The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Book #110 of 2025:

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

A fun take on the magical school archetype. The setting reminds me a lot of Naomi Novik’s Scholomance, where the spellwork attracts hungry monsters from a terrifying hell dimension, although at least this time the teenaged students aren’t locked-in and left fending for themselves. In fact, the protagonist is one of their teachers, who offers a delightfully exasperated perspective on what it’s like to have to keep up with lesson-planning, grading, and career guidance while also battling such incursions.

The publisher’s blurb calls this standalone novel a “sapphic dark academia fantasy,” and I don’t know that I’d quite go that far. It’s more focused on administrative minutiae (alternating with sporadic action sequences) than the gothic aesthetic and air of mysteries I normally associate with that subgenre, and while the heroine is canonically bisexual, her main love interest throughout the text is a man. We do meet both an ex-girlfriend and a female colleague she eventually kisses, but readers looking for heavy F/F romance themes are likely to be disappointed.

Still, a queer millennial approaching middle age is a neat choice for this sort of lead, and though the plot around her isn’t the most revelatory, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, either. All told, I’m happy to give this story three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for amputation and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Meltdown by John Peel

Book #109 of 2025:

Meltdown by John Peel (2099 #5)

After a promising start, this middle-grade sci-fi series has stalled out in a major way, and I can only hope that the sixth and final volume manages to tap into that original sense of imaginative fun that propelled the earlier books. Just like in the last entry, Jame’s corner of the story about the rebellion against the corrupt ruler on Mars is the sole piece that’s really still effective here, though it remains sadly isolated from everything else. His clone brothers are meanwhile stuck in their same old patterns: the psychopathic Devon again terrorizing people on the moon, while Tristan and his new friend Genia spend the whole novel trying to track down that villainous doppelgänger (and being inexplicably accompanied by the boy’s ex-girlfriend Mora, who brings literally no relevant skills to the table). At least Shimoda finally makes headway in cracking the big conspiracy case she’s been investigating, although it’s fairly inert in how it plays out on the page.

As we head towards the conclusion, Devon is holding Earth hostage with a ship full of radioactive waste and has set up bombs to explode behind him on Luna, while the Quietus conspirators are heading off to join the Martian administrator, who’s managed to suppress the local resistance movement with his own threats of widespread violence. Will the clones meet up before the end? Will we get more of that goofy futuristic worldbuilding that initially drew me into this setting? I’m pretty sure I read this far way back in the day, but it turns out I don’t remember any of these later installments at all.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Poker Face, season 2

TV #35 of 2025:

Poker Face, season 2

I wasn’t a huge fan of this modern Columbo riff in its debut year, but it had enough charms that I gave it a grudging three-star rating overall. This followup, unfortunately, is considerably worse. I do like a few elements here and there — Giancarlo Esposito as a funeral home director in 2×2 Last Looks; the little sociopathic grade-school overachiever in 2×6 Sloppy Joseph — but for the most part, the show’s standard episodic formula is growing stale and its efforts to tell a larger serialized story are increasingly dire.

Steve Buscemi’s very distinctive voice pops up as a recurring CB radio acquaintance, for instance, who forms such a bond with the protagonist that he lets her borrow his keys and stay in his apartment for an extended time, which is quite a departure from her usual drifter ways. But we never meet him in person, or indeed even hear from him again after he’s set her up with a place to live, which seems like a remarkable unfired Chekhov’s gun. Meanwhile, ‘human lie detector’ Charlie Cale is at first running from another mobster, then inexplicably continuing her life on the road once that threat has been resolved, and then finally settling down in the NYC homebase that Buscemi’s character provides, which turns out to be a mistake that allows a villain to get close… for the express purpose of tricking her into leading the way to someone from an old case who’s now in witness protection and that she has no reason to know how to contact.

It’s a mess! The finale appears to again reset the premise to the old status quo of our heroine on the run — just from the FBI this time — and maybe that’s for the best, since it doesn’t seem like this season really knew what to do with her otherwise. It might even be the strongest ending that we realistically could have hoped for, given how the program still hasn’t officially been renewed for round three. But whether it comes back someday or not, I doubt I’ll be returning as a viewer.

