The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix by Julie C. Dao

Book #30 of 2019:

Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix by Julie C. Dao (Rise of the Empress #2)

The first book in this East Asian-inspired fantasy duology remains a fascinating look at a complex antiheroine, but author Julie C. Dao makes the disappointing choice for its sequel to reduce that character to a more conventional villain’s role and center her much less interesting stepdaughter instead. The broad strokes of the narrative aren’t surprising — it is a Snow White retelling, after all — but the evil queen’s downfall could have been told in the same nuanced way as the previous novel rather than being the result of someone else’s bland quest to collect magic artifacts here.

There’s nothing especially awful about this concluding volume of Empress Xifeng’s story, but there’s also not much to recommend it for anyone who loved her debut.

This book: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Book ranking: 1 > 2

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Book Review: The Hollow of Fear by Sherry Thomas

Book #29 of 2019:

The Hollow of Fear by Sherry Thomas (Lady Sherlock #3)

With this third novel playing out along similar lines to its shaky predecessors, I think I’ve reached the end of my patience with the Lady Sherlock series. There are some strong character elements that I like in its genderbent version of the famous consulting detective, but the plots are consistently muddled and full of implausible details that any reasonable person should question in a heartbeat. (Some of these are flimsy disguises that weaken the characterization of anyone who doesn’t see through them, and others are contrived coincidences that make it harder for the reader to suspend disbelief at all.) So although I’d still say there’s great potential in the heroine and the core concept of these books, I believe it’s time to recognize that the execution just isn’t working for me.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season 4

TV #7 of 2019:

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season 4

This series has always been an interesting blend of over-the-top 30 Rock absurdism and heightened-yet-thoughtful portrayal of abuse and recovery, but this final season struggles with that balance and regularly comes across as glibber than I remember the show being in the past. It’s a bit too quick to use wokeness as a punchline, ridiculing legitimate cultural critiques instead of considering them with the nuance that I know the writers could bring to the task.

In many ways, the early episodes of this show foreshadowed the #MeToo movement, shining an uncomfortable spotlight on issues that were too often dismissed or not considered at all in most popular entertainment. But now that those conversations are more mainstream, the sitcom approach feels somewhat hollow, leaving an audience with characters who can still deliver reliable jokes but are increasingly hard to really root for. There’s not enough closure in this final chapter of the Kimmy Schmidt story for my tastes, but since the program seems to have run out of things to say, I guess it’s for the best that it’s ending here.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Season ranking: 2 > 1 > 3 > 4

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Book Review: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Book #28 of 2019:

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

This pastoral winter fantasy novel initially seems like it will be a straightforward retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin myth, and I was already drawn in by the idea of setting that story in a medieval Slavic kingdom with a Jewish heroine. As it develops, however, author Naomi Novik spins her own form of magic, shuffling and repurposing elements of the original tale until that narrative has been entirely transformed. The resulting product feels wondrously brand-new — and yet still there’s the impossible alchemy of changing commonplace material into gold, there are hidden names, there are promises of a firstborn child, and there are fits that threaten to break the world apart. And always and everywhere, there are contracts and bargains, debts and obligations, negotiated stances and ever-shifting relationships.

It’s a remarkable achievement, especially since Novik eventually includes six different first-person perspectives, all of whom are well-developed and complex individuals. (I found this a bit hard to follow in the audiobook and had to exchange it for a text version, but in print there’s a visual indication when the point-of-view switches, and it’s always clear from the context which person is now speaking.) These characters all have distinct goals and insights, and they illuminate one another’s plots as well as their own.

I also can’t say enough about the thorough #ownvoices Jewishness of this book. The primary protagonist is a moneylender’s daughter, and she faces historically realistic antisemitism and distrust as she tries to provide for her family. She keeps the sabbath, she says Hebrew prayers, she dances at her cousin’s wedding, she turns to the Torah for moral guidance, and none of it feels like tokenism or an interchangeable aspect of her identity. Her Judaism is deeply entwined in her characterization, and it makes me feel seen in a way I’ve never experienced in this genre before. It’s incredibly empowering to see a young woman from my faith background take her place amongst sorcerers, demons, and elves.

This is, simply put, my favorite thing I’ve read in years.

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte

Book #26 of 2019:

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte

This 2018 book is an interesting review of the current scientific understanding of dinosaurs, much of which is different from what was taught in schools decades ago (and from the representation in popular culture like Jurassic Park). Author Steve Brusatte is an expert paleontologist himself, and he’s fairly skilled at conveying complicated ideas from the field to a general audience.

