The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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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TV Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 6

TV #9 of 2021:

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, season 6

Production on this penultimate batch of episodes was cut short by Disney’s 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm, with the truncated season eventually being released straight to Netflix in 2014. So it wasn’t created to be an intentional ending for the series, and it doesn’t read much like one either, although it would effectively stand that way until a proper conclusion came out six years later on Disney+. On the other hand, the writers have so strenuously avoided an overarching plot all along that this latest anthology doesn’t feel any less complete on its own than any of the individual runs preceding it.

As for the actual content, it’s the same mixed bag as usual. I enjoy Tup’s conspiracy thriller arc for its character-driven stakes, even if I think a secret biological implant is an unnecessary explanation for why the clones faithfully execute Order 66 in the movie Revenge of the Sith. But Yoda’s mystical quest to find out how to be a Force ghost bores me to tears, and the Jar-Jar Binks / Mace Windu team-up is one of those laughably bad moments presumably aimed at younger audiences. It’s also disappointing that this program’s breakout figure Ahsoka Tano only appears as a brief vision, given how her story leaves off before and how she’s generally one of the most effective protagonists on Clone Wars. (I understand she goes on to play a role in the sequel cartoon Rebels, but it seems a waste to keep her off-stage immediately following her dramatic choice to leave the Jedi order in the previous finale.)

From the start, this show has been motivated by the idea that there are compelling tales to be told in the space between the second and third prequel films — which were of course themselves constructed to fill in the blank areas hinted at by the original trilogy. That mission hasn’t always worked for me as a viewer, but perhaps it’s fitting that the initial conception of the series terminates here with more left for some future project under new creative control to pick up and shade in. There’s a certain beauty in a franchise that can recede fractally into its narrative like that, perpetually beckoning viewers to explore the last gaps while simultaneously carving out new ones for tomorrow.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova

Book #26 of 2021:

Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova (Brooklyn Brujas #1)

A fun #ownvoices fantasy built on indigenous Latinx mythology, rather like Percy Jackson in aiming for the younger side of the YA market. The plot is a classic careful-what-you-wish-for scenario, in which a teenager frightened by her family’s magic tries to lose her own emerging powers, only for the spell to rebound and send her relatives off into the mystical land of the dead instead. She then must chase after them on a quest to undo her mistake, come to terms with her heritage, and maybe defeat a lurking evil or two.

My biggest complaint about the novel is how unlikeable I find the initial romantic interest, but that may have been a conscious choice by author Zoraida Córdova, who eventually replaces him in that role with the heroine’s best friend, a girl who is much sweeter and kinder to her. Still, love triangles are not my favorite aspect of this genre, and his red flags like calling the protagonist a nickname she’s repeatedly told him she hates are neither cute nor endearing. I’m hoping he either improves or is made scarce in the sequels.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Teenage Bounty Hunters, season 1

TV #8 of 2021:

Teenage Bounty Hunters, season 1

I like the characters in this Netflix series, but I feel far more interested in their family drama and high school social lives than in the wacky side gig that makes up the other part of the title. Each of the twin protagonists exhibits meaningful growth over the course of these ten episodes, and one’s realization of her sexuality and ensuing queer love story is particularly well-wrought. Plotwise, though, I’m more lukewarm, and the lack of resolution on that front after a twisty finale would be frustrating even if the show had been picked up for a second season. As a one-and-done, it’s mostly just a curiosity and a valuable addition to the cast members’ future audition reels.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Eternal Life by Dara Horn

Book #25 of 2021:

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

I love a good story about angsty immortals, but it’s possible I read this one too soon after last year’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which explores a similar thematic territory far more movingly. In this 2018 novel, the protagonist is a woman who doesn’t physically age past her apparent 70s, and can restore her body to that of a teenager by setting herself on fire — which she’s done for millennia now, starting over with a new identity every time her current family and friends start to get suspicious. Her old lover has the same condition, stemming from an oath they swore back in biblical Jerusalem, and she can’t seem to ever quit his company entirely despite her best intentions.

That’s an interesting premise with some natural built-in tension points, but the result in execution is somewhat plodding. I also don’t find the heroine’s present children and grandchildren particularly engaging as characters, so it’s hard to accept that she’s so attached to them as to break her self-imposed rule and delay her next restart. Similarly unconvincing is the codependent relationship with her fellow traveler, an attraction which I understand in theory but never really feel as a reader.

As with author Dara Horn’s earlier A Guide for the Perplexed, I appreciate the #ownvoices Jewishness in this book, but I think I prefer the sections that are pure historical fiction about the Second Temple era over the fantastical developments later on.

[Content warning for depression and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #24 of 2021:

Rocannon’s World by Ursula K. Le Guin (Hainish Cycle #1)

First published in 1966, Ursula K. Le Guin’s debut novel already shows her promise, spinning a genre-bending tale that sets off her loose Hainish Cycle of related books and gifting future writers with the name and concept of the ansible, a device for instantaneous communication across the universe. The story is science-fiction, but it mostly takes place on a low-tech planet where the indigenous lifeforms seem more like the elves, dwarves, and vampires of legend than traditional aliens. And although not as cerebral as some of the author’s later works, it features her usual anthropological focus on the interactions and misunderstandings between different cultures; the scenes exploring how a person from a pre-industrial society might conceptualize relativistic spaceflight, cryogenic freezing, and the like are a particular delight. I wouldn’t exactly call this title a classic or a must-read, but it’s a strong start to a dazzling career.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Kim’s Convenience, season 4

TV #7 of 2021:

Kim’s Convenience, season 4

There’s a little plot momentum this year when Jung finally gets together with his long-term love interest, but for the most part, this is the same steady program it’s been all along: reliably funny yet rarely all that exciting, and structurally still far too separated into its different social universes of the store, the rental agency, and Janet’s art school. Granted, a few further story developments are teased in the finale, but I’m not getting my hopes up, as I’ve been burned by this series before and fully expect another prompt return to the status quo. I may have to wait to find out, though, since the next season has only just started airing on Canadian TV, and I’m not sure when it’ll hit Netflix in the US.

If this stretch of Kim’s Convenience is any changed from the preceding ones, that may be less in the new romance and more in the degree to which the main characters seem to be falling into meanspiritedness. Everyone except perhaps Kimchee feels a bit harsher towards one another lately, and while that’s sometimes an important driver of episode conflict, it’s seldom called out or redressed on-screen. I know that’s an avenue many sitcoms end up taking as the cast grows Flanderized over time, but it’s not exactly my favorite thing to watch.

★★★☆☆

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