[Content warning for drug abuse, gun violence, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Book #108 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel (Virgin New Adventures #6)

Andrew Cartmel served as the script editor for the last three seasons of Classic Doctor Who (1987-1989), which were also the years that produced the final protagonist team of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace. The author thus had great control over their specific personalities, which he transfers well into this first novel he contributed to the ongoing Virgin New Adventures line in the 1990s that continued their journeys through time and space after the TV series went off the air. It’s technically the middle volume in the Cat’s Cradle trilogy too, although it’s almost entirely unrelated to the book that came before it, Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt. (That story set up a strange glowing feline as a sort of avatar for the TARDIS, which was going through a bit of a crisis. The timeship is still largely out of commission here, and the cat makes a cameo appearance, but that’s about it as far as the continuity goes.) Meanwhile, two characters introduced midway through this adventure, Justine and Vincent, would reappear in the subsequent Cartmel titles Warlock (VNA #34) and Warchild (VNA #47), though that’s all I know about the later works so far.

As for this installment, it’s a thrillingly globe-hopping spectacle, set in a dystopian cyberpunk near-future in which the world is choked by smog and one corrupt megaconglomerate functionally runs everything. The Time Lord is in his full manipulative chessmaster mode, operating less as a traditional action hero and more as a quiet presence nudging pieces into place from behind the scenes. Ace is his reluctant catspaw — pun intended — and it’s clear that she’s growing into a more battle-hardened and jaded young woman than she’d previously been characterized as, although the development certainly fits her character and what all she’s been through. The Doctor drops her in Turkey with no support to recruit a dangerous group of mercenaries, one of whom she ultimately has to kill in desperate armed combat, on a mission to retrieve what turns out to be the cryogenically-preserved body of a teenage boy with latent psychic powers.

I do have a few critiques. This is a tale that’s heavy on atmospheric worldbuilding but thin on a legible plot, and the ultimate aim of the villain is to create a process for digitally uploading the consciousnesses of the uber-rich… which isn’t particularly evil save for his methods to accomplish it, which for some reason require sacrificing his wife and son. And while the Doctor foils that scheme, he doesn’t even attempt to topple the overarching system that preys on the working class — literally harvesting them for body parts after arresting and executing them on trumped-up charges — and is steadily poisoning the planet, driving girls into underage prostitution, and other such sins. He and Ace stride off triumphantly in the end despite the widespread suffering they’re leaving behind, which doesn’t feel especially earned. There’s also a totally unnecessary scene at one point when that heroine, stepping naked out of the shower to save the still-drowsy telepath from drowning in the nearby bathtub, gets groggily groped for her efforts. It’s a step up from the pervasive misogyny and threats of sexual violence that hung over John Peel’s Timewyrm: Genesys, but maybe only just — and the one genuine romance of the piece is too predicated on instantaneous attraction to ever register as a meaningful opposite.

And yet! This is overall a neat departure for the franchise, and one not bogged down in the usual lore-heavy complications. It’s full of clever insights into the Doctor and how he thinks about history, and my understanding is that its darker turn proves very influential on the volumes that follow. There’s little indication of the so-called Cartmel masterplan, in which the former editor apparently intended to reveal if the show had gone on that the Doctor was a mysterious figure from Gallifreyan prehistory — as the preceding Platt title did ironically start to explore — but we do get a strong sense that that character constitutes an ancient and implacable force hiding behind a jester’s act, somehow powerful and inscrutable beyond normal human morality, which is one of my favorite characterizations in Doctor Who. We see those hints through the eyes of the ordinary people who populate this text, as he repeatedly swirls into somebody’s life and completely upends it with but a few well-placed words.

