The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Book #34 of 2021:

Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz (Susan Ryeland #2)

This is another fun postmodern detective story, but it’s a bit too similar to its predecessor Magpie Murders, in a way that rather strains credulity. (The same dead writer knew about a second killer who had escaped justice and placed subtle clues to that effect in one of his other novels? Really? Is his whole bestselling catalogue going to turn out to contain such mysteries hidden underneath the surface? That’s so much effort — not to mention coincidence — with so minimal a justification for why he never simply alerted the authorities instead.) I also feel like some of the protagonist’s insights are too flimsy to support her deductions, and I don’t understand why the police inspector is willing to humor her staging of a dramatic parlor-room reveal scene at the end, beyond that the genre conventions demand it.

As in the first volume, a lengthy section of this text is given over to the book-within-a-book detailing a Poirot pastiche working a case that’s both enjoyable in its own right and a mechanism for taunting references to the real crime in the framing narrative. But at this point, I think I prefer the doubly fictitious Atticus Pünd to his editor-cum-investigator Susan Ryeland, and the meta trick that author Anthony Horowitz plays with the parallels between the two is starting to lose its novelty.

[Content warning for ableism including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

Book #33 of 2021:

The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia #7)

What a depressing and offensive conclusion to a generally solid children’s fantasy heptalogy. Author C. S. Lewis has always had his share of mid-twentieth-century hangups, but they are seldom so blatantly awful as here, where traditional feminine interests like makeup and fashion are given as a reason to keep someone from reaching paradise, where dark-skinned foreigners are explicitly described as wicked enemies, where racial slurs are used against them and pale heroes don blackface to pass among their ranks, and where their Muslim-analogue religion is conflated with devil-worship and said to secretly route to the setting’s leonine Jesus figure on the rare occasions when its adherents manage to do good in its name. Did I miss anything?

Ah, yes — there’s also the actual plot of the novel, which concerns a literal apocalypse of falling stars and boiling seas, destroying the idyllic land of the previous six books. Many returning protagonists are killed as well, and although the writer shows them frolicking in a sort of afterlife, I can attest from personal memory that that can still be a traumatizing development for a young reader to witness. Even before armageddon arrives, this is a much crueler Narnia than we’ve seen elsewhere, one full of greed, corruption, and doubt where miracles just don’t seem to happen anymore. (In a way it’s similar to the setup for Prince Caspian, but instead of a resurgent golden age, this one results in a biblical day of judgment — a distinction in outcomes that isn’t satisfactorily justified, from my perspective. It may be in line with Christian teachings that no one can predict the hour of the endtimes, but it’s a frustrating narrative choice that reads as though Aslan is wiping out his world on a whim.)

I honestly kind of dread each reread of the series knowing that it culminates in The Last Battle, whether the various titles are approached chronologically or by publication order. This volume doesn’t merely offer the weakest individual storyline, in which no one appears to have any meaningful control over their fate; it also casts a long shadow that weakens the impact of earlier events once you realize how little they end up mattering at the close. Certain scenes are visually striking and the themes are interesting(ly horrifying) to examine critically, but as the finale to a heartwarming sequence of adventure tales, this all feels like a mean joke.

[Content warning for gaslighting and slavery.]

This book: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader > The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe > The Horse and His Boy > Prince Caspian > The Magician’s Nephew > The Silver Chair > The Last Battle

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Book Review: The Orchard by David Hopen

Book #32 of 2021:

The Orchard by David Hopen

This novel’s all-Jewish cast helps disguise the familiarity of its tropes, but it’s ultimately a pretty conventional coming-of-age plot, one part Mean Girls (sheltered new kid falls in with the school’s popular crowd of bad influences) and one part The Secret History (scholarly discussion group chases after esoteric philosophy to increasingly disastrous ends — although here’s where I should confess that I haven’t read that classic Donna Tartt title yet, so I may have the summary a bit wrong.) Author David Hopen paints a hyper-realistic portrait, both in the thorough #ownvoices Jewishness of the text and in the dimensions of his teenage subjects, who generally feel like actual youths compared to the stylized heroes who populate much of the YA market. When the protagonist is called out for forming an idealized image of his romantic interest and ignoring her human flaws, the moment is all the more powerful for how seductively recognizable his thinking has been. I remember being that boy, and I’ve rarely seen the mentality conveyed so exactly or critiqued so cuttingly in fiction.

