The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

Book #208 of 2019:

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson

This is one of those popular history volumes that’s a deep dive into a fairly narrow topic, and I definitely learned a lot about the shipwreck incident that’s usually rendered as just a sentence or two in the account of how America was drawn into the first World War. I especially had no idea that so many surviving passengers had written about their experiences (as obvious as that now seems in hindsight). With a wealth of material in the form of those memoirs and other primary documents, author Erik Larson is able to recreate events surrounding the fatal voyage in great detail.

Most affecting, of course, are the moments immediately after the torpedo hits, and I wonder if the overall text might have been stronger if it had stuck more closely to that window of time and wandered less afield to some of Larson’s more quixotic inclusions like President Woodrow Wilson’s love life. As with his book The Devil in the White City, I feel as though the writer has thrown together everything from his research that was at all related to the topic at hand, when more discipline could have produced a tighter and more coherent narrative.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Book #207 of 2019:

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #2)

This Percy Jackson sequel is a decent follow-up, but with a lot of issues that bother me, especially in a book aimed at younger readers. (As with early Harry Potter, the series sort of straddles the line between middle-grade or children’s fantasy and YA, and I imagine that that balance shifts over the course of subsequent volumes. But the protagonist is currently in seventh grade.)

Early on, one of Percy’s friends is called the r-word, and the hero protests, “He’s not _,” repeating the slur and giving no indication that the term and the ideology behind it are what’s truly unacceptable. There are also jokes about the same character’s weight and multiple stereotypical comparisons to “Comanche warriors,” as well as a running gag of a satyr hiding himself from a hungry cyclops by donning a wedding dress and speaking in falsetto. Although such cross-dressing does feature in some of the classic Greek myths that author Rick Riordan has drawn upon for this franchise, it’s a dated use of gender as punchline that reads differently in the twenty-first century.

I’m sure many kids and even adults who pick up this novel either will not notice the above concerns or will simply shrug them away. But I’ve found them to represent a pretty glaring departure from the lighthearted fun of the previous story, and there isn’t enough substance in this new quest plot to distract from that. I’d like for Riordan to be more mindful in how he writes about people’s differences, but I’d also like weightier consideration of the peril in these adventures and further divergence from the original mythology canon. We’re two years into Percy’s narrative at this point; it’s well past time for some worldbuilding details to distinguish this from any other modernization.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

Book #206 of 2019:

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

This intergenerational drama reads fine on the surface, but so many elements ring false upon a moment’s reflection. Like the fact that the central family is repeatedly described as Catholic but never shown doing anything religious, or that the college professor complaining about millennial students is actually young enough to be in that generation herself, or that her teenage nephew shows no sign of having any friends, teachers, or other social structure outside the home. These two viewpoint figures are joined by an unwieldy additional five, and their various subplots progress erratically and seldom intersect as the novel goes along. Fairly major life decisions are neither explained nor explored, which further distances the reader. For this sort of story to work we have to care deeply about the characters, and that’s challenging when everything feels so hollow.

[Content warning for eating disorders, miscarriage, and uncritical use of the r-word and related slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Movie Review: Cooties (2014)

Movie #11 of 2019:

Cooties (2014)

Even by the standards of low-budget horror schlock, this zom-com is pretty bad. There’s potential in the premise of elementary teachers fending off their infected pupils, but too much of the intended humor relies on nothing but gross-out gore effects and the inherent transgressiveness of violence to and by child bodies. The tone is all over the place too, and the parameters of the fictional setting don’t feel coherent even before the outbreak hits. The big-name cast members are mostly game, but they’re wasted on this material.

[Content warning for repeated misgendering, along with all of the above.]

★☆☆☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Book #205 of 2019:

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

This story of a New York City Jewish family on the verge of divorce has well-drawn (albeit realistically frustrating) characters and some sharp observations on marriage, parenting, and gender roles. I like the late perspective shift that complicates our understanding of the Fleishman dynamics and raises questions of narrator reliability. But at the end of the day, it’s a literary novel about rich people going through midlife crises, which is every bit as depressing and exasperating as it sounds. There’s also just a whole lot of sex and masturbation, which I personally could have done without. I’m sure some readers will love all of the above, and I’d happily check out further works by the clearly talented debut author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, but this wasn’t an ideal book for me.

[Content warning for graphic descriptions of childbirth, sexual assault, child pornography, and revenge porn.]

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Nightbooks by J. A. White

Book #204 of 2019:

Nightbooks by J. A. White

In this delightfully spooky middle-grade adventure, a young horror fan keeps his witch kidnapper at bay by telling her a series of scary stories. It’s a smart modern blend of Hansel and Gretel with The Thousand and One Nights, and both the smaller nested narratives and the larger framing device are sure to please the Goosebumps crowd (or whatever today’s comparable phenomenon would be). There’s a late twist that genre-savvy older readers will likely see coming, but it’s deployed well and is no less enjoyable even when guessed in advance. This novel has a lot of heart to it, and it deftly captures the fun of frightening fiction without ever growing too terrifying itself.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Book #203 of 2019:

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

This experimental novel starts out like a cross between Memento and House of Leaves before taking a detour through Neverwhere and ending up finally at Jaws. In other words, it’s a story about an amnesiac receiving messages from his former self, wherein the actual printed text on the page sometimes forms a sort of concrete poetry or otherwise functions in ways we wouldn’t expect, and a manic pixie dream girl leads our everyman protagonist through a hidden underside of Britain on their way to hunt a shark. Only this is a conceptual fish that swims in the semantic ocean of human cultural interactions, and it’s the living meme that ate his memories in the first place. It’s a weird book!

