The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Book #194 of 2019:

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

This is a clarifying read in many ways, and I appreciate author Ibram X. Kendi’s framing of racism as any policy or behavior that maintains or furthers inequity across racial groups. Moving the locus of activism from intention to effect is an important step in enacting meaningful change, as is the careful use of precise definitions that Kendi employs throughout the book. On the other hand, I don’t find all of his arguments convincing (like that capitalism is inherently racist), and I would question how much of his personal journey in arriving at these insights is strictly necessary to have included. I ultimately think this is more of a useful guide for readers who already agree with the writer — and don’t mind a bit of memoir along with their social justice — than a persuasive tract that would sway anyone else.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

Book #193 of 2019:

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

Debut author Caitlin Starling has delivered a stunning, claustrophobic sci-fi horror novel, the entirety of which is spent in an underground alien cave system with the protagonist locked in a mechanized suit. Her only contact is an evasive handler back on the surface, who withholds key information and takes dangerous liberties with the remote control features of the equipment. As the two women navigate her through the hazardous terrain, they develop an unhealthy codependency and the miner, spiraling into paranoia and potential hallucinations, becomes convinced that there’s someone or something down there with her.

This is a deeply creepy read, and by avoiding the full-throttle surreal madness of a work like Annihilation, it maintains a coherent sense of danger that’s all the more terrifying. The pacing is first steady and then increasingly frantic, and although some of the threats could seem repetitive, the shifts in the characters’ psychology and relationship to one another render each scene more gripping than the last. I love them both, each canonically dark-skinned and queer, and I admire the writer’s skill in being able to tell this story so effectively with such a small cast.

I often complain about a lack of worldbuilding details in speculative fiction, but this book is a perfect example of how with the proper scope, readers don’t need to have everything spelled out for us. There’s a lot that I still don’t know about the broader fictional setting of The Luminous Dead, but not once have I had any difficulty in suspending my disbelief in its internal consistency or felt as though Starling hadn’t considered some key issue. It’s sparse, but in complete service to the genuinely flawless narrative at hand.

[Content warning for body horror and seriously intense claustrophobia.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Book #192 of 2019:

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

This urban fantasy novel feels severely underbaked, like a first draft that was rushed to publication without any editor’s notes. The worldbuilding is vague, and the few details that we get generally arrive via infodump right when they become relevant, rather than threading organically throughout the text. The villain is even more of a cipher, and there are plenty of dangling plot issues that could be justified for the start of a series but are just frustrating in a standalone volume like this.

I’m also pretty confused about the heroine’s love life, which is a fairly central part of the narrative. She has a serious human boyfriend already, and she soon develops an intense relationship with a vampire that generates no discussion on anyone’s part about jealousy or fidelity or guilt or open arrangements. If the overall work were stronger I might suspect some sort of radical statement in this, but given the messiness of everything else it mostly comes across as an oversight instead. And although the book predates Twilight by a couple of years, it shares with that franchise the romanticizing of unhealthy behaviors like secretly watching a prospective partner while they sleep and manfully repressing the desire to attack them.

There’s sporadic potential to the story that could have been polished into something better, but I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed it as a finished product.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Lost Man by Jane Harper

Book #191 of 2019:

The Lost Man by Jane Harper

Australian writer Jane Harper’s first two books fit explicitly within the mystery / crime thriller genre, featuring a detective protagonist and clear whodunnit cases to solve. Given such bona fides, and the fact that this third novel opens with yet another corpse, I can’t have been the only reader expecting to find those same familiar procedural beats of a police investigation.

Instead, this time the author has turned in more of a contemplative, Celeste Ng-esque narrative about the dead man’s family, whose history we come to learn while we watch them processing his death (which everyone initially takes to be a suicide, anyway). Some plot developments are easy to predict, and the story grows into more of a traditional hunt for clues as it goes along, but the primary focus throughout is on the characters and their complicated relationships with one another.

As always, Harper treats the remote outback setting almost like a character in its own right, penning evocative descriptions of the unforgiving landscape. That’s one of the elements I love most about her writing, and it is honed to perfection for the lonely vistas here. Would a local to that environment really have parked his car, left all of its supplies of food and water and other survival gear, and walked out into the barren wilderness to perish under the desert sun? It’s a scenario that couldn’t be explored just anywhere, but one that is rendered for this volume in stark #ownvoices authenticity.

Ultimately the answers to how the deceased passed away — while interesting and fitting — are less important than the other details about those who knew him and how their lives will be forever altered in his absence. It’s a sharp piece of characterization and a phenomenal read through and through.

[Content warning for domestic abuse and death of a dog.]