And yet… For all of these strengths, I don’t know that I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed the reading experience as a whole. The students may be lifelike, but they’re also fairly insufferable, and although the writer seems aware of that, it’s hard to root for them to do anything but improve as people, which, without getting into spoilers, is not quite how the narrative trends. There’s a non-consensual drug trip that introduces a potential supernatural element into the mix as well, and I think the issue would have been better off resolved one way or the other, rather than remaining ambiguous throughout.

Do I love the fact that the frum Jew faces temptation from peers who are more secular but still clearly members of the same faith with some common touchstones and values of the sacred? Of course. And I really appreciate how rooted the book is in its Judaism overall; I don’t believe an outside audience would be lost, but I hadn’t realized how refreshing it could be for a story featuring my religion to dispose of the explanatory comma spelling out each and every offhand remark. This is a tale that trusts you to already understand about Purim and davening and plenty beyond, or at least be willing to look such items up on your own time. That is truly a rare gift; I only wish I could bring myself to care more for the petty figures at the heart of it.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Wishtree by Katherine Applegate

Book #31 of 2021:

Wishtree by Katherine Applegate

This is a weird little middle-grade story narrated by a talking tree, detailing its efforts to find a friend for a local girl and encourage the rest of the neighborhood to stand up against the recent xenophobia targeting her family (probably Islamophobia in particular, although that’s not spelled out precisely). It’s an experimental sort of narrative, but one that doesn’t really work for me as a reader, in part because I don’t especially care for the protagonist’s character voice. I’ve gotten invested in stranger storytellers before, but this one is too lacking in relatable interiority to latch onto and understand. Its recruitment of crows and other animals to deliver messages to the humans also reminds me too much of Charlotte’s Web, or of author Katherine Applegate’s own The One and Only Ivan.

Still, the book isn’t a complete trainwreck. I enjoy the tiny bit of worldbuilding about different species naming conventions — opossums name themselves after something they fear like HairySpiders or Flashlight, skunks name themselves after pleasant smells like RosePetal or FreshBakedBread, etc. — and of course the underlying moral of acceptance and embracing diversity is a great one. But there’s a lot here that never quite clicks into place, which tends to blunt the appeal of the more positive aspects.

[Content warning for gaslighting]

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Dawson’s Creek, season 1

TV #11 of 2021:

Dawson’s Creek, season 1

I think I was too young when this show first aired to watch it then or hold any nostalgic attachment now, and I’m old enough at this point that I still don’t have an easy identification with the teenage protagonists. Both in the age of the cast and the era when it was made, I’m rather on the outside here — which renders it a curious cultural artifact, but rarely one that moves me. Even the problematic elements like a teacher-student love affair (in which the latter partner is painted as the predatory one), abusive police behavior, or the occasional transphobic remark feel less disappointing than they likely would in a contemporary project.

It is fun to see actors I know from later work looking so youthful and figuring out their craft, and the plot is starting to sporadically catch at my attention as actual character arcs are introduced, even if that’s mostly tied up in romances so far. (To the extent that I care, I’m shipping Joey and Pacey, whose dynamic reminds me of other pairings I’ve enjoyed like Logan and Veronica on Veronica Mars or Barney and Robin on How I Met Your Mother — relationships that seem as though they arise once the writers understand their characters and how they click on-screen, rather than being decided more arbitrarily in advance.)

High school drama is not my favorite genre of television, and a lot of this one’s debut season comes off as fairly generic to me. But I’m interested enough to stick with the story for at least a little while longer, and that excellent Friday the 13th episode proves that the series has some potential spark to it. Let’s see if it gets any sharper after this.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

Book #30 of 2021:

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #2)

Not quite as powerfully moving as the previous novella, but still well above much of the fantasy genre. In this story, returning protagonist Cleric Chih is waylaid on their travels by a pack of hungry tigresses, who briefly take on human form when they greet the cats with courtesy. Scheherazade-like, Chih puts off their death even longer by recounting an old tale of a tiger queen who fell in love with a scholar, a queer romance that’s remarkable in this setting only for the different species of the two and not their common gender. As their audience corrects the cleric with their own version of the legend, author Nghi Vo raises challenging questions about the reliability of either account and the inherently biased nature of narrative itself. The truth, one ultimately suspects, lies somewhere in the middle.

