The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Book #194 of 2018:

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

This memoir is a difficult read, recounting author Tara Westover’s fundamentalist survivalist childhood in rural Idaho and her decision as a teenager to finally pursue an education away from home, which leads her to realize just how sheltered and unhealthy her early life has been. She has no birth certificate and has been taught never to use soap or visit a doctor. It’s not until college that she learns about things like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement that have no place in her original view of the world.

Her father is a paranoid crackpot and her brother a cruel brute, but their isolated patriarchal community makes