The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: A Promised Land by Barack Obama

Book #19 of 2021:

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

This memoir is a solid but not spectacular inside look at Barack Obama’s political career, from his earliest run for Illinois State Senate through his ordering of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound midway into his first presidential term. (That’s a fairly arbitrary cutoff point, but it will reportedly be followed by at least one further volume yet to come.) The former commander-in-chief is less guarded in writing than he was while in office, and he is particularly critical about the partisan Republican obstructionism that hampered his agenda. At the same time, however, he is not as reflective as one might hope regarding his failures — from targeted drone strikes against civilians to breaking his campaign promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay — or the ways in which his administration helped pave the way for his disastrous successor. The blame game in this text is interesting, especially for those backroom details which hadn’t been made public before, but too little of it lands at the author’s own feet.

Some of my dissatisfaction here originates from my own politics; although I didn’t always pay the closest attention during the Obama years, I’ve drifted to the left since then, and it’s frustrating to realize that the candidate I proudly supported in 2008 and 2012 doesn’t seem to have undergone a similar growth. Even with the benefit of hindsight, he is dismissive of progressive activists and their concerns, and too focused on complaining how his shining vision for America was forced to compromise with special interests on both sides of the aisle. As a process story for how something like the Affordable Care Act gradually took shape, it’s an informative read. As an actual argument defending the president’s intentions and achievements, it’s substantially weaker.

I write this review as a new era is dawning for the nation, with Joe Biden swearing his oath of office just today (an event as yet undetermined when the book was written). This historical moment offers a great opportunity to closely examine what has and hasn’t worked in previous administrations, but I’m frankly not sure this title gets there in the end.

[Content warning for racism and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Killing Eve, season 1

TV #6 of 2021:

Killing Eve, season 1

I have a lot of open questions about this show, some of which might fall under the category of plot holes, but are perhaps more charitably labeled as simply ‘details the writers aren’t interested in.’ At a minimum, this first season seems to revel in ambiguity, throwing out potential explanations and character motivations at times but seldom following through to confirm or reject exactly why anything is happening. As a result, much of the weight of the program rests on its performances rather than its scripts, tasking the actors with the daunting responsibility of ensuring their penciled-in reality feels remotely credible.

Luckily, those performances are generally rather good, and Jodie Comer is an absolute revelation, making choices in literally every scene which surprise and delight me. She’s hilarious in a way that keeps the spy thriller shenanigans just shy of camp, and it’s all in her line readings and not the dialogue itself, which doesn’t seem quite so sparkling when you try writing it down. Her role as the remorselessly chaotic serial killer could so quickly turn dour or empty in someone else’s hands, yet the actress instead maintains an effervescent ease throughout that’s near impossible to resist.

Speaking of which: the murderess’s cat-and-mouse game with Sandra Oh’s intelligence agent who’s tracking her is one of those complicated and unclear dynamics I mentioned above, but I have to give the series credit for — spoiler alert — turning it into an explicitly queer romance by the end of this initial year. The allure of the criminal mind often carries that subtext of sexual attraction in a story like this, but even NBC’s Hannibal shied away from unequivocally confirming that its own monster was the protagonist’s canonical love interest. Although the star-crossed Eve and Villanelle appear unlikely to find a happily-ever-after, they’ve now shared a kiss and forged an intimate connection that’s a pretty exciting setup for what comes next — even if I’ll probably still have a few logistical problems with the execution.

[Content warning for graphic violence and child endangerment.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

Book #18 of 2021:

Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #6)

I still like this series of novellas about children who temporarily stumble into various fantasy worlds and later yearn to return there, but the past few volumes have been a little underwhelming. I think the format tends to work best in the aftermath of those journeys, and this story ends with the protagonist finding her way home, before any such misgivings can set in. That also means that all of the conflicts with her classmates established in the first quarter of the text remain unresolved, which is somewhat unsatisfying from a narrative perspective. The Hooflands doesn’t feel as richly-drawn or wonderfully dangerous as some of author Seanan McGuire’s previous creations either, which makes our time in that other realm more tedious than enchanting — although readers who had a ‘horse phase’ may get more out of the resident centaurs and unicorns than I have.

