The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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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Book Review: Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones

Book #90 of 2020:

Conrad’s Fate by Diana Wynne Jones (Chrestomanci #5)

This fifth Chrestomanci volume — in both publication and author’s suggested reading order; actually the second chronologically — has a great set-up, but it throws out too many intriguing complications that aren’t given the development they’d need to land with any proper impact. A few of these elements feel warmed over from previous stories too, like the scheming uncle of The Lives of Christopher Chant or the secret romance against family wishes of The Magicians of Caprona. This later novel is still worth reading for the amusing look at castle servant duties, the reality-shifting wizardry, and the growing friendship between its twelve-year-old heroes, yet it’s overall a weaker effort for both this writer and this series.

[Content warning for anti-Romani slurs and fatphobia.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 7

TV #11 of 2020:

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, season 7

Another solid run of this police workplace comedy (sitcop?), reliably delivering jokes but not really knocking it out of the park anymore. Brooklyn Nine-Nine has an unfortunate tendency to shy away from follow-through on any big narrative moves, and sure enough, this batch of episodes swiftly reverts to the usual status quo rather than commit to the demotion cliffhanger from the year before. And that risk aversion in writing tends to limit the impact of the comedy, for me. I do still enjoy hanging out with these characters, but I feel like it’s been a while now since the series really delivered on its full potential.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Book #89 of 2020:

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

I admire the ambition of this novel to build up an alternate world history across six centuries — in which the Black Death kills off almost all of Europe, and China and a Muslim empire become the dominant geopolitical powers instead — but for the most part I can’t say I’ve actually enjoyed reading it. Structurally, the book jumps from era to era like A Canticle for Leibowitz, with the added wrinkle that the same three figures recur throughout, reincarnating but mostly not remembering their former lives until they die again. That’s one of the elements that doesn’t really work for me, since I don’t see enough continuity among these disparate folks to track them as coherent protagonists over the course of the volume.

The scope is impressive, as are the regular meditations on topics like history, science, Buddhism, and Islam. I just wish there were more here to latch onto on a character level, and less flat exposition about major historical events! It all probably works best when considered as a series of short stories (like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, maybe) rather than one single long narrative, but even those smaller segments seldom do much to grip me on their own.

[Content warning for castration, slavery, foot-binding, torture, and rape.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers

Book #88 of 2020:

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers (Zamonia #1)

I absolutely adore this wild and whimsical adventure novel, detailing the tall-tale nautical escapades of a talking blue bear. (Life inside a stable tornado! The famous dueling liars of Atlantis! Impressment on the biggest ship in the world! Microscopic mini-pirates!) The tone is somewhere between The Phantom Tollbooth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — including quirky cartoon illustrations like the former and the latter’s gimmick of regular encyclopedia entries interrupting the narrative — and author Walter Moers displays an endlessly clever inventiveness both in the outrageous situations that Bluebear encounters and the hilarious puns and other pieces of wordplay that populate the linguistic landscape of this setting. Translator John Brownjohn also deserves a shout-out here, for finding so many English ways of channeling that spirit of fun from the original German text.

Structured like a short story collection, albeit with continuity of protagonist and some delightful eventual callbacks, this book is really just such a joy to read and reread. I’m not as enamored of the later volumes in this series, which follow different main characters without much of a common plot, but I’ve come back to the ursine captain time and time again. It’s a little disappointing on the current passthrough to realize how male-dominated it is, with even the minor background figures almost inevitably described as men, yet I still can’t help but give the title my highest recommendation.

★★★★★

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