Yet somehow in the hands of debut author Steven Hall the daftness mostly all works, even if it’s ultimately a narrative that hints at complexities rather than developing them for us outright. It’s also a very empty fictional universe — I count just five characters, no more than three of whom ever share a scene — and although that further detracts from the worldbuilding, it adds a lonely and haunted aspect that fits the self-reflective mood of the overall piece. Like the shark or the first Eric Sanderson, there’s a lot to this tale that feels just out of sight, as though if we had finished each chapter just a little bit faster, we might have caught a glimpse of the truly significant events that passed beforehand. But instead we’re left with the rustling whisper of ripples spreading out across a dim surface in their wake.

I don’t quite love the volume as a finished statement, but I find that I can’t stop thinking about it. And I’ll take ambitiously flawed over perfectly competent any day.

[This title was suggested to me by a Silver-level Patreon donor. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation today at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke!]

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #202 of 2019:

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Another entry in the burgeoning genre of #ownvoices fantasy books that draw upon the traditional folklore of their authors’ cultural heritage. In this case, that’s Mayan mythology, which I knew little about beforehand. I’d call the result a win for representation, but somewhat unremarkable for the story itself, which offers up a variety of stock character types and plot developments and never really grabs my attention. (Cross Cinderella with Persephone and you’re basically halfway there already.)

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is rather adamant that this novel should not be classified as Young Adult, and although I agree generally that those of us in the contemporary literary sphere are too quick to put that label on female-written fantasy, I see little about this particular title that doesn’t qualify. Teenage heroine, coming-of-age narrative, supernatural love interest, intense focus on feelings but fairly chaste physicality — there’s nothing wrong with such elements, but they do have YA written all over them.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Book #201 of 2019:

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #1)

This mature urban fantasy is a major departure for author Leigh Bardugo, both in genre and in tone. Although its college-age characters aren’t significantly older than her YA Grishaverse bunch, the traumas they face are so much darker than anything encountered in that high fantasy franchise. Her talent remains, but I can’t imagine all of her existing fans will be quite eager to follow in this new direction.

The story posits that the eight original secret societies of Yale University are not just networks of privileged connection, but also hidden dens of somewhat-depraved sorcery — with the titular ninth house existing as a sort of oversight agency to prevent wizarding excesses from getting truly out of hand. Bardugo is a Yale graduate and admitted member of one of these clandestine organizations herself, and she draws on that experience for many of the key details of this novel. So many of the buildings are exactly as she describes them that she has mentioned in interviews the idea of conducting a book tour to show off the campus’s gothic architecture. Even sight unseen, the writer’s evocative prose makes it easy to picture these structures and believe they could hide the occult.

The narrative itself is a fairly straightforward noir investigation, in which a hardboiled cynic doggedly pursues the truth and gets progressively more beat-up for her efforts. That protagonist, a street kid plucked from obscurity due to her ability to see ghosts, is very well-drawn, as is her upperclassman mentor, a blue-blooded Richard Gansey type. I don’t quite love how the case resolves, but I enjoy these characters and the still-open mysteries of their setting enough to come back for another go. I just need to remember to steel myself more than I would for a typical Bardugo offering.

[Content warning for self-harm, drug abuse / overdose, revenge porn, possession / mind control, coerced prostitution, PTSD, coprophagia, and rape including child rape. And probably some other topics that are now slipping my mind. The overall mood of the piece is not so nihilistic that I would call it an example of violence-for-the-sake-of-violence grimdark speculative fiction, but sensitive readers should tread cautiously all the same.]

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Long Blink: The True Story of Trauma, Forgiveness, and One Man’s Fight for Safer Roads by Brian Kuebler

Book #200 of 2019:

The Long Blink: The True Story of Trauma, Forgiveness, and One Man’s Fight for Safer Roads by Brian Kuebler

This is a true story about my cousin Ed Slattery, whose wife was killed and two boys gravely injured when a drowsy semi truck driver crashed into their car in 2010. Ed and I are not especially close, but his grief and the other repercussions of that day have echoed throughout our family for years. I’m grateful to journalist Brian Kuebler for producing a book that can begin to share with a wider audience not only the tragedy that Ed has suffered, but also the challenges that he faces in making life more accessible for his now-disabled son Matthew and his tireless efforts in advocating for trucking industry safety reforms.

Ed asked me to read the book and give it an honest review, and although I don’t know that I can be completely objective, I’ll try. I do think it would be an incredible and heartbreaking account even without the personal connection, as well as a terrifying reminder of how suddenly and completely a person’s whole world can shatter. Kuebler has been reporting on the Slatterys since a few months into their first hospital stay, and he is able to provide all the details of this awful experience — from Susan’s death and the children’s medical needs (and accompanying astronomical bills) to a lawsuit and criminal case; from meetings on Capitol Hill to a widower’s quest to understand and be understood by the man who gave him that status.

It’s a powerful story, but sometimes frustratingly told. This is Kuebler’s first book, and the language doesn’t flow particularly well. There’s repetitive word choice, clunky sentence structure, strained similes, and all manner of typos. More often than not, I feel as though the author is getting in the way of the narrative, rather than enabling it. The most effective passages tend to be direct quotes from Ed himself, rather than the reporter’s added commentary. That’s a failure of both writing and editing, and I’m sure it will turn off some would-be readers from the very first pages.

But I’ve learned more about my cousin’s troubles as well as his resilience, and I do consider my time with this book to have been well spent. Overall I would recommend it, with tempered expectations for the quality of the prose.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter