The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Book #98 of 2020:

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney

I’ve been reading a lot lately about disease outbreaks as a way of understanding the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, and this book from 2017 is a solid overview of the influenza pandemic that ravaged the global population last century. The misleadingly-named ‘Spanish’ Flu ultimately infected one out of every three people worldwide with an estimated death toll of 50 to 100 million, and although we all hope the current coronavirus will fall well short of those numbers, it’s probably the closest analogue for historical comparison.

My three-star rating for this title reflects its discursive organization, with little apparent structure guiding which chapters occur when, as well as the fact that author Laura Spinney doesn’t really provide satisfactory answers to the question she raises of why such a massive upheaval has so faded from the public consciousness. Still, the work overall is quite informative, and I recommend it for anyone interested in seeing how society handled these circumstances the last major time they arose.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Movie #5 of 2020:

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

This is the first Star Wars release in my lifetime that I didn’t see in theaters, partly due to new parent challenges and partly because of the mixed-to-negative reviews it seemed to be getting everywhere. Now that it’s out on Disney+ and I can watch it from the comfort of my sofa… it turns out I actually really like it!

The script definitely makes a few odd choices, but for the most part that weirdness lies in the relation of this film to the larger Skywalker saga (as well as the unfortunate reduction of Leia’s role to what scraps of dialogue could be cobbled together from the previous episode’s unused footage after her actress passed). There’s some major new backstory presented as an unearned fait accompli, and quite a bit of backtracking that suggests a behind-the-scenes power struggle among the respective writers. Star Wars as a series has sort of always had those issues, but they’ve seldom felt so egregious as they do here.

Nevertheless: if you can approach the movie on its own terms, it’s a fun, funny, and exciting capstone to this trilogy (and what’s come before, to a lesser extent). Fans will find plenty to nitpick over, but also great character moments and cool additions to the Force mythos which make this galaxy a more interesting setting. For a franchise that lives as much in the stories off-screen as on — both canonical and imagined — I can’t fault the basic shape of the plot. Finally seeing it has surprised me in good ways and in bad, yet on balance I’ve certainly enjoyed the ride.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing by Maryla Szymiczkowa

Book #97 of 2020:

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing by Maryla Szymiczkowa (Profesorowa Szczupaczyńska #1)

The idea of a nineteenth-century Polish Miss Marple has potential, but I haven’t found the characters or plot in this series debut to be especially interesting. The amateur detective in particular seems motivated to look into the case largely out of boredom with her comfortable lifestyle, and her breakthroughs often feel like guesswork more than deductive cunning or even vague intuition. There’s also some awkward writing throughout, and although that may be due to the translation, the novel overall isn’t strong enough to lead me to be charitable there.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Shameless, season 1

TV #12 of 2020:

Shameless, season 1

I like most of this large Chicago family, and I especially enjoy the hardscrabble depiction of their poor financial straits, which is pretty rare for TV. The Gallaghers’ lives are precarious in any number of ways, and seeing them cleverly hustle both in and outside of the law to make ends meet and weather a steady succession of crises is generally a whole lot of fun.

But tonally, I don’t know that I’m entirely vibing with this show. There’s a lot of rape in the debut season, often either not framed as such by the writing or treated as a punchline (or both). There are a few broad cartoonish elements that stick out for me as well, and the uneven plotting leaves many ongoing arcs feeling unintentionally unresolved. Any serialized program is of course going to keep some threads open for the future, but overall I expect a more impactful and satisfying conclusion than Shameless is able to deliver this first year.

Also: love interest Steve is both a worthless character and a bit of a sociopath. I really hope the writers realize how little he brings to the table and that he’s nowhere to be found after this.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

Book #96 of 2020:

My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

This 80s horror pastiche doesn’t win me over as early or as completely as author Grady Hendrix’s later effort The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires — set in the same town but otherwise unrelated — but it’s effective at balancing its various influences without ever feeling like a tongue-in-cheek sendup. On the one hand, this is a story about demonic possession, involving some creepy ghoulishness along the way to the titular climactic event. On the other hand, it’s a Heathers-like tale of the cruelty teens can enact all on their own, and of how painful it can be for a tight clique to shatter. There’s no real ambiguity in the existence of the supernatural here, yet for the most part, the plot plays out as just an increasingly frantic heroine scrambling to understand why her friend has changed and why no one else can see it.

(Indeed, there’s probably a version of this book I would have liked better that maintains the possibility that Gretchen is simply acting out or that Abby is losing her mind. That’s a more complex narrative space than Hendrix is interested in exploring, though.)

