimes find daunting. (As the poet puts it, in a rather heartbreaking fashion: “I was a river, dammed against my will into a lake. I could not break the confines of my dam, and so… and so I reconciled myself to being a lake. Eventually I learned how to be still.”)

Overall this story just works for me, even as I can spot the issues that might exasperate other readers. It’s another Nine Worlds installment where plot is secondary to talking, and as mentioned, it all hinges on so much prior context that I know not everyone is going to bring to the task. And maybe that should be considered a mark against it, that it can’t stand especially well on its own! But if you view this as the cozy equivalent of a tentpole cinematic universe extravaganza, centered around the emotions and complex inner lives of belovedly familiar characters…

Well, there’s simply nothing else like it. Well done, Dr. Goddard. Top marks.

★★★★★

Book Review: Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Book #122 of 2025:

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Author Torrey Peters had a smash hit with the bestselling 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, and I assume her publisher wanted to release something else with her name on it before that recognition had completely faded. Hence this new title collecting four unrelated novellas, two of which had been previously published on their own back in 2016. (Is the longest entry actually another novel, as the cover suggests? Maybe! Such labels are admittedly pretty arbitrary. But I hesitate to accept that framing when this entire book is shorter than Detransition, Baby.)

The only element really linking these pieces together is that, like DB, they are about imperfect transgender characters navigating complicated trans issues. I love literature’s function as both a window and a mirror, and that’s certainly delivered here. Drawing on her own experiences in the extended queer community, Peters fills her stories with aspects of gender identity and presentation that so rarely get written down, and the #ownvoices authenticity generally elevates the material. At the same time, however, she eschews the hand-holding of expository explanations, which together with her creations’ messy human flaws ensures that her work never reads as simply Trans 101 (a critique I recently had about Woodworking by Emily St. James, for example).

It’s still not entirely to my liking. My favorite of the quartet is the first one, “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” for presenting a dystopian future where a genetically-engineered supervirus renders everyone’s bodies unable to produce their natural hormones. Suddenly, cisgender and transgender people alike must squabble over the scarcity of synthetic alternatives, which is an interesting backdrop for the more personal relationship drama that then ensues. The others don’t have quite the same spark to them, though — or as likeable a protagonist. “The Chaser” is about a boarding school romance gone wrong and “The Masker” is about the complex divide between cross-dressers and trans women, and I think both could have benefited from greater length. On the other hand, the titular “Stag Dance” itself has those extra pages for its tale of an isolated crew of lumberjacks who begin experimenting with transgressing their expected gender roles, and it still doesn’t seem like it ever figures out just what it’s trying to say about them.

So a mixed bag, as I often end up labeling such anthologies. Not bad! But I’ll be shocked if it winds up earning anywhere near the plaudits of its predecessor.

[Content warning for sexual assault, transphobia including slurs, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Deadbeat by Adam Hamdy

Book #121 of 2025:

Deadbeat by Adam Hamdy

The premise of a broke ex-con getting hired by an anonymous benefactor to become a hitman has distinct potential, but the story that follows is unfortunately pretty dreadful throughout. Part of the problem is the obnoxious protagonist, who has no clear redeeming features that I can identify. He’s not especially smart, or brave, or moral, or determined, or competent, or funny, or… anything, really. I suppose he’s somewhat sympathetic — or maybe just plain pathetic — as an alcoholic and an absentee father, but it’s hard to continue rooting for him as he repeatedly drinks himself into a stupor and drives under the influence, despite having already killed someone that way in the backstory. He’s also easily duped into murdering subsequent people for money, under the thin justification of a few websites (that later turn out to be doctored) purporting them to deserve that fate.

It feels like the novel is grasping for some larger point here about fake news and individual culpability in abstract societal sins, and there are even a few blunt digressions along those lines that read like sophomoric philosophizing. But it simply doesn’t land, particularly with such a vacuous person at its core. The writing isn’t doing the work any favors, either; this genre of crime fiction may be known for its direct prose, but there’s no excusing the number of times the hero refers to himself as a deadbeat or the basic errors that have gone uncorrected here. Mailbox flags are used to indicate incoming mail rather than outgoing, for instance, and the character gets paid in thousand-dollar bills at one point. Unless these were supposed to be subtle indications that the setting isn’t actually our world, they strike me as signs of a product that didn’t run past a capable editor.

And the plot is absurd, especially once everything has been revealed about what was really behind the murders and all. By the time our lowlife is telling us in the epilogue how he’s now happily settled down with the sex worker he spent one night with, I don’t even care enough to object anymore. Fine. Go be happy with her. Please don’t let me accidentally read something from this author again.

[Content warning for drug abuse, gun violence, and gore.]

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: The Guest List by Lucy Foley

Book #120 of 2025:

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

A good plot twist should feel surprising in the moment but almost inevitable in hindsight, and there are several such developments woven throughout this wicked thriller about a disastrous wedding off the coast of Ireland. Other readers have compared this 2020 novel to an Agatha Christie mystery, but it’s structurally more daring than that, with multiple narrators and a rhythm that alternates back and forth between two timelines a few days apart. In the past, tensions are rising and old secrets are coming out as the festivities get underway, while in the present, a dead body has been discovered out in the storm on the night of the reception. The really ingenious aspect of this setup is that the identity of the corpse is kept from us until near the very end, so although we know that a death is looming, we’re technically in the dark about who the victim will prove to be for the majority of the text leading up to it.

