Book Review: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket

Book #77 of 2020:

Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket (All the Wrong Questions #4)

I’ve been somewhat lukewarm on this prequel series, but it goes out on a suitably climactic high note, with most of the action confined to the tight spaces of a speeding train. Lemony Snicket the author provides some of his sharpest writing yet, and young Lemony Snicket the protagonist comes to a few important realizations about himself, his associates, and the larger plot in which he’s been embroiled. Ultimately this quartet of novels never really provides the Unfortunate Events backstory that I want from it, yet it’s a generally solid middle-grade spy adventure and a fine character piece for its hero.

(Since the title of this last volume is a reference to the four questions traditionally recited at a Passover seder, I moved it up in my reading queue to just before the holiday. However, there’s not much here that resonates with the Exodus narrative. Still, Snicket the author is Jewish — and has mentioned in interviews that “by default, the characters I create are Jewish, I think” — and I appreciate that a stated goal in this book is to repair the world, an echoing of Judaism’s ethical concept of tikkun olam.)

This book: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Individual rankings: 4 > 2 > 3 > 1

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Book Review: Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

Book #76 of 2020:

Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland (Dread Nation #2)

This Reconstruction-era zombie sequel is enough of an improvement over the debut that I’m happy to bump my rating up to four stars. Overall the various elements are maybe still pulling in too many different directions, but a nebulous plot works better here with the story positioned as more of a straightforward western, complete with our gunslinging black heroines roaming the plains for vengeance, bounties, and general protection against the undead. Switching back and forth between two perspective characters this time also helps deepen them both beyond the more limited versions we saw in the first novel. In the end this is still not my favorite series, but I appreciate that it’s the rare genre project to tackle both racism and revenant hordes head-on.

[Content warning for anti-vaccination rhetoric.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: And I Darken by Kiersten White

Book #75 of 2020:

And I Darken by Kiersten White (The Conqueror’s Saga, #1)

I like the idea of this YA alternative history about the young life of a female Vlad the Impaler, but the plot throughout this first volume hasn’t gripped me just yet. Although Lada and her brother are captives of the Ottoman sultan, most of the drama stems from the personal stakes of their shared feelings for his heir, a messy love triangle that’s weakened by the prince’s bland characterization. The narrative tells us again and again that he is their friend and later the object of their attraction, but I feel as though we are rarely shown why in any particular detail.

I may read further in this trilogy if my library acquires the sequels, yet for now I’m wishing that author Kiersten White had stuck to her usual fantasy genre. I realize that Bram Stoker’s supernatural invention of Count Dracula is nothing like the historical figure, but a few well-placed vampires could really have spiced this novel up.

[Content warning for sexual assault and infanticide]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: His Dark Materials, season 1

TV #8 of 2020:

His Dark Materials, season 1

For all its spoken exposition, this literary adaptation somehow manages to be downright inscrutable in terms of motivation and worldbuilding, such that neither the characters nor their setting feel anywhere near as fleshed-out as they do on the page. (The climactic battle for the panserbjørne throne, for instance, comes off as simply good bear versus bad bear, with no deeper nuance as to why the outcome would matter.) And although I understand the impulse to introduce Will Perry earlier in the series, the writers have come up with nothing for him to actually do, leading to endless check-in scenes with him, his mother, and their stalkers that cycle through the same stale beats sans any meaningful progression. It’s like when Game of Thrones had Theon Greyjoy spend a whole year being tortured, unwilling to exclude him from a book he wasn’t in but unable to find a way of incorporating him into any of the other ongoing storylines.

The biggest flaw in this project, however, is its treatment of dæmons, the animal companions who are the external representation of people’s souls. Every human in Lyra’s world should have a dæmon by their side at all times, and they should be interacting with them regularly as our young heroine does. Yet in practice, these creatures are missing from most shots — with an offhand reference to staying hidden in pockets — and rarely provided any dialogue or particular characterization. As a result, several big moments related to dæmons and their mythos fall completely flat, since the audience has been given no compelling reason to truly care about them.

Now, the casting is pretty great, and I love the decision to turn Lee Scoresby from a stoic cowboy into a motormouth Lin-Manuel Miranda type. No single episode is a complete bust, and I appreciate that the show has the courage to stick with the original dark ending to the first novel (as the 2007 film did not). I’m probably invested enough to watch another season, but I can’t say I’m really looking forward to it.

★★☆☆☆

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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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