The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: The Good Fight, season 3

TV #13 of 2021:

The Good Fight, season 3

This series is still doing the best job of anything I’ve seen on TV at capturing the actual experience of living through the Trump presidency, and even as that era recedes behind us, it remains validating to see these protagonists grappling with the issues of family separation, alt-right violence, judicial corruption, and so forth that have likewise commanded audience attentions in real life.

With that being said, however, this third season makes some frustrating choices that don’t always utilize that throughline to its fullest potential. Diane’s joining an underground resistance saboteur group never quite feels in-character for her, especially once it requires her to compromise attorney-client privilege, and the educational Jonathan Coulton clips that pop up each episode are annoyingly twee. The new over-the-top figure of Roland Blum is a bad tonal match for the show too, although the acting there is admittedly a tour-de-force (given how much he differs from actor Michael Sheen’s performance as Aziraphale on Good Omens the same year). And of course, Maia’s storyline is way too disconnected from everyone else’s, generally seeming as though she’s off on an entirely separate program that only occasionally crosses back to rejoin her former peers.

The overall effort is hanging together better than the worst stretches of The Good Wife, so I’m not ready to give up on this spinoff just yet — but my hopes aren’t exactly high going into the fourth / latest run, which had its production unexpectedly cut down due to the coronavirus outbreak. That would be a blow for any serial drama, and it might prove fatal for one that’s already grown this wobbly.

[Content warning for rape / #MeToo, drug abuse, SWATting, and racism.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker

Book #36 of 2021:

Over the Woodward Wall by A. Deborah Baker (The Up-and-Under #1)

This is a cute children’s fantasy adventure, sort of like a cross between The Phantom Tollbooth and L. Frank Baum’s classic Oz series. It’s also a bit metatextual, as “A. Deborah Baker” is a pen name for the real author Seanan McGuire, whose (rather adult) novel Middlegame mentions and quotes from Over the Woodward Wall as a fictitious text hiding secret lessons on alchemy. The writer later decided to expand those excerpts into a full book, giving this title a status similar to Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On, which famously originated as a story within a different work too. Readers don’t have to pick up the earlier volume first — and a younger audience emphatically should not — but coming at this one with an understanding of its original purpose does add something to the experience.

I initially expected to give this project a four-star rating based on how it starts, but the ultimate shape of the plot is largely a sequence of unrelated encounters, and the ending feels somewhat sudden and anticlimactic. I’m invested enough to check out the forthcoming sequel, but the present narrative doesn’t resolve quite as strongly as it begins.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones

Book #35 of 2021:

The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones

It’s always neat to see a fantasy story built on Welsh mythology, but the plot to this one is a slower and pretty generic quest narrative, and I haven’t quite found the protagonists interesting enough to justify spending so much of the novel with just the two of them journeying together. (And the reviewers who call this a friends-to-lovers arc are mistaken — the characters don’t even know each other at the start, and they are clearly set up as mutual romantic interests as soon as they first meet.) The antagonist is a fairly one-note greedy landlord too, and the atmosphere isn’t as spooky as I’d like for all the zombie revenants wandering around the countryside. I do appreciate that the hero has a chronic pain condition, and the inclusion of a friendly undead goat is an unexpected delight, but overall this book has only sporadically managed to grab my attention.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Fleabag, season 2

TV #12 of 2021:

Fleabag, season 2

I’m aware that I’m joining the chorus here, but it’s frankly astonishing how much Fleabag has improved in its sophomore outing — possibly more than any program I’ve seen since Parks and Recreation. Although still relying slightly on cringe humor, now that the protagonist is no longer sabotaging herself with meaningless sex and blurting out awkward things seemingly just for the joy of that chaos, the show has turned into a really thoughtful character piece with relatable and grounded emotional stakes. Even the romantic attraction to her family’s priest is played honestly and respectfully throughout, when that sort of scenario would have been nothing but a sick punchline in season one.

That may all sound sanctimonious, but the writing never loses its comic instincts, and the scenes are even funnier coming from a place that understands these people so deeply. Over six short episodes nearly everyone in the cast goes through a significant personal plot arc, and the laughs in service to those storylines are genuinely hilarious. I’m almost tempted to recommend new audiences skip the first run altogether, but it probably does help to bring that background knowledge into the better stuff.

I don’t know if I’d say this works great as the conclusion to the overall series that creator / writer / star Phoebe Waller-Bridge later announced it would be, and there’s an intriguing development with the fourth-wall-breaking asides that feels particularly unfinished at the end. But as a somewhat open tragicomic exploration of love, it’s a remarkably strong viewing experience.

[Content warning for miscarriage.]

★★★★☆

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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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