★★★★★

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Book Review: Fly Already by Etgar Keret

Book #190 of 2019:

Fly Already by Etgar Keret

Even in translation, Israeli author Etgar Keret’s short stories are challenging, haunting, and darkly comic. Few of them begin as explicit speculative fiction, yet they often take surreal turns in that direction as they go along, bringing in clones, or aliens, or magical transformations to an otherwise grounded scenario. Keret also excels at rich, provocative ironies, as in an imagined email exchange between a customer and a business owner, in which the explanation that they are required to close for Holocaust Remembrance Day is met with the retort that mindlessly acceding to government demands shows they’ve learned nothing from history after all. Such moments are everywhere in this collection, and although I’m not sure I could put up with that sort of acerbic wit in a longer work, it’s well-deployed in snapshot form here.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell

Book #189 of 2019:

Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell (Simon Snow #2)

Somewhat appropriately given the genesis of this series, Wayward Son reads more like fanfiction than a proper sequel to the first novel Carry On. There’s no pressing danger or overarching plot for much of the story, just three friends who still suspiciously resemble Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, and Hermione Granger taking a road trip across America (with the romance between the first two still quietly radical for this genre). Nominally the Brits are overseas to check in on an old classmate and escape the doldrums that set in after finishing magic school and defeating the Big Bad, but mostly this volume just features fun personalities bouncing off one another as the characters wander into and out of a variety of low-stake scrapes. It’s far less epic than Carry On, but still a good time overall.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Anya and the Dragon by Sofiya Pasternack

Book #188 of 2019:

Anya and the Dragon by Sofiya Pasternack

I’m really enjoying the recent trend of explicit Jewish representation in speculative fiction, and this new middle-grade fantasy novel is another fun example. The story is populated with all sorts of creatures from Slavic folklore, but the main conflict facing twelve-year-old Anya isn’t a dragon; it’s the antisemitic magistrate issuing bogus taxes to force her family off their land (which leads her to team up with a band of dragon-hunters to earn some reward money). The plot could have been tightened up a bit near the end, and the reading level is more simplistic than I generally prefer, but I’m still pretty charmed by the novelty of a heroine baking challah and looking forward to her bat mitzvah in and among all her other adventures. I read this book over the High Holidays, and it was a lovely way to start the year 5780.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: There Will Come a Darkness by Katy Rose Pool

Book #187 of 2019:

There Will Come a Darkness by Katy Rose Pool (The Age of Darkness #1)

A competent but somewhat derivative fantasy adventure, heavy on portentous omens yet light on significant plot or character growth. I normally defend the Young Adult genre as telling stories about people coming of age, rather than necessarily for people coming of age, but I think this book might land better for readers less familiar with certain tropes and conventions. I’m also maybe just too jaded for the earnest teenagers in the novel, who all seem to unquestioningly accept whatever they’re told, whether that’s “you are the prophesied hero” or “I definitely won’t betray you again this time.” Their viewpoints could have been more streamlined, too, as none of the five narrative voices are particularly distinct.

Anyway, it’s solid enough for a debut work, and I appreciate the inclusion of a gay romance angle, but I don’t feel interested enough to stick with this series for any subsequent volumes. And it definitely doesn’t live up to the publisher’s hype of “Six of Crows meets Graceling.”

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Book #186 of 2019:

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

There’s a slow burn to the fantastical elements of this novel about teleportation on the Underground Railroad, but even when it seems like pure historical fiction, it’s still a devastating portrait of slavery in antebellum Virginia. Debut novelist Ta-Nehisi Coates channels the same powerful prose of his contemporary nonfiction to depict the awful conditions of the enslaved characters, while being careful to never slip over into framing that anguish as spectacle. His research into actual slave narratives lends a terrible authenticity to the work, and his insights into race relations and power dynamics grant complex shading to the white abolitionists and black collaborators who defy easy categorization as heroes or villains.

Protagonist Hiram Walker, black son of a white plantation owner, similarly has relative privilege over some of his fellow ‘tasked’ people, but is still positioned as someone’s claimed property in countless subtle ways. His personal journey towards recognizing the full reality of his situation and seeking an escape is well-rendered even before his special abilities come to light. Although there’s a certain degree of wish fulfillment and revisionism that’s unavoidable when writing a magical pathway to freedom into the record of 19th-century America, Coates grounds the overall storyline in such detail that even this feels like something that could perhaps have happened as well.

★★★★★

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TV Review: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., season 6

TV #35 of 2019:

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., season 6

With its future still uncertain at the time, the previous season of Marvel’s sci-fi spy show ended in such a way that it could have functioned as a series finale if necessary. Instead, the program got renewed for two final outings, leaving this first one to undo that tidy resolution and figure out what happens next. That’s a tough situation for the writers, and although I sympathize, I’m not blown away by their solution.

Characters coming back from the dead in some form isn’t new for comic-book properties (or even this one in particular), but the eventual explanation here feels pretty weak, and there isn’t enough other cool stuff going on to distract from it, even with the seasonal episode count reduced from the occasionally wheel-spinning 22 of years past to a theoretically more propulsive 13. We’re still a long way from the blandness that started this show, and the core team members have such a rich history at this point that they can easily provide a compelling anchor regardless — as best demonstrated in the standout FitzSimmons adventure 6×6 Inescapable — but this is overall not S.H.I.E.L.D.’s finest hour.

★★★☆☆

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