The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe

Book #177 of 2019:

The Sorcerer’s House by Gene Wolfe

There’s some neat slipstream weirdness to this fantasy novel, and its epistolary format hints at interesting nuances of narrator reliability, but I just couldn’t get past the obnoxious treatment of all the female characters. Every woman in this story is either a perky flibbertigibbet, a nubile temptress, or an old hag, and nearly all of them want to sleep with the protagonist on sight. Several succeed at this aim, including a shapeshifting fox whose human form he praises as ‘a submissive oriental.’ Charming! Later on, two women are stripped and one of them raped in a two-page subplot that doesn’t connect to anything else in the book.

I can sometimes stomach archaic attitudes in older works of fiction, but this was written in 2010. There’s simply no excuse, and those issues overwhelm any positive qualities of the text. I’m sorry to have to pan a title that one of my Patreon donors recommended, and I wish I could have better enjoyed all the magical transformations, appearing and disappearing rooms, and hidden twins, but this is the worst sort of throwback. It hearkens to an era of the genre when only white men got to be portrayed as actual people rather than objects, and that’s all the more tiresome from a modern author who should know better.

[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: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Book #176 of 2019:

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale #2)

With this novel, author Margaret Atwood returns to the setting of her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale a decade and a half later on (and ignoring how its recent TV adaptation has imagined what happens after the end of that first book). Unfortunately, the effort falls somewhat flat by comparison.

This time the story is told by three different narrators, and only one of them is anywhere near as engaging a character voice as the original handmaid Offred. That would be the returning figure of Aunt Lydia, and the passages reflecting on her history with Gilead are searing towards both the theocratic-fascist state and its ruthless enabler herself. She’s a compelling antiheroine, and although few readers would willingly admit they’d make the same choices in her situation, Atwood excels at deepening Lydia from the villain we’ve met before. Perhaps she even goes too far — as I’m personally skeptical that a redemption arc was really called for — but it’s an interesting journey nonetheless.

The same can’t be said for the other two protagonists, however. One young woman has been raised in Gilead and one in Canada, and the latter especially feels plucked from some generic YA dystopia, complete with a bland resistance-fighter love interest. They seem more like plot devices than fully fleshed-out humans with organic interests and motivations, and the narrative slackens during their viewpoint chapters even after the three different storylines have converged.

There’s a potential version of this sequel — call it “The Aunt’s Tale” — that could have been truly outstanding, if the writer had dispensed with the teenage theatrics and leaned into what was so effective in the previous volume, using characterization and quiet worldbuilding details to hold an uncomfortable mirror up to our own society. It’s great that she does so for a third of this new text, but that’s not enough on its own.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Institute by Stephen King

Book #175 of 2019:

The Institute by Stephen King

Stephen King’s latest novel finds a secret government program kidnapping children with latent psychic abilities, running unethical experiments upon them, and harnessing their powers for nefarious purposes. That’s a variation on a plot device the writer has utilized several times before, but it’s given its most in-depth consideration here — and undoubtedly gains additional poignancy from a political moment in which real-life minors are being ripped from their families and placed in cages. (The parallel is left as subtext, which may be a mercy but is somewhat odd given the digs at other aspects of the Trump administration that King delivers along the way.)

The book also strongly evokes Stranger Things, completing a feedback loop with the Netflix series that was famously inspired by some of the author’s classic horror works of the 1980s. Neither is exactly a rip-off, but they feel very much in conversation with one another and keenly interested in how kids can unite to process and resist dangers from the adult world that only they can see, along with how their elders can justify abominable behavior in the interests of a perceived greater good.

So the story isn’t groundbreaking, yet it’s well-told and feels like quintessential Stephen King, to the point where it could be a great introduction for readers new to his style and typical concerns. Another of his favorite tropes, that of the noble small-town lawman, even serves to bookend the narrative, although this character disappears for the entirety of its middle. That’s a bit of structural weirdness that is, again, fairly on-brand for King. Anyone who’s disliked his writing or his politics in the past probably won’t care for this volume either, but my fellow fans should enjoy it as I have.

[Content warning for child abuse, torture, sexual assault, gun violence, and slurs]

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Star Wars: A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova

Book #174 of 2019:

Star Wars: A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova

This Young Adult licensed novel is one of three 2019 books exploring the Galaxy’s Edge setting that has been developed as a new theme park area in Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Its main purpose is to showcase the locations, characters, and lore of that environment, and the narrative accomplishes this aim well enough: I imagine that my first visit will be at least somewhat enriched by bringing a sense of history to Batuu as more than a generic Star Wars outpost.

As its own tale, however, A Crash of Fate is a fairly run-of-the-mill space opera romance. Two childhood friends from this backwater world reunite in their teen years, have instant chemistry, and get caught up in a dangerous smuggling ring. The plot points are predictable and coincidence-heavy, and there’s nothing so powerful as the epic anguished love story that Claudia Gray created in Lost Stars. This one is worth reading if you have a few hours to spare before a Disney trip, but most fans can safely give it a miss.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Need by Helen Phillips

Book #173 of 2019:

The Need by Helen Phillips

This short novel starts out as a creepy thriller about an unseen household intruder, but it grows into something far weirder and more complex as it goes along. As such it’s probably one of those stories that’s best entered into without much advance knowledge of the plot or even the genre, but it concerns a mother facing down a serious existential threat to herself and her family, and I find it taps into the worries and exhaustion of early parenting really well. The children, ages four and one, are also rendered more realistically than is often the case in popular fiction. I liked the book a lot, even though I feel like I can’t discuss why at length without spoiling key developments.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

Book #172 of 2019:

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

A neat sci-fi murder mystery, sort of like Altered Carbon with less misogyny and more disciplined storytelling. In this setting, cloning is commonplace, and people are supposed to wake up in a new body with their recent memories intact if anything happens to a previous version. But the six crew members of a deep-space vessel have just come to life surrounded by their own slaughtered selves and unable to recall the past few decades that they’ve been in transit. The ship’s computer has been sabotaged so that no records are available and no further clones can be generated — yet there’s no one else on board.

