The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★★☆

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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.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman

Book #199 of 2019:

The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman

There are some lovely individual moments in this novel about characters in 1940s Europe evading and resisting the Nazis, but I’m ultimately dissatisfied by the overall shape of the narrative and by how little author Alice Hoffman has developed the various elements of Jewish mysticism that she introduces along the way. (I hesitate to label the story as magical realist, but it certainly fits a tradition of fabulism amidst the mundane within the literature of Judaism.)

Certain individual threads work well, like the female golem a rabbi’s daughter creates to protect a young girl on the journey out of Germany, or the angel of death who appears to people on the verge of their fated hours. But other aspects are too vague to make much of an impact, and the plot is so disjointed that I struggle to feel invested in any particular angle. So although I appreciate the #ownvoices perspective of our common heritage that Hoffman continues to bring to such projects, this book is a real letdown after her exquisite earlier piece of historical fiction The Dovekeepers.

[Content warning for sexual assault of a child as well as historical Holocaust atrocities.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 1

TV #36 of 2019:

Better Call Saul, season 1

This is my first time rewatching this program from the beginning, on the heels of my first time going back through its parent show. And overall, I really think I prefer this one. Breaking Bad is an amazing piece of television storytelling on any number of levels, but its central character is pretty flat from a personal growth perspective. (Complex and interesting, yes. And his situation changes dramatically over the course of the series. But Walter White is fundamentally the same person from earliest flashback through bitter end, a corrosive element that becomes more widely recognized by himself and others without ever altering in any meaningful way.)

Better Call Saul, by contrast, is all about change. And choices. Its own protagonist is actively seeking to be a better person, only for a cruel universe to strike him down for it again and again. There’s great dramatic irony in this being a prequel, since the audience knows Saul Goodman as the jaded figure he’ll be in 2008 when his storyline intersects with White’s. But when we meet him here in 2002, he’s still going by the name Jimmy McGill, and he’s so much more earnest and decent than anyone could have imagined. True, he’s already bending the truth as well as the law, but he continually surprises us with hidden depths and the lengths he’ll go to on behalf of his loved ones and clients.

After all, this is also a story about the grind, about putting an unfathomable amount of effort into a task in the hopes of achieving some sublime reward. That’s true in a macro, thematic sense of the hero’s futile journey toward self-improvement, as well as in the smaller moments of hustle that we get to see him employ. Jimmy is willing to do the work, even while he’s hindered by his own worst impulses and the people like his brother who can’t see beyond his past as a small-time con artist.

I’m giving this debut season a rating of four stars instead of five, but only because I know how the story improves from here and gives its supporting cast more to do. Kim, Mike, and Nacho all have compelling grinds of their own ahead, but they’re largely an afterthought to the Jimmy show for now. His is such an unexpectedly rich piece of characterization that it’s more than capable of sustaining these first ten episodes, but the narrative grows deeper and even more entwined with the original series as the focus shifts to encompass his fellow travelers as well. I can’t wait to see it again with fresh eyes.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Book #198 of 2019:

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman (The Book of Dust #2)

I hate to foreground the matter in my review, but I think every prospective reader of this much-anticipated His Dark Materials sequel should know that it’s a book in which returning heroine Lyra Silvertongue gets sexually assaulted by a group of soldiers in brutal detail. She’s twenty years old now, but it still feels like a betrayal of authorial trust to write this treatment of a beloved character first introduced to us as a precocious child.

Even before that incident at the 92% mark, I have some issues with how Philip Pullman has approached the new adult Lyra’s story. She has nascent mutual romantic feelings for a man over a decade her senior — who’s known her since she was a baby and first realizes he’s in love when he’s her teacher and she’s sixteen — and seems poised for a love triangle in the next novel involving an enemy alethiometer-user with whom she already shares an odd Rey/Kylo dynamic. And she’s grown up in a Susan Pevensie sort of way, half-convinced that the fantastical adventures of her youth were exaggerated flights of fancy.

All of this suggests that perhaps Pullman has become ill-suited to his protagonist, which is a shame because this second volume of The Book of Dust trilogy is otherwise a major step forward from the forgettable prequel La Belle Sauvage. And plot developments aside, there is a genuine thrill from seeing Lyra and her dæmon Pantalaimon again and discovering what they’ve been up to since the end of The Amber Spyglass. The narrative that takes them away from Jordan College once more is interesting and exciting, and I only wish I could recommend it without all the sour notes.