I say technically because as the story goes on, it becomes clear that there’s a single person whom everybody else in the main cast might have a motive to kill, once they/we piece certain things together. But this has the brilliant effect of providing us with a range of well-developed suspects by the time we deduce or are told who’s been murdered, while also establishing that this was probably a crime of passion, rather than the ornate premeditation schemes that Christie tended to favor. None of these people came to the island planning for violence, though one of them was ultimately driven to it by the end.

In the meantime, we get a twisty tale full of outrage at sexism and the particular variety of casually destructive privilege embodied by wealthy British schoolboys and the men that they grow into. Author Lucy Foley plays fair with her red herrings for the most part, and there’s only one connection among the characters that strikes me as too coincidental to be believed. In fact, my biggest qualm is just with the title of the book itself — all the players we’re following are in either the actual wedding party or their immediate periphery, with the remaining guests barely characterized as individuals at all. But that’s obviously a minor element that in no way detracts from my enjoyment of the piece overall.

[Content warning for self-harm, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, abortion, revenge porn, hazing, and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Fear Death by Water by Emily Cook

Book #119 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Fear Death by Water by Emily Cook

This adventure finds the Fifteenth Doctor traveling by himself, sometime after the events of Joy to the World (and presumably before The Robot Revolution, when Belinda Chandra joins the crew). It’s in that sub-genre of Doctor Who stories where the time-traveller meets a historical celebrity, which in this case means nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper’s daughter Grace Darling. That’s a figure from British history I was previously unfamiliar with, but she was apparently famous in her time for helping her father rescue survivors of a nearby shipwreck and inspiring reforms for provisioning lifeboats that saved many further lives down the line. William Wordsworth even wrote a poem about the young woman, although for some reason this particular novel takes its title from an unrelated T. S. Eliot piece instead.

It’s a tale that’s clearly important to author Emily Cook. An afterword discusses the intensive firsthand research she did to get the details right — which is not a step every Whoniverse writer would take! — and she writes herself into the text as a minor character writing a book about the subject, whom she names as a distant relation. Other readers may feel differently, but that meta-twist offers a level of sentimentality that works for me, as do the Vincent-and-the-Doctor-like moments when the hero tries to impress on his new acquaintance the degree of impact that she’s had on the future. It’s a narrative element that ties into the season 2 focus on storytelling and legends, too.

The immediate plot of an alien incursion near the Darling home is standard enough for the franchise, but the voice of Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is captured well and the work is riddled with fun continuity nods, from River Song’s perfume to low mercury in the TARDIS’s fluid links, which is a reference all the way back to the very first season of the show in 1963. I wouldn’t say the result is a must-read or anything, but I think fans will generally enjoy this expansion of the protagonist’s timeline — and hope that additional such installments are ahead on the publishing horizon, given the still-uncertain fate of the series on television.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks

Book #118 of 2025:

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks

Big on vibes but short on plot, unfortunately. I was fine with the worldbuilding remaining a bit mysterious early on, but there never really are many concrete details for us to latch onto. Instead we have a generic alternate history of the late nineteenth century, featuring a version of the Trans-Siberian Railway that cuts through… something. In lieu of the typical wilderness along that route, the tracks pierce some kind of Lovecraftian dimension that nobody understands and isn’t as empty as the company would like to pretend. This ultimately builds into a vague sort of environmentalist and anti-capitalist theme, which I’d generally enjoy but here feels a tad underbaked. I think I needed the denizens of the other place to be more horrible or weirdly alien, where they’re mostly just plain inscrutable.

The human characters are somewhat better-drawn, and I don’t even mind that they spend most of the novel wandering up and down the train reflecting on their respective secret motivations for being there. But with all the promise of that atmosphere, the actual story fails to materialize in any meaningful fashion, and especially not into the fantasy Murder on the Orient Express riff I was expecting. I give the overall result two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Ballard, season 1

TV #39 of 2025:

Ballard, season 1

Bosch and Bosch: Legacy have both wrapped up after a combined ten seasons, but the franchise survives in the form of this latest entry, whose protagonist was introduced in the final episode of the latter series. She’s a detective working cold cases for the LAPD, and her new show — based loosely on the Michael Connelly novel Desert Star — is a solid police procedural. The rhythms of the officers interviewing witnesses and tracking down leads are familiar and competently-executed, and our heroine is a compelling figure in her pursuit of justice for victims who might otherwise be forgotten.

A couple quibbles keep me from rating the program more highly, however. First, as usual for the genre, everyone is very territorial over their investigations in a way that doesn’t really track for me as a viewer. Why should I particularly care whether Cop A or Cop B solves the crime in question? I also have to roll my eyes at a certain plot contrivance, which finds the guy who sexually assaulted Renée in the character’s backstory likewise guilty of attacking a new acquaintance of hers and then implicated in a police corruption case that spins out from one of the old murders she’s investigating. It’s too much! That feels artificially easy, for the person she hates but can’t prove is a rapist to coincidentally come under her crosshairs for taking bribes from a Mexican cartel.

But generally, this is baseline good in the way we expect the Bosch shows to be. Harry himself even drops by for a few episodes, and his old friends Crate, Barrel, Jerry, Mo, and Honey make a cameo appearance or two apiece as well (although no one would be remotely lost by starting here without seeing any of the earlier stuff first). Maddie is missed, but hopefully we’ll see her again too if this spinoff gets renewed for a second outing. If it doesn’t, it’ll be a pretty strange ending for Amazon’s long-running adaptation project — though at least we’ll always have the books, I suppose.

[Content warning for copaganda, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