Furthermore, while I appreciate the representation of an intersex heroine experiencing delayed puberty, I have concerns over how that’s echoed in her spending years consciously resisting the call to adventure once she arrives through the portal, and I’d love to hear how relevant audiences are or are not seeing themselves reflected in this character. (To me, it seems strange to suggest a thematic tie between something so outside and inside a person’s control, as though they are equivalent acts of holding onto childhood.) It’s always great to see the writer use these books to showcase this sort of diversity that’s largely absent in the genre, and I know she employed a sensitivity reader for this particular title, but I’m curious to learn whether the portrayal reads as problematic to anyone more directly affected by it, or if I’m just overthinking things as usual.

Regardless, as a whole I don’t especially care for this tale, but since it’s a flawed segment in a wider project that I continue to find engaging, I expect I’ll go on in the hopes that further sequels can recapture the magic for me.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Book #17 of 2021:

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #1)

A quiet but captivating #ownvoices fantasy novella, rich in feminist character work and immersive East Asian-inspired worldbuilding. I’m always so interested in stories like this that can compel the reader’s attention despite a complete lack of traditional narrative stakes. Here, Cleric Chih [they/them] has arrived at the former home of the empress in exile sometime after her holiness has passed, seeking to gather reference materials for their order’s archives. The only other person around is an old handmaiden, who begins to share firsthand anecdotes that alternately illumine and undermine the official histories of that complicated monarch. The result is a dazzling tale of studied rebellion that feels far deeper than the scant page count should allow, and indeed, my sole complaint beyond a slight wish for more details on the protagonist’s own life is a yearning to see what debut author Nghi Vo could have accomplished at greater length.

Luckily, although this 2020 book reads like a self-contained / standalone plot, it already has a sequel out detailing another of Chih’s research expeditions. I’m now on my library’s waiting list for that volume, and eagerly anticipating the writer’s forthcoming (though unrelated) novel The Chosen and the Beautiful, which looks to be a queer Asian fantasy retelling of The Great Gatsby. If those titles are anything like this one, they will truly herald the arrival of a bold new talent for the genre.

★★★★★

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TV Review: Kim’s Convenience, season 3

TV #5 of 2021:

Kim’s Convenience, season 3

This sitcom has always had a fairly stable status quo, so I was excited by the genuine potential for change in last season’s finale, when Jung quits his job and finally kisses his long-term love interest, who at first reciprocates but then pulls away when she remembers her boyfriend. (It’s honestly a lot like how the second year of The Office ends, now that I think about it. Huh.) Unfortunately, this stretch of the show walks back those developments almost immediately, with Jung going back to work at Handy — albeit as a junior employee and not assistant manager — and he and Shannon agreeing to pretend nothing has happened between them. It’s a bit of a letdown, even for a viewer like me who’s not particularly invested in that relationship.

The other main characters are equally static; the biggest update in their lives this time is probably Janet getting a new roommate and dealing with some minor romantic drama. And even after Mr. Kim’s big reconciliation with his son, those story engines still aren’t intersecting very much, with the convenience store business and the car rental agency tending to occupy separate spheres of the writers’ attention. I still enjoy this series just fine, but it remains a placid comfort-watch when it feels like it could easily be made exceptional with just a little more focus on pushing the protagonists through a dynamic plot with stakes that linger beyond each individual episode.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Lives of Saints by Leigh Bardugo

Book #16 of 2021:

The Lives of Saints by Leigh Bardugo

A short collection of dark fables from author Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse, some of which have been referenced before in the main novels and others that merely add further texture to the local cultures of the setting. It’s an interesting addition to series canon, especially as an in-universe religious document, but the individual entries tend to be quick and not particularly memorable. Although a later book may cast this volume in a different light, for now I wouldn’t say it’s anything most fans need to read. It’s essentially this writer’s version of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a fun side-project that will remind you of why you like the larger franchise without necessarily bringing its usual strengths of character and plot to bear.