Does it hang together as a coherent narrative? I’m not so sure. But the mood is fairly intoxicating throughout.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho

Book #107 of 2025:

Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho

An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on asking inane questions and otherwise treating the low-salary workers like dirt — but that comes at the cost of some hazy worldbuilding about the nature of the situation and an overall comedic tone that I think ultimately cuts against the effectiveness of the piece. I couldn’t really connect to the characters, either, with the amnesiac hero in particular feeling like a perpetual generic blank slate. Add to that a tepid plot and a few predictable twists, and well, I can’t say that I’ve found too much in this YA apocalyptic horror novel to actually recommend.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Book #106 of 2025:

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Ji-won is a fun protagonist: a Korean-American college student who’s been dealing with some hard times lately, but who is even more obviously having a completely unhinged and over-the-top reaction to them. Or that’s obvious to the reader of her private thoughts, at least — to her classmates and family, she seems the same quiet girl as ever, even as inwardly she’s growing increasingly fixated on her immigrant mother’s folk belief that eating the eyes of a cooked fish will bring good luck. Before long, she starts craving that delicacy raw… and from her own species, instead.

The horror of the piece creeps up on us American Psycho-style, first in unsettling dreams and then in opportunistic attacks on isolated strangers that still might just be the antiheroine’s feverish imaginings. By the time it’s clear that no, this demure teenager actually is a committed cannibal and budding serial killer, we’re too invested in her deranged POV to do anything but watch in appalled fascination. Besides, her Umma’s new boyfriend and her own obnoxious stalker are both such loser fetishizing racist jerks anyway — the former perving on her underage sister and the latter acting like his performative feminism gives him the right to claim her as a model Asian girlfriend — so is it really so bad to root for them to become her next bloody victims? I support women’s wrongs, as the bumper sticker says.

This was an absolute rush to read, and while I called the ending early on, it represents the sort of neat plotting that’s still super enjoyable to see unfold. Recommended for anyone who can handle the racism and the gore, not to mention a deliciously monstrous and thoroughly unrepentant young woman as the lead character. I daresay she’s the YA #ownvoices Dexter you didn’t even know you’ve been looking for.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

Book #105 of 2025:

Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

I read this novel back in high school, a few years after it was first published in 2000, and when I saw it recently on my mom’s shelf, I remembered it vaguely as a Michael Crichton kind of science-fiction, channeling the writer’s deep background research in service to a thrilling plot. As it turns out, however, the writing style is more akin to something like Ayn Rand or Daniel Quinn, with authorial mouthpieces debating philosophical worldviews back and forth until the stronger argument eventually prevails.

There’s really not much story here — although it begins with the fun premise of an alien arriving on earth and asking to speak to a paleontologist, the bulk of the text follows the two of them having a long drawn-out conversation about the potential existence of a divine creator, with the extraterrestrial insisting that that’s the unavoidable implication of all available evidence and the atheist human stubbornly refuting that claim. A minor subplot involves a Stephen King-esque fundamentalist terrorist scheme to destroy the fossil collection at the protagonist’s museum, and events take a somewhat surreal turn in the last fifty pages once that situation resolves, but otherwise, the only real arc beyond the cerebral exchange of ideas consists of our hero processing his terminal lung cancer and swiftly impending death.

As for the visitor’s thesis, it’s largely a rehashing of old creationist talking points, though they might be new to a given reader. There are a lot of factors around either our planet or the universe itself which would seem incredibly unlikely to have arisen by chance, which suggests to such thinkers that an intelligent designer is behind it all. To this author Robert J. Sawyer adds revelations that similarly defy coincidence, like mass extinctions on the other being’s homeworld overlapping exactly with ours, which collectively tip the scales towards the reality of some sort of god, loath as the scientist is to accept that.

I do enjoy the characters and the depiction of academia here, but it’s fair to say that not much happens in the book, nor is there any pressing tension besides the man’s diagnosis and the extremists steadily approaching his institution. That final 15% or so is also deeply weird: a nearby star suddenly goes supernova, a presence intervenes to block its effects, and the spaceship blasts off to investigate whether it’s the literal deity or not, with the patient brought along in cryosleep to extend his remaining days. It’s a mindbending excursion that sits awkwardly against the majority of the title before it, and contributes to the overall uneven tone.