We get more of a sense here of the initiate themself, who spent most of the first volume listening and recording rather than talking. They are quiet but brave, determined to take good notes for their order even as they stare fate in the fangs. There’s minimal linkage between the books or evidence of any larger plot, but the standalone adventure and its nested fable are each captivating enough regardless. I’ve sped through these scant pages, and at this point I will happily return to the Singing Hills for any further sequels.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny

Book #29 of 2021:

The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny (The Chronicles of Amber #5)

These Amber sequels have never really lived up to the promise of their series debut, and since this fifth book brings the initial story arc to a close, I think it’s a good moment to cut my losses and bow out as well. (I am tempted to pick up the tarot-themed next volume simply for its title, the unintentionally-hilarious Trumps of Doom, but I can probably restrain that urge.)

Author Roger Zelazny has always spent more time referencing important characters and concepts than showing exactly who or what they are and why they matter to the protagonist — which is fine while he’s an amnesiac early on, but makes less structural sense now and entails that any major development or revelation is still eliciting more shrugs than gasps from me as a reader. Similarly, although I don’t need a Sandersonian system of logical rules for the magic, it would be nice to have simple expectations that could be either met or subverted in interesting ways, rather than the constant feeling of deus ex machina at each new spell.

I’m sort of airing my frustrations about the Chronicles as a whole here, but this novel also just has fewer individual scenes that are particularly engaging. There’s some warmed-over Norse mythology with Huginn and Yggdrasil, but the plot mostly consists of Corwin blundering around the land of his enemies and then facing off against one last treacherous sibling. It’s not a complete misfire, nor even a marked drop in quality from the previous adventure, but it shows little of the spark that first drew me into this world.

[Content warning for incest and racial slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott

Book #28 of 2021:

Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott

This pseudonymous Agatha Christie novel is reportedly quite autobiographical, but I’ve personally found it to be a fairly aimless bildungsroman, tracing its protagonist’s life from childhood to early marriage without much of an overarching plot. It’s also full of the writer’s less endearing quirks, like people being able to intuit that a stranger is planning to commit suicide just by looking at their face, and of course a wholly unnecessary inclusion of antisemitism and racism, including the n-word. Overall the book presents a reasonable character study, but if you aren’t seeking insights into the author’s own history — which hardly seems her intent anyway, given the use of a pen name — I don’t know if it’s worth the effort. Although a few individual scenes are striking, the story as a whole isn’t on the level of the first Mary Westmacott title Giant’s Bread, let alone Christie’s typical whodunnit fare.

[Content warning for rape culture and sexual assault.]

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: I Am Not Okay With This, season 1

TV #10 of 2021:

I Am Not Okay With This, season 1

Another 2020 Netflix original that was unfortunately cancelled after just one season due to COVID-19 impacts on studio production. As with Teenage Bounty Hunters, there are plenty of dangling threads here suggesting that the writers were instead expecting the show to be renewed, but this time the single installment functions pretty well as an unintended standalone: definitely open-ended, but with a fair bit of emotional closure packed into the finale before everything goes off the rails again. (And, since this one is an adaptation of a graphic novel, audiences could theoretically seek out the rest of the plot in its initial form.)

It’s more or less a Carrie riff, wherein a teen pariah starts developing telekinetic powers, but the humor is delightfully wicked and the characters have some interesting complications, including the protagonist’s crush on her presumed-straight best friend. Centering a story on a queer girl still feels quietly radical in this day and age, and the series around her is a fine showcase for lead actress Sophia Lillis — who on the heels of Sharp Objects and IT is really making a name for herself finding the warmth in these damaged young roles.

The entire run is only seven short episodes, and while I don’t know that I’d ever feel drawn to rewatch the title, I have enjoyed and will miss it.

[Content warning for gore, suicide, death of a parent, and death of a pet.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

Book #27 of 2021:

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

A dark and violent YA tale, predicated on the idea that although a vampire’s first bite infects the victim with an all-consuming thirst for blood, they don’t turn fully undead until they finally give in and feed on another human in turn. There’s some interesting worldbuilding around that premise, especially in the titular ghetto that keeps the infected walled away from everyone else, but I feel like the addiction element is not handled consistently throughout, and I don’t care much for the characters either. (I am largely over the trope of a teen girl being the one true love of a handsomely brooding immortal ten times her age, and this protagonist in particular doesn’t always seem to be acting from a place of legible motivation as she drives the plot.) It’s a competent enough story that I don’t want to rate it less than three-out-of-five stars, and I’m sure there are readers who will find it more to their taste, but it’s left me a little chilly myself.

[Content warning for parental death, transphobia, and erotic bloodplay.]

★★★☆☆

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