It’s nevertheless a dark and uncomfortable read, especially since the protagonist spends most of the novel with no particular support structure, abandoned by her family, teachers, and peers for daring to speak the truth in a time and place where distasteful occurrences are expected to be swept under the rug and ignored. There’s raw power in her ensuing despair, but it’s not exactly pleasant to experience.

[Content warning for rape, gore, gaslighting, self-harm, eating disorders, homophobia, slurs, and death of a dog.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Severance by Ling Ma

Book #95 of 2020:

Severance by Ling Ma

This 2018 novel offers an intriguing fresh take on plague fiction, in which victims are reduced to mindlessly repeating their most familiar mechanical actions until they eventually waste away. It’s almost like a zombie scenario, except that the shambling mobs are just a sad curiosity rather than any active threat to the remaining survivors. Yet this story divides its timeline between the post-apocalyptic present and flashbacks to the protagonist’s life before the outbreak, and until very near the end, the earlier half doesn’t appear particularly relevant.

That narrative structure could work — as it does tremendously in the book Station Eleven — but here it never seems like we’re learning anything about Candace Chen in the past that informs our understanding of who she is later on. Although I mostly enjoy her younger self, especially with author Ling Ma’s #ownvoices insights into Chinese immigrant and Asian-American experiences, I’m not sure we need to spend quite so many pages in the time before she even first hears of the disease.

Ultimately I’d say this is a four-star core unfortunately tethered to an overlong three-star backstory, so three stars overall feels about right. Still, the depiction of a pandemic response that includes PPE masks, travel bans, and business interruptions makes this a spookily prescient COVID-19 read.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston

Book #94 of 2020:

Heart of Iron by Ashley Poston (Heart of Iron #1)

In theory, this should be a neat space opera retelling of the quasi-historical Anastasia story, in which a young royal escapes the uprising that kills her family and is brought up in secret not knowing her true identity. Unfortunately, the execution here is hampered by shallow characterization and vague worldbuilding throughout. Several minor characters are effectively interchangeable — inspiring precisely no reader pathos when they die — and even the four viewpoint protagonists don’t have particularly well-defined motivations behind their actions. And although a certain human/android romance has potential, it ultimately feels rather inert compared to other sci-fi works like Defy the Stars or Battlestar Galactica that dig into what that would mean to both parties with substantially more nuance.

I do like the genre subversion of having the figure most YA writers would treat as the princess’s love interest actually turn out to be her cousin and gay, but overall I’m pretty underwhelmed by this novel and completely uninterested in checking out the sequel.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski

Book #93 of 2020:

The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski (The Midnight Lie #1)

This fantasy novel takes a little while to grow on me, but once the narrative clarifies into the story of a sheltered heroine learning to ask for what she wants — including the love of an alluring new female acquaintance — everything about her character arc clicks into place rather nicely. I don’t necessarily understand what that experienced stranger sees in such an initially unassuming wallflower, but at least by the end of this tale the protagonist has grown into a worthy partner for her. And that personal development is both gradual and believable enough to reward investing our sympathies.

I also like the rigid caste system that author Marie Rutkoski has devised for this isolated island society, and although I have questions about the wider world of the setting, it’s possible that’s just because I haven’t yet read her earlier series The Winner’s Trilogy, which I understand takes place across the sea. I’ll likely have to remedy that while fretting over this book’s cliffhanger and awaiting the publication of its sequel.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card

Book #92 of 2020:

These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card

This novel hops around a lot from character to character, gradually filling in the web of family relations surrounding a Jamaican immigrant who faked his death to start a new life in America. The resulting narrative is so nebulous — eventually even encompassing enslaved ancestors back in the 1830s — that I’m not quite convinced all the threads pay off as fully as they could. I also have mixed feelings about the supernatural elements suggested by the book’s title. Nevertheless, the rich characterization, reflections on lingering trauma, and #ownvoices cultural portrayal from new author Maisy Card make this a debut worth seeking out.

[Content warning for brutal depictions of slavery, rape, and racial slurs.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Spellhacker by M. K. England

Book #91 of 2020:

Spellhacker by M. K. England

I like this novel’s conceit of magic as a tightly-controlled natural resource that criminals are hired to siphon off from the government pipeline, and I definitely appreciate author M. K. England’s commitment to representing diversity of race and gender in this setting. Among other inclusive elements, it’s refreshing to see that the heroine’s love interest uses they/them pronouns (as does England themself). But I feel like the book promises clever heist action that it never really delivers on, and the worldbuilding and eventual villain motivations each come off as somewhat vaguely defined. It’s great for helping to widen the scope of who gets to save the day in genre fiction, but the story itself sometimes seems a bit perfunctory.

★★★☆☆

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