[Content warning for cannibalism, infanticide, and claustrophobia.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart by Stephanie Burgis

Book #15 of 2021:

The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart by Stephanie Burgis (Tales from the Chocolate Heart #1)

A cute little book about a young dragon who gets cursed into the body of a human and discovers her true passion for hot cocoa. Unfortunately, it has a few issues typical of the middle-grade fantasy genre, like shallow worldbuilding and under-explained character logic, and a few seemingly distinctive to author Stephanie Burgis, like having someone see the protagonist’s new form and say she “can’t be more than twelve years old” on three or four separate occasions (over the course of this not particularly long tale). Still, it’s not all bad, and the storyline improves as it goes along and gathers more stakes. I doubt I’ll pick up the sequels, but I’d recommend this volume for a younger reader whose interests it checks.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman

Book #14 of 2021:

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman (The Rabbi Small Mysteries #1)

This series has been on my radar for a while, and although I’m not sure I’m going to read all dozen volumes, the first one is pretty neat. It’s one of those stories in which a police investigation is aided by a civilian of nontraditional wisdom and insight, but instead of an elderly spinster like Miss Marple, the surprising hero here is the only rabbi in the small New England town where a young woman has just been found murdered. He’s briefly considered and dismissed as a suspect, and thereafter strikes up a friendship with the Irish Catholic detective in charge of the case.

The portrayal of Judaism in this book is a great example of accurate #ownvoices representation, all the more remarkable for having been written back in 1964. Lots of smaller details make me smile in recognition of temple life, and author Harry Kemelman does a good job of explaining Jewish things to his Christian characters and readers, like how our prayers are mostly grateful rather than petitionary (“Thank you for X” and not “Please provide Y”). Even the ugly antisemitism that the protagonist encounters feels textured from real experience, in contrast to the sort of simple Jew-hating bigotry I sometimes see gentile writers attempt.

With so much focus on incorporating these elements of authentic Jewishness into the narrative, the actual mystery plot often seems like an afterthought — and a foreword notes that it did in fact come late in the creative process, at an editor’s suggestion. I still enjoy the finished result a whole lot, but I think I might have liked the original vision for a novel about navigating simple congregation and community tensions even better.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie

Book #13 of 2021:

The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie

A charmingly creepy departure for author Agatha Christie, who trades in her usual detective fiction for a dozen tales of the supernatural (or supernatural-adjacent). Normally when she’s written of things like possessions and premonitions, their reality is ultimately undermined Scooby-Doo-style by some more mundane explanation. Here instead, those psychic phenomena are largely either confirmed outright or left lingering in tense ambiguity. The whole volume is fairly short, so no story overstays its welcome, and the audiobook narrated by Christopher Lee is a particular delight. It’s a great read for fans of the writer or interested newcomers who don’t care as much for the mystery genre.

[Content warning for ableism and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Justified, season 1

TV #4 of 2021:

Justified, season 1

I’m not thrilled with the first hour of this show about a trigger-happy US Marshal, which has a whole lot of white supremacist violence and rhetoric used as an apparent shorthand for villainy, I assume so that audiences can know which group of white gentiles are the good guys and which group of white gentiles are the bad guys. (I’m sorry, but even for a decade ago, it’s in supremely poor taste to have characters stand in front of swastika flags and discuss their hatred of blacks and Jews when the series cast has one African American character with barely any screentime and no Jewish people whatsoever. We’re not just ideological props to justify the use of deadly force.) There’s no real effort to grapple with the dynamic that draws many actual law enforcement officers to join Neo-Nazi type movements, either; viewers are supposed to simply accept that Raylan and his colleagues abhor Boyd’s message like anyone should.

So that sets me off on the wrong foot, and I’m honestly not sure how much more of it I could have taken. But programs often adjust their formula following the pilot, and in this instance, that thankfully means that the bigotry is scaled way way down (although there remain plenty of slurs, mainly racist and homophobic). When that initial antagonist reappears, he’s still a dangerous backwoods killer, but he’s no longer blowing up black churches or complaining that Jews control the banks. The writers also do a nice job of balancing the loosely serialized elements like his rising threat vs possible reform with a fun case-of-the-week structure — which appears mostly to exist in order to give a talented pool of guest stars the chance to try on their best Kentucky accents and roll around in the delightfully colorful dialogue.

Episode by episode, this is a drama that I’m finding entertaining and engaging, full of complex simmering family conflicts, and after Deadwood and Santa Clarita Diet, I’d pretty much watch Timothy Olyphant in anything. It has some early growing pains, but we seem to have gotten past them well before the end of this debut year, and I’m excited to see where the broader story heads next.

★★★★☆

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