The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

Book #74 of 2020:

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

As a self-help book, this text seems difficult — albeit worthwhile — to implement in day-to-day life for salary discussions, vehicle purchases, and so on. Anyone interested in using its tips to improve their own persuasive ability in these situations should probably acquire the title for regular reference, rather than just reading over a library copy as I have. Yet it’s equally valuable as an interesting memoir of author Chris Voss’s time as an FBI hostage negotiator turned corporate consultant, full of examples of how he and his students have used honed strategies and an understanding of psychology to breeze through conflict to their desired ends. The writing is workmanlike and somewhat repetitive, but it’s kind of fascinating to watch Voss do his thing.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

Book #73 of 2020:

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

With a few caveats, this is an informative look at massive disease outbreaks from the ‘Spanish’ influenza of 1918 through more recent crises like Ebola, Zika, and SARS. The book could have been structured better in terms of an overarching message or narrative throughline, and I wish author Mark Honigsbaum had focused more on preventative measures / recovery rather than just how the individual epidemics spread and were eventually detected. I also don’t love how often he emphasizes historical scientific models being wrong or how little we still understand about plague vectors. There’s a sense of resignation to the inevitable in how these topics are framed, along with an element of chiding people for their (reasonable!) panic.

But my feelings are definitely influenced by my reading this in the midst of the global COVID-19 situation, and although it’s not necessarily the most helpful volume for understanding how we got here, I do feel like I’ve learned a lot about potentially similar cases from the past. There’s not much in this title that’s directly actionable for someone trying to survive a pandemic — or flatten its transmission curve to preserve limited medical resources — but in fairness to Honigsbaum, that wasn’t exactly his goal in writing it.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore

Book #72 of 2020:

Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore

I really adore this high-concept book about a woman who travels to a different year of her life every birthday at midnight. (When she turns nineteen, she finds herself in her fifty-one-year-old body, and so on.) The inherent drama of interacting with loved ones who haven’t shared the exact same history recalls earlier stories like 13 Going On 30, The Time-Traveler’s Wife, or The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, but author Margarita Montimore spins out a wholly original tale that I found utterly enchanting and engrossing.

The only thing holding me back from awarding this novel a full five stars is that it ends without exhaustively traversing Oona’s life, resulting in a few truncated plot threads that I was expecting to be revisited. For instance, the protagonist spends one year with friends she’s never met before, but we never do get around to seeing her meet them in the first place. The storyline still finishes with a satisfying degree of resolution, and it’s possible that a sequel will eventually pick back up and show some of those moments that are merely hinted at here, but I wanted this volume to keep going far beyond its final pages. I know that’s hardly a terrible flaw, yet the incompleteness doesn’t quite feel like a finished statement to me.

[Content warning for transphobia and heavy drug use.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood

Book #71 of 2020:

The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood (The Serpent Gates #1)

I love this science-fantasy setting and its radical diversity of race and sexuality with no bigotry in sight, but the actual plot here is dreadfully slow. And the protagonist who should be fascinating — a lesbian orc priestess who flees her sacrificial fate to help a wizard retake his planet — feels very passive to me, generally falling in with other people’s plans rather than exhibiting much motivating agency herself. The second half of the novel improves on that front, and I enjoy how the only villains are more like temporary rivals and potential future allies, but I can’t fault anyone who doesn’t have the patience to wait for this character or storyline to blossom. It does end on an upswing that’s quite promising for the next volume in the series, though.

[Content warning for torture.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones

Book #70 of 2020:

The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #4)

Returning to a book from one’s childhood can sometimes be a letdown, but I’m pleased to report that this fourth Chrestomanci volume (in the author’s preferred reading order; actually the second to be published and roughly the fifth chronologically) is far better than I had remembered. There’s a strong Romeo and Juliet vibe to the Italian setting and its feuding noble families, and Diana Wynne Jones fleshes out the new worldbuilding with the same sort of amusing slice-of-life details that help make the Harry Potter titles so enjoyably immersive.