I don’t want to be too harsh about the work. It’s kept me turning its pages at least twice in my life now, and I’m sure the logical thrust of the piece could blow one’s mind if encountered at just the right moment. But the strongest supporting arguments tend to be the purely invented ones, which makes the whole crisis of faith and its resolution come across as fairly contrived. That wouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker in a storyline with more going on, but since the Socratic dialogue is the entire point of the thing, it rings a bit hollow for me in the end.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

Book #104 of 2025:

Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

This is the latest “Secret Project,” a name that author Brandon Sanderson gives to the books he’s written in his spare time outside his regular public writing schedule and produced via crowdfunding instead of traditional publishing. Although technically a standalone piece, it is set within his sprawling cosmere saga, which means the standard preliminaries apply: you don’t necessarily need to have read any or all of the previous releases in that massive setting, but there are common histories and worldbuilding principles that the text assumes you’re probably familiar with. The immediate plot is focused enough that a total newcomer could still follow along, but the bewildering array of characters, factions, species, and types of ‘investiture’ magic can be overwhelming even for those of us who have done all the relevant homework.

This novel is interesting for being an expansion of the writer’s 2014 novella Sixth of the Dusk (previously collected in the anthology Arcanum Unbounded). That is, it’s a sequel that incorporates the earlier story — with minor edits for tone — as a sequence of flashback chapters, which is an approach I don’t think I’ve seen before. In that initial excursion, the protagonist is a native tracker in a Polynesian-inspired culture who navigates a deadly island while reflecting on the more technologically-advanced outsiders who have recently come to his planet. In this fuller version, it’s clearer that the new arrivals are Scadrian — using powers endemic to the Mistborn books — and the entry takes place in some future era, when that civilization is a militaristic space empire. Here an older Sixth ventures into the Cognitive Realm, in search of allies or other means to resist the impending colonialist forces.

I like this tale when it focuses on either our hero or his co-lead, the young dragon Starling. She doesn’t have as well-defined a motivating arc to begin with, but once their paths cross about midway through the book, she’s fun to watch trying to find a way out of their particular predicament. I also appreciate how a central theme of the work concerns the importance of oral knowledge and other traditional folkways, both for their own sake and as a method for resisting imperialism.

I am less sold on the many crossover elements, and the increasing feeling throughout the franchise that tracking them has been left as an exercise for the hyper-attentive reader. Major canon revelations are nice, and subtle Easter egg connections back and forth can be a delight, but I shouldn’t have to look up the right wiki or subreddit or explainer video to be sure I’m catching everything. The balance is off here in my personal opinion, which is a deepening complaint I’ve had about the cosmere for a while now. The present adventure remembers to tighten its scope at times to let the main characters shine, but their supporting cast is thin and the larger impacts regularly feel like they’re getting in the way of the plot at hand. Sanderson at his best can deliver such lore in service to the struggles of specific personalities, but when those two impulses are in conflict, I will always favor fiction that prioritizes the people over the grander continuity details.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green

Book #103 of 2025:

Nightingale’s Lament by Simon R. Green (Nightside #3)

Not great, but I like it better than I did on my last read in 2019. I’ve described the Nightside books before as having rhythms similar to a police procedural TV show, and after a pilot outing and a fairly thrilling followup, this third volume represents our first real filler episode. It’s still fun, to be clear! Author Simon R. Green continues to spin some really imaginative setpieces and character concepts for this urban fantasy setting, and I appreciate that Shotgun Suzie and Razor Eddie are both mentioned but absent, given their prominent roles in the two previous adventures. In their place, we’re introduced to a few new faces who will go on to become recurring presences too, most notably the unkillable zombie teenager Dead Boy.