[Content warning for some implicit homophobia and Islamophobia, in addition to the above.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: His Hideous Heart: 13 of Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Unsettling Tales Reimagined edited by Dahlia Adler

Book #197 of 2019:

His Hideous Heart: 13 of Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Unsettling Tales Reimagined edited by Dahlia Adler

I’m rounding up my rating for this collection a little bit on the strength of the original Edgar Allan Poe stories (many of which I’d never read before) that have been included along with their 2019 YA retellings. Still, the contemporary updates are pretty fun, and Tessa Gratton’s “Night-Tide” alone justifies the entire project for its heartbreaking version of “Annabel Lee” as a summer romance between two teenage girls, tragically struck down just as it and they are blossoming. That’s one of several entries that introduce diversity of gender, sexuality, nationality, and/or race into the classic works, a welcome act of representation that unfortunately also casts some marginalized characters as victims, given the macabre subject matter.

Yet overall, this is a quick and spooky read, perfect for introducing younger audiences to Poe. I only wish that each older tale had been presented alongside the newer one that it inspired, instead of having all of the reimaginings at the beginning of the volume and all of their precursors at the end. I wanted to (re)read each Poe item prior to its modernization for the full context and impact, and I had to keep flipping back and forth in order to accomplish that.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell

Book #196 of 2019:

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell

The true story of how an American woman with a prosthetic leg overcame discrimination against her nationality, her gender, and her disability to become a British intelligence agent in Vichy France is downright astounding, but this deep dive into her activities with the resistance movement often struggles to adequately convey the excitement of that career. It’s a well-researched historical account, but somewhat flat and repetitive as a reading experience. Because Virginia Hall was such a private person by both nature and vocation, it’s not always clear how much author Sonia Purnell is reconstructing rather than reporting, either. Still, I’m glad Hall is getting more recognition for her accomplishments, no matter my issues with this particular biography.

[Content warning for graphic descriptions of torture and discussion of concentration camps.]

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

Movie #10 of 2019:

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

It’s an undeniable thrill to see Jesse Pinkman again (along with some other old friends), and both star Aaron Paul and writer/director Vince Gilligan seem to have grown even more adept at depicting the wayward figure’s stoic anguish in the six years since Breaking Bad went off the air. And the story is well told in the Gilligan tradition, offering several new spins on his trademark vision of the crooked Albuquerque underworld.

Yet it never quite feels necessary, as though there were anything further to say about this character or his fate. Picking up in the immediate aftermath of the series finale, the film plays out like an extended deleted scene, presenting a sequence of logistical hurdles that aren’t terribly different from what any reasonable observer could have guessed would happen next.

(I’m reminded of some of the worst indulgences of the Breaking Bad spin-off prequel Better Call Saul — which I generally love, but which can occasionally fall into the trap of simply ticking the boxes of what had to occur in the past rather than telling compelling new stories in that space.)

To put it differently: if the closing scene of El Camino were where its narrative began, and we instead watched some fresh incident in Jesse’s life from that point onward, I don’t think a single viewer would have complained that we don’t know how he got from Breaking Bad to there. The entire arc of this movie is suggested in the final frames of the character in 2013, and actually seeing it play out carries little genuine surprise.

So I liked watching, for the most part. It doesn’t cheapen the original show as some might have feared, and the callbacks will make fans smile throughout. It works as the next chapter of that saga so long as you can ignore the actors’ aging. But I’m truly baffled that anyone involved in making this project thought it was worth the effort.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Book #195 of 2019:

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

This is a lovely fantasy debut about portals to other worlds, the power of stories, and the tension between stable stagnation and unpredictable change. The prose is lyrically beautiful in the Laini Taylor fashion, and the plotline of a mixed-race girl in early 20th-century Vermont discovering the titular doors evokes other authors like C.S. Lewis, Philip Pullman, and Seanan McGuire while still carving out a new style that feels distinctive to writer Alix E. Harrow.

My only criticisms concern an underbaked romantic element and a tendency for the narrative to stall artificially, such as when the heroine forgets she can perform a certain magic or twice has a book confiscated before she can finish learning its secrets. These issues keep me at a distance from the character, although they do improve somewhat once she’s finally off on her adventures and coming into her own as a capable young woman. And despite the unevenness, I would still recommend this novel and call Harrow a clear talent to watch in the future.

[Content warning for racism and sexism directed at the protagonist.]

★★★★☆

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