Unfortunately, Brusatte’s own personality intrudes a lot into this narrative, making its ‘history’ as much about himself and his colleagues as about the fossilized species they study. There’s a degree of casual sexism here as well, both in who the writer chooses to cite and in his occasional comments like a dino having “the emaciated build of a supermodel.” So although the actual facts are educational, I wish they had been presented in more of a textbook format.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Flight or Fright edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent

Book #27 of 2019:

Flight or Fright edited by Stephen King and Bev Vincent

In principle, horror about air travel is a fine concept for a short story collection. There’s so much that can go wrong on a plane, at least in the domain of fiction: from supernatural cloud-dwellers (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson) to terrorism (“The Fifth Category” by Tom Bissell) to witnessing a nuclear war (“You Are Released” by Joe Hill) to a good old locked-room mystery (“Murder in the Air” by Peter Tremayne). At their best, tales like these get at the sheer helplessness of being adrift miles from the rest of humanity when terror strikes. For modern authors like Stephen King (“The Turbulence Expert”), airplanes cut us off from our accustomed web of internet and smartphone connections. For earlier writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (“The Horror of the Heights”), the dawn of aviation was inherently a journey into the unknown where anything could be lurking.

So thematically, the idea for this book is a good one. The problem lies in its execution, and the more middling stories that join those mentioned above. As is common for this sort of collection, the editors have privileged quantity over quality, resulting in seventeen total entries of which maybe half are any good. The afterword also makes clear that this assortment is intended to be exhaustive, with Google searches and Facebook posts having been employed to gather up every known example of the genre.

I’m skeptical that that’s truly the case, of course. (These two male editors couldn’t find a single relevant piece written by a woman? They couldn’t put out a call for new submissions, joining the original fiction that King and his son Hill have premiered in this volume?) But even if a reader takes them at their word that they’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel for stories of skybound horror, there’s no reason why they couldn’t have delivered us a product of half the size with the dregs left out.

Flight or Fright alternately soars and plummets like a turbulent aircraft itself, and if you can put up with the moments when your metaphorical oxygen mask deploys, there’s much to enjoy along the way. But it’s altogether a bit of a bumpy ride.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne

Book #25 of 2019:

Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne (The Tales of Pell #1)

This novel aspires to be a tongue-in-cheek fairy tale sendup a la Discworld or Shrek, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the heart or cleverness to pull that off. Instead it reads more like just the plot beats of someone’s first tabletop roleplaying campaign — and although that’s a common criticism of the fantasy genre, most stories still offer more than just the thin characterization and intended punchlines on display here.

Look, I love a good pun probably more than most readers, and there are a few nice ones within these pages. But a lot of the book is just puerile jokes and lazy referential humor, as though the height of comedy is for elves to live in a forest called Morningwood. I would call it sophomoric, but even high school sophomores would likely find this a tad immature.

The nicest thing I can say is that the authors have avoided many easy opportunities to be sexist or racist, and there’s a lesbian relationship that is mostly not played for laughs. Overall, the farcical elements punch up, not down. But it’s hard to really appreciate that when the main focus is literally on a goat that keeps pooping everywhere.

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale

Book #24 of 2019:

Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale (Princess Academy #2)

Much like the first book, this Princess Academy sequel seems like a great title for readers transitioning between the middle-grade and young adult publishing categories. It’s a tough act to balance the atmosphere of class consciousness and fermenting revolution against a lighter preteen tone, but overall author Shannon Hale manages it quite nicely. I also like how she takes a love triangle that could easily feel perfunctory and instead illustrates the different choices more broadly facing her heroine, which is a great use of that genre trope for this sort of coming-of-age story. I’m not sure if the next novel is intended to close out the series as a trilogy or if Hale will go on to publish further volumes, but I’m looking forward to reading on and finding out.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart

Book #23 of 2019:

Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart (Kopp Sisters #1)

The heroine in this historical fiction novel has a plucky Willa Cather vibe to her, and it’s neat that her story is based on real events (which have also been recently portrayed in an episode of the show Drunk History). The narrative struggles to keep my attention, however, and an invented mystery subplot essentially goes nowhere until an egregious betrayal of attorney-client privilege late in the book. I don’t think I’ll bother with the rest of this series.

[Content warning for antisemitism presented as a charming personality quirk — which arguably fits the 1914 setting, but is a curious authorial choice a century later.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander

Book #22 of 2019:

Taran Wanderer by Lloyd Alexander (The Chronicles of Prydain #4)

I like the section near the end of this book when the hero apprentices under a series of artisans who sneakily give him life lessons along with crafting skills, but as a whole it’s a bit too meandering for my tastes. Living up to its title, this fourth Prydain novel really is just a story about its main character wandering around on side-quests while vaguely wanting to learn more about his parentage. It’s a little dull, especially for the continuing absence of the princess whose hand he’s supposedly trying to win. I hope the final volume in the series picks back up.

★★★☆☆

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