The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Doctor Who: At Childhood’s End by Sophie Aldred with Steve Cole and Mike Tucker

Book #49 of 2020:

Doctor Who: At Childhood’s End by Sophie Aldred with Steve Cole and Mike Tucker

As the final companion when the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who went off the air in 1989, the character of Ace McShane casts a long shadow over the franchise. Her nuanced characterization and complicated relationship with the Doctor — which would prove a model for later figures in the revived show — have been even further developed off-screen, including an ongoing series of licensed audio dramas that her original actress Sophie Aldred has regularly performed in over the past twenty years. At this point Aldred clearly has a deep, lived-in understanding of the role, which she brings with great effect to this, her first novel.

It’s not one of those Doctor Who stories that resolves old plot holes or offers long-delayed catharsis, simply because Ace has continued to live on and hit those narrative beats for decades now. Some of her recent Big Finish appearances have even found her in the same lifestage as this book, a middle-aged philanthropist scarred by her past but still fighting the good fight against various extraterrestrial threats. Yet whether you’ve followed those other adventures or not, this one is a cracking good time and a fascinating first opportunity for Aldred — with the help of her co-writers — to flesh out the character beyond a physical/vocal performance.

It’s also just great for teaming up the older woman with Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor and her current TARDIS team (set in 2020, with the exact timing unclear but sometime after the events of the “Resolution” special). In a way this encounter plays out similarly to 2006’s “School Reunion” that brought together 70s sidekick Sarah Jane Smith with the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler: the audience gets to check in on an old favorite, the Doctor is forced to reckon with someone long left behind, and the new companion(s) must process feelings of jealousy and worry about when their own tenure will come to an end.

Yet this is no carbon copy of that TV episode, any more than Ace is of Sarah or Yasmine Khan is of either. Aldred the writer has enough familiarity with science-fiction to spin out an engaging yarn with plenty of interesting wrinkles, and the character interactions sparkle as much as one could hope. (She’s pretty talented voicing the audiobook too, with only her version of Graham O’Brien not quite capturing the actor’s cadences.) I still wouldn’t call it a must-read, but for any long-time Whovian, it’s a whole lot of fun.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones

Book #48 of 2020:

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #3)

This has always been my favorite Chrestomanci book, even though it’s a bit of a spin-off, with the multiverse-hopping enchanter only showing up in the last third or so of the text (and not requiring any prior reader knowledge to understand and appreciate his appearance when he does). It’s not just that one could easily read this as a standalone — every time I pick it up, I find the narrative so immersive and engaging that I half-forget it’s connected to those other stories at all. I love this world of snippy students and illegal witchcraft, and how the friendship slowly blossoms among children who each begin the novel feeling lonely and ostracized in their own particular ways.

Given the English boarding school setting, this is also the volume that most resembles Harry Potter, whose publication it predates by a good decade and a half. These characters aren’t learning magic, but they’re still taking classes as a cohort and dealing with petty rivalries against the backdrop of a more serious plot and some truly inventive displays of sorcery. Although probably not the most logical place to start the series, it would be a great option for anyone still looking to find their next Hogwarts.

[Content warning for fatphobia, capital punishment, and self-harm.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America by Margaret A. Hagerman

Book #47 of 2020:

White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America by Margaret A. Hagerman

There’s an unfortunate disconnect between this 2018 book’s title / framing and its actual content, which discusses author Margaret A. Hagerman’s ethnographic study of thirty affluent white families in one midwestern community from 2011 to 2012. Although the work is interesting in its own right — especially for pushing back against the idea that children are passive recipients of socialization, rather than individual agents who actively construct ideologies about race and other matters within the cultural milieu as they grow — the researcher never really provides evidence that her findings can be extrapolated as broadly as her thesis suggests. All white kids in America have some level of privilege, but for the particular subjects that Hagerman follows, their household income level sure seems like a key element of how that advantage manifests and affects their worldview.

The conversations captured here among rich white tweens and their parents or peers are eye-opening for how members of this demographic engage with the country’s racial hierarchy, and how they come to hold opinions about race even when the adults in their lives claim to be ‘colorblind’ and opposed to racism themselves. I’m just not convinced that the text successfully makes a case for extending that process to apply to cohorts of the same race and age in other situations.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison

Book #46 of 2020:

Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison

I don’t read (or watch) a lot of westerns, but I’ve mostly enjoyed this tale of an orphaned rancher who restyles herself as a man to strike off across the frontier in search of her last surviving kin and ultimately falls in love with another woman. I just think the narrative loses a little focus in the back half of the novel, and I wish author John Larison wouldn’t rely so heavily on colorful bigotry — racism including slurs, sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism — as a shorthand for the setting and the villainy of certain characters. I get the argument for historical accuracy, but it’s hard to appreciate this as a piece of escapism when those harsh realities of our present keep dropping in.

[Content warning for mention of child prostitution, in addition to the above.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

Book #45 of 2020:

Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

A delightful middle-grade fantasy novel that incorporates elements of traditional Navajo folklore while avoiding the paint-by-numbers plot that such modernizations often entail. (I hesitate to call the work #ownvoices, since author Rebecca Roanhorse is not Navajo herself and she makes clear in an afterword that she isn’t speaking for or from the culture. But as a fellow Native American married into that tribe, she does bring a certain authenticity to the project.) The plucky twelve-year-old protagonist is a joy to root for along her quest, and I love how the narrative rewards her for her bravery and selflessness alike. This is a standalone book for now, but I’d happily come back for a sequel.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Doctor Who, season 12

TV #3 of 2020:

Doctor Who, season 12

I’m honestly still not sure how I feel about this season on balance. The Thirteenth Doctor’s debut year was designed to be maximally approachable for new viewers, and although that could sometimes feel a bit tame, I don’t think any of us expected its successor to bolt quite so far in the opposite direction. The individual episodes are pretty fun, but the season as a whole is staggeringly heavy on returning concepts, figures, and species from across the show’s history, not to mention the wide swaths of new continuity introduced for future writers to explore.