The result is a tense and paranoid locked-room thriller, straight out of Agatha Christie by way of the 2007 film Sunshine. Everyone is harboring dangerous secrets, and with the outlawed technology of mind-hacking in the mix, no one is entirely above suspicion. As the astronauts race to solve their own murders and identify the killer in their midst, author Mur Lafferty spins out a fantastic tale of the sort of crimes that might be waiting for us in the future.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Redwall by Brian Jacques

Book #171 of 2019:

Redwall by Brian Jacques (Redwall #1)

This is a fine if straightforward adventure story, and definitely one that grows on me as it goes along. The brave woodland creatures in its cast represent a fun change from most children’s fantasy literature, and the bucolic setting lends the tale a certain timeless quality.

Unfortunately, I think I might have come at the series too late to truly love it, and I have some worldbuilding questions and structural issues concerning the villain of this first novel — whose exact motivations are inscrutable, and who’s really too flat of a character to justify all the scenes we spend checking in on his perspective. I’m also disappointed that author Brian Jacques has gone the lazy route of using species and physical characteristics as a shorthand for morality, such that all mice are good, all rats are evil, and so on.

In the end I would probably still recommend this book to younger readers, but I don’t feel especially drawn to continue on myself with the next 21 (!) volumes, which I’ve heard can get rather repetitive. If there’s any sequel that you think is particularly worth checking out, though, please do let me know.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Resistance by Jennifer A. Nielsen

Book #170 of 2019:

Resistance by Jennifer A. Nielsen

On the surface, this novel about teenage Jewish resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Poland is a welcome piece of YA historical fiction, educating all ages about a lesser-known aspect of World War II. The characters are invented, but they are inspired by Jennifer A. Nielsen’s extensive research on the era, and the specific events that she relates are largely drawn from real life. The action crackles with a tense energy, and the protagonists are easy to root for throughout.

However, the author is not Jewish herself, and although an afterword notes that the manuscript has been vetted by Holocaust experts for historical accuracy, it doesn’t appear as though she has employed a sensitivity reader to ensure that the representation of Judaism is similarly precise. There are little details throughout the text that niggle with inauthenticity, from mangled prayer names to things Jews just wouldn’t say, like calling the meal before a dangerous mission the Last Supper. Perhaps worst of these issues is the repeated description of the main character as looking “Polish, not Jewish,” which plays right into the antisemitic notion that Jews are a separate class of people and not true citizens of whatever country they call home. Nielsen’s figures are Polish Jews, but she regularly writes as though these identities are in opposition to one another and cannot be held by the same person.

The narrative also includes Jewish collaborators and Jews who are too despondent to fight back against their oppressors — and although such people did exist and the afterword stresses that the writer is not passing judgment on them, this is yet another element that could have been handled more gracefully or left out altogether. I don’t think authors need to refrain from ever engaging with backgrounds and heritages outside of their own, and I’m grateful that Nielsen has sought to bring this story to a larger audience, but so much of what should be its essential Jewishness rings false to me.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

TV Review: Veronica Mars, season 2

TV #34 of 2019:

Veronica Mars, season 2

Let’s start at the ending. This season is so much more serialized than the first, with major storylines unfolding over multiple episodes and a lighter focus on the cases of the week — and although a few of those sub-plots peter out before the end, they mostly come crashing together in one chaotic finale that packs on twist after twist. And on this rewatch, as ever, I find myself fairly underwhelmed and disappointed by the result.

In the interest of keeping this review spoiler-free I won’t go into specifics, but beyond the simple fatigue of all the last-minute surprises, the new big villain reveal is just about the polar opposite of the previous one. I praised that solution as being “threaded brilliantly throughout the year… in plain sight with masterful misdirection.” Once the season one culprit is identified, so many subtle clues click into place. Here, the answer is so out-of-line with the person’s earlier characterization, and the extent of their crimes so laughably moustache-twirlingly evil, that it instead seems like a complete retcon and a name pulled out of a hat.

Luckily, the stuff until then is pretty solid. In the moment, either ignoring or not yet knowing what it’s all building towards, there’s more of the fun high school sleuthing and great character work that was so appealing in the show’s initial run. This batch of episodes lacks that same thematic throughline of class inequality, and the stakes of the primary investigation feel a lot less personal to Veronica, yet it’s overall a reasonable continuation of the series. I can’t say I love it as a whole, but it’s always kept me engaged and invested enough to keep watching.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Book #169 of 2019:

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #1)

This middle-grade fantasy debut is a fun ride with an engaging young character voice at its center. The plot can be a bit episodic, and the worldbuilding doesn’t go much deeper than bringing traditional Greek myths into the modern U.S. like a narrower, kid-friendly American Gods, but the foundations are there for a richer complexity that I assume the sequels will develop. This book feels a lot like the first Harry Potter volume, and not just for the preteen hero escaping a bad home life by discovering his magic heritage. It also carries a similar sense of adventure and a promise of great things to come.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter