The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

Book #14 of 2019:

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson (Skyward #1)

I mostly enjoy this Young Adult novel about a girl following in her father’s footsteps to join their planet’s defense armada, although I do feel there are some issues with people’s motivations at the very beginning. That’s not a problem I normally experience with either author Brandon Sanderson or the YA genre at large — or even Sanderson’s previous works therein — but everyone’s actions at the start of this story seem like they’re mandated solely by plot concerns, rather than arising organically from the characters.

Luckily these feelings drop away by the time the heroine joins flight school at around the 10% mark of the book, and from there on out, it’s an engaging coming-of-age narrative that substitutes the author’s customary intricate magical systems for thrilling aerial dogfights among pieces of falling space debris. The worldbuilding is simple but effective, the characters are a lot of fun, and Sanderson sets up some interesting mysteries and plot threads for the remainder of the series to unspool. Between pilot lessons and the discovery of an abandoned ship with a mind of its own, the narrative blends Ender’s Game with How to Train Your Dragon, all developed with typical Sanderson flair. I highly recommended checking this one out, even if you don’t love it right away.

★★★★☆

[Disclosure: I’m Facebook friends with this author.]

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Book Review: Us Against You by Fredrik Backman

Book #13 of 2019:

Us Against You by Fredrik Backman (Beartown #2)

This sequel feels somewhat aimless compared to the first Beartown novel and its vivid picture of a rural community’s complicated relationship with the local hockey team. Although I generally enjoy author Fredrik Backman’s writing style and his regular insights into his characters, there aren’t really any lingering issues from the previous book for him to explore, and so this follow-up never quite manages to justify its existence. (An intriguing early possibility of a Beartown without hockey is quickly dropped, and the sports rivalry with the next town over proves far less interesting.) I would probably read a further entry in this series regardless, but I hope that Backman finds more of a story to tell again.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: On the Basis of Sex (2018)

Movie #3 of 2019:

On the Basis of Sex (2018)

The first act of this Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic is somewhat choppy, jumping from year to year in the 1950s without giving the audience enough room to really invest in its heroine and her struggles. Luckily once the film skips ahead to 1970, the narrative slows down and tells a great story of how the future Supreme Court justice began working with the ACLU to overturn the long-standing precedent of legalized gender discrimination in America. The screenplay, written by Ginsburg’s nephew, is apparently quite true to life, and includes some lovely moments of the lawyer and her husband as a partnership of equals, quietly challenging traditional roles in their own right. Although “RBG” is best known today as a liberal icon on the Court, the movie mostly steers clear of contemporary political divides to present a historical fight for equality that everyone can celebrate.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)

Movie #2 of 2019:

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)

I hadn’t watched this movie in many, many years, but it holds up better than a lot of comedies from that era. (The two lead characters are con men who prey on wealthy women, so there’s a slight degree of sexism, but the narrative undercuts them more than it invites viewers to share their perspective. I think the script could basically be filmed again today without requiring any changes.) It’s not really laugh-out-loud funny for the most part, but it’s fun to watch the guys play off one another to spoil each latest scheme.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

Book #12 of 2019:

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (Legacy of Orïsha #1)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A small band of commoners discover a secret that could bring down their evil empire and restore the old order, but when their home is attacked, they are forced to flee, maybe joined by a runaway princess, perhaps pursued by a conflicted enemy. Sound familiar? It’s Star Wars, it’s Dragonlance, it’s Lord of the Rings, it’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, and any number of other stories that take their basic plot points straight from the hero’s journey monomyth. And now it’s Children of Blood and Bone, the debut novel in author Tomi Adeyemi’s new Young Adult fantasy series.

The familiar plot is at least told well, even though the characters generally feel like pretty standard YA figures as well. The best thing this book has going for it is its Nigerian Yoruba-inspired mythos, which is admittedly a strong flavor given the usual eurocentric offerings in this genre. Even here, however, the worldbuilding could stand to be better realized and more descriptive throughout. It’s a promising start, and I’m excited by the possibilities of where the narrative could develop next, but this first volume feels far more rote than it should.

[Content warning for torture and racialized state violence.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Orange Is the New Black, season 6

TV #2 of 2019:

Orange Is the New Black, season 6

Moving the action over to the long-mentioned Maximum Security branch is a reasonable way for this prison show to keep itself fresh (and cut loose some of the huge cast it’s assembled over the years), but the writers have made some odd choices about which plot threads to develop there. The rivalry between Max blocks rarely feels grounded in any real stakes for the returning characters, and no one in the new bunch ever does much to win my sympathy. It also seems like the post-riot trial should have been a much bigger deal within this narrative, rather than the few isolated scenes we actually get. Certain actresses’ availability may have influenced decisions like that, but the resulting season is weaker than it could be.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King

Book #11 of 2019:

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King

There’s a solid dystopian premise for this story of a near-future China where genetic engineering and a cultural preference for sons has given rise to marriages of multiple men sharing the same wife, but all four of the viewpoint characters — a 40-year-old bachelor, his prospective bride, and the two husbands she already has — gradually lose my interest as the book goes on. The strongest moments are when author Maggie Shen King focuses on how one husband’s homosexuality and the other’s neurodiversity must be painstakingly stifled in the face of their repressive totalitarian government, but the overall plot could use higher and more personal stakes and the sudden turn into a conspiracy thriller late in the narrative seems unearned. With a surprising failure to pass the Bechdel Test given what women in this setting could talk about, I ultimately feel like this is a better thought experiment than it is a novel.

[Content warning for eugenics and marital rape.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman

Book #10 of 2019:

Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman

This is a goofy little shaggy-dog story, made up of the series of outlandish excuses a father offers to his children for why he was late picking up some milk from the store. (And I do mean “little” — at an audiobook length of just one hour, this is probably about the shortest book that I’ll take the time to review. Sorry to anyone waiting for my hot takes on The Cat in the Hat.) What unfolds is a fun and inventive tale of time travel, pirates, talking dinosaurs, and more, but the characters and the world lag behind author Neil Gaiman at his best. It’s cute and I’m sure the absurdism entertains young readers, but it won’t go down as one of my favorites.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim

Book #9 of 2019:

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim

A bittersweet sci-fi take on the immigrant / refugee experience, this debut novel from author Thea Lim imagines a world in which people can enter into indentured servitude and time-travel to when their services are needed, generally to pay off a loved one’s medical bills. The protagonist arrives at her future destination to find a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that dehumanizes her at every turn, and her ensuing struggle to comprehend this changed world and reunite with the people she’s left behind is utterly heartbreaking. It’s a heightened look at real-world class issues facing migrant workers in the language of science-fiction, and a story I especially enjoy for the familiar landmarks and neighborhoods during the scenes set in my former home of Buffalo, NY.

[Content warning for a sexual assault / rape attempt.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas

Book #8 of 2019:

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses #1)

I’m pretty underwhelmed by this retelling of Beauty and the Beast by way of Twilight, which somehow captures some of the worst impulses of both those narratives. There’s no real build-up to the heroine’s Stockholm Syndrome love for her theoretically beastly captor, who in this version of the story is actually an attractive faerie lord she immediately starts ogling. And I’m not saying that writers should completely throw out the trope of the teenage girl falling for a decades-older, boundary-ignoring inhuman love interest — Laini Taylor eventually pulls it off in her similarly-titled Daughter of Smoke & Bone series — but it’s a tricky act that I don’t feel author Sarah J. Maas manages here.

The plot is a bit uneven too, and the book has some rather explicit sex scenes for its otherwise Young Adult tone, especially given that some of those interactions feature dubious consent and at least one is just straight-up sexual assault. There’s also a recurring trend of slut-shaming — literally characters calling themselves and one another ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ — that never once gets called out by the text or anyone in it. I’m uncomfortable enough as a man in my 30s to be reading this sort of thing, and I really worry about what sort of dynamics it’s modeling for younger readers.

★★☆☆☆

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