It’s an exciting space for the franchise to be in for a diehard fan like me, but there’s no way these additions to the mythos are connecting for everyone. (It can’t be a good sign that the forums spent much of this season debating the relevance of several frames from 1976’s The Brain of Morbius — which do indeed make an appearance in the finale.) There’s also little in these developments that tells a complete story in its own right, rather than just opening up intriguing possibilities that the series may or may not ever come back to.

I want more from the character arcs too, as I still don’t feel I know the current companions all that well. Yaz gets some belated characterization in the last few episodes, but Ryan and Graham are never really challenged in a way that feels specific to them as individuals. I think that’s where showrunner Chris Chibnall is struggling the most for me as compared to his New Who predecessors, who for all their own faults could generally render distinct and fully humanized roles with ease. So while I appreciate what this season does for Doctor Who on a macro level, I guess I’m less satisfied on the micro.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata

Book #44 of 2020:

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata

Ostensibly, this is a novel about a man whose late grandfather has a package come back as undeliverable after the funeral, and his efforts to track down its intended recipient, the son of the woman who wrote the unpublished manuscript inside. But that’s mostly just a thin framework to justify author Michael Zapata sharing the life story of seemingly every character even remotely involved with the matter. I don’t hate these vignettes on their own terms, but I also don’t really understand why they’ve all been included — nor why the main protagonist cares about what he’s doing and why I should as a reader.

That’s particularly true when the journey takes him to New Orleans in the direct aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Zapata provides a wrenching look at the devastation from the storm, but doesn’t seem to notice that he’s writing about the resources devoted to giving a complete stranger a book in a time when so many people needed actual help. I feel very detached from this narrative, and don’t think it adds up to much resolution in the end either.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

Book #43 of 2020:

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

This seems like one of those books that is guaranteed to frustrate a lot of readers, in that it obliquely hints at larger designs instead of ever giving us the full picture. The opening premise, after all, is less a novel than a collection of loosely-connected fables, one of which is about a student who finds a half-forgotten incident from his childhood described in just such a book. The ensuing adventure links dusty library research a la The Historian or S. with classic portal fantasies too numerous to exhaustively list out here.

(Narnia and Wonderland get specifically name-checked by the characters, but there’s a strong Dark Tower essence to both the metafictional aspects of the narrative and the general appearance of the mystical doors too. The secret organization dedicated to closing off those gateways also calls to mind The Ten Thousand Doors of January, although since that book’s publication predates this one by a mere two months, I’m assuming any similarity there is a happy accident of common origin rather than yet another influence itself.)

As you might guess, this a self-referential and elliptical piece of storytelling that probably raises more questions than it answers and often feels more like just an overheard conversation about storytelling in the first place. But sometimes that sort of approach works for me, and it largely does here thanks to the quality of author Erin Morgenstern’s prose and the vivid universe she’s able to imply. I wouldn’t want to read a tale like this every day, but once in a while it’s nice to swim out into something that expands your horizons about what the format can do.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Afterlife of Holly Chase by Cynthia Hand

Book #42 of 2020:

The Afterlife of Holly Chase by Cynthia Hand

This YA novel is built on a neat idea for a modernization of A Christmas Carol starring a corporate version of the Ghost of Christmas Past, but I have way too many unanswered questions about both the worldbuilding logistics and that protagonist’s exact motivation. I also never really feel as though it makes sense for her organization to have selected its target / her eventual love interest as their latest Scrooge to reform, since he seems basically no worse a person than any other seventeen-year-old boy. (That’s somewhat addressed near the end of the book, but not in a way that really satisfies me as a reader.)

Also: I know this is based on a classic Christmas story, but it bothers me how weirdly Christian-normative it all is. Characters declare offhandedly that the existence of life after death must mean God exists, the company has specific rules about not monitoring inside churches, and anyone who mentions not celebrating Christmas is assumed, apparently correctly, either to be against materialism or to find family gatherings painful. Outside of the Hallmark Channel, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a fictional version of New York City rendered quite so religiously homogeneous.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote by Craig Fehrman

Book #41 of 2020:

Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote by Craig Fehrman

This is a fascinating topic — or at least one aimed squarely at the center of my particular interests — and I really commend author Craig Fehrman for compiling the material behind it. As he details in his closing remarks, presidents’ books have rarely been seen as important even for their official biographers, so quite a bit of original primary research was necessary just to gather all the facts in question. And in Fehrman’s hands, those findings have been assembled into not the rote catalog I was half-expecting, but rather an intricate narrative tracing the gradual development of American literacy, literature, publishing, notions of authorship and ghostwriting, and presidency itself.

The content could have been organized better, since following a single politician from campaign book through legacy memoir and even posthumous influence often requires then doubling back to an earlier time for the next figure Fehrman considers. I also wish he had approached the subject more exhaustively, making this not merely the first account of its type but also the definitive comprehensive one. By focusing on the texts that either best reflect changing trends or were so influential themselves, we miss out on others that could still be interesting in their own right. And finally, I’m somewhat frustrated by how often the writer acts as a critic, projecting his own subjective take on what is “enlightening or enjoyable to read today” instead of simply documenting the books themselves and how they were received by contemporary audiences.

Nevertheless, I have generally found this to be a worthwhile and educational read, full of neat contrasts between the writings that various presidents have created to either pitch their candidacy or leave behind as memoir. I’d recommend it for anyone interested in history, politics, or how those might intersect with popular nonfiction.

[Content warning for descriptions of racism and sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

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