I do wish that the character voices of our two main protagonists were differentiated more — or that the perspective jumped between them less — and I still think the novel is weird for assuming an audience familiarity with the Punch and Judy puppet shows that play such a large role in events. But overall, this is another fun magical adventure livened by the chaotic household dynamics that Jones writes so well. I regret skipping it so often on previous passthroughs of the series.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Girls with Razor Hearts by Suzanne Young

Book #69 of 2020:

Girls with Razor Hearts by Suzanne Young (Girls with Sharp Sticks #2)

I imagine it must be challenging to plot out a sequel to a book that ended by blowing up its status quo, but I’m pretty underwhelmed by the authorial choices here. Having broken free of their programming and committed to taking down the nefarious organization behind their academy, the friends from the first Girls with Sharp Sticks novel proceed to go undercover at a normal school on the flimsiest of pretexts (seeking the unknown son of an unknown investor who might be a student there). There’s some worldbuilding developments that aren’t really given space to land, and the girls spend most of their time challenging everyday sexism in a very heavy-handed fashion. Overall the volume makes little progress on any larger storyline and is quite the letdown after an excellent series debut.

[Content warning for sexual harassment and assault.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban

Book #68 of 2020:

All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban

The premise to this novel sounds like a delirious blend of The Breakfast Club and the Saw horror franchise: six high schoolers are invited to an exclusive scholarship dinner, only to find themselves locked in a room with a ticking bomb, a vial of poison, and a note saying they will only be saved if the group kills someone before the countdown ends. (I’ve also heard comparisons to the 2017 book One of Us Is Lying, but I haven’t read that one yet.) The action cuts between the teens’ increasingly frantic efforts to come to terms with their situation and flashbacks exploring their complicated history with one another.

Yet although I love all that as a concept, it doesn’t quite work for me as it plays out here. In theory the interstitial vignettes should help humanize the students and make their crisis as would-be murderers / murdered more poignant, a la the Japanese cult classic Battle Royale. But in practice the tension flags every time we jump away from the main scene, since the petty personal dramas of the past can’t possibly compare to the life-or-death stakes in the present. There’s also a late twist I found staggeringly obvious from the get-go, and it frustrates me both that it wasn’t better hidden by author Diana Urban and that none of the characters even consider the possibility at all. In general the story’s not bad, especially for an authorial debut, but I’m not exactly blown away either.

[Content warning for suicide, bullying, school shootings, underage drinking, and peer pressure.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

Book #67 of 2020:

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

The most effective parts of this novel are lifted straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, and although there’s certainly room for multiple writers to tackle dystopian societies treating fertile women as chattel, we get too little information here about what that actually entails. The authoritarian uprising stems from the fact that every species on earth seems to be devolving, with individuals giving birth to their distant ancestors — dogs breeding wolves, etc. — yet such a ludicrous sci-fi premise is likewise given only a fraction of the narrative attention or explanation it deserves. Instead we spend our time with a pregnant protagonist first seeking to connect with her birth family and then hiding out after her condition is declared illegal. The latter storyline builds to those familiar Atwood scenes, but the project as a whole is far too vague to land with much of an impact.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Foul Is Fair by Hannah Capin

Book #66 of 2020:

Foul Is Fair by Hannah Capin (Foul Is Fair #1)

I love the concept of a high school Macbeth, but the execution here — which plays out more like The Count of Monte Cristo meets Mean Girls, with a sixteen-year-old changing her appearance to seek revenge on the boys who drugged and raped her — has some issues for me. As with many Shakespearean retellings, the plot requires a certain heightened characterization that keeps these people from ever feeling like real teenagers, especially once they start literally dying off. I also have difficulty suspending my disbelief over how quickly the (anti)heroine is able to infiltrate the friend group and sow chaos, or how no one suspects the newcomer in a very small field of possible culprits.

On the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the basic pitch of Lady Macbeth murdering a bunch of privileged prep school jerks. The artificiality keeps me from feeling wholly immersed and I don’t expect I’ll read the forthcoming sequel, but I enjoy the general thrust of this narrative for sure.

[Content warning for transphobia, self-harm, and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Frozen II (2019)

Movie #4 of 2020:

Frozen II (2019)

This film has some interesting themes of responsible environmental stewardship and accountability for indigenous oppression (to the extent possible in a family-friendly production)… but boy could it have benefited from a few more drafts of its script. So many plot beats and character arcs make no sense at all, and the efforts to expand the worldbuilding of the previous movie aren’t really given enough detail to ever gel into a coherent picture.

I’m trying not to be too critical, since this is a kid’s flick that’s pretty to watch and probably fun to sing along with, but the storytelling is really not up to the standards of Disney’s best. Frozen is such a cultural phenomenon that this sequel almost had to arrive in theaters at some point, but the quality of story logic feels more akin to the sort of low-budget cash grabs that used to go straight to VHS. I’m disappointed it never comes close to recapturing the magic of the original, and thoroughly satisfied with my decision to wait and catch it on Disney+.

★★★☆☆

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