The problem is, there’s not much powering the plot this time around. The series debut carried the inherent energy of introducing everything, and the second novel offered cataclysmic stakes with the forces of heaven and hell ripping apart the city in the hero’s wake. In this next story, it’s just that same noir-ish detective taking on a more mundane case, investigating a singer whose soulful performances are driving audience members to suicide. That sort of reset might have been necessary — we can’t have the apocalypse every installment, even in the Nightside — but it’s a pivot that ideally should have come with some personal angle for the protagonist to spark our investment. Here, he’s merely a bloke on a job.

The larger mystery arcs involving his unknown enemies and vague portentous rumblings about his vanished inhuman mother are featured again, but not meaningfully advanced. You could skip over this title and never notice it, which is hardly a ringing endorsement. There simply are no major developments in its pages, enjoyable as it remains to see John Taylor overcoming a sequence of escalating magical threats with bluffs off his reputation and a pocketful of black pepper as much as his own special talent.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, and repeated use of a transphobic slur. In general, this series is embracing of genderfluid pronouns and what it calls cross-dressing — though you could certainly accuse it of exoticizing queer identities and equating them with the rest of the macabre pulp weirdness — but it was written in Britain in the early 2000s, and that obviously shades how such matters are presented.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Book #102 of 2025:

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Ron Chernow is a consummate biographer, probably best known for popularizing the tale of an overlooked Founding Father into an account that became the basis for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. Here he turns his attentions a century forward to the life of author Mark Twain, who represents a considerably less obscure subject matter. We likely all have an image of the man in our heads, have read or at least discussed his controversial bestseller Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and are acquainted with the basic facts of his existence: born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, grew up in the sort of small frontier town he’d later set his fiction in, piloted a riverboat for a while, and eventually turned to writing and public speaking, for which he crafted a wealth of humorous aphorisms that are still widely quoted today. (A personal favorite: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”)

This new biography expands upon those facets at great length — it’s yet another Chernow text clocking in at over 1000 pages — with plenty of direct excerpts from Twain’s own journals and private letters. It goes further, however, to round out its portrait beyond the avuncular mustachioed figure in that canonical white suit. Outside of his books themselves, we learn of the writer’s failed business ventures, and how he was constantly falling for some fast talker’s harebrained get-rich-quick scheme. We hear a lot about his progressive politics, which included a lifelong friendship with Frederick Douglass and an unpopular aversion to American imperialism in the Philippines. And we get a sense of the wilder culture around him, which he navigated as one of the country’s first real celebrities.

We also see how dependent he was on his wife Livy, who served as his editor and household manager, and how rudderless he was after her passing, elevating his secretary to a romance-free but otherwise similar role whilst ignoring how his adult daughters chafed against her even as she had the younger one needlessly confined to a sanitarium. (To the extent the employer-employee relationship was effectively a marriage, the two subsequently had a huge and legally protracted divorce that played out in the popular press.) He ultimately outlived three of his four children, including a son who died as a toddler.

Above all, Mark Twain was a complicated man, which Chernow captures ably. Although generally a liberal thinker, he had his share of hangups and misconceptions, like an appreciation for Jews that seemed based on many of the same stereotypes that drove antisemitism in others. He could be racist in one moment and an avowed egalitarian in the next. Most awkwardly, he spent much of his final decades obsessing over the company of young girls aged ten to sixteen, whom he recruited into a private fan club for himself — though always with a chaperone and apparently never a hint of impropriety. The biographer largely avoids either lionizing or judging Clemens throughout, and he speculates here that the children may have represented the widower’s attempt to recapture his bygone happy family days. That two of his daughters were still alive at this point and frustrated over these newcomers taking all their father’s attention is but another irony in a lifetime full of them.

Could the work have been tightened up in places? Sure. This is an exhaustive and frequently exhausting narrative, pulling out minutiae that other biographies — including the subject’s own infamously rambling memoir — perhaps would have skipped right past. But one doesn’t read Chernow for the digestible takeaways, despite how I’ve tried to summarize them here. We read an author like this to immerse ourselves utterly in the lives of others, and Sam Clemens offers a wonderful specimen for that type of lens.

[Content warning for slavery and racial slurs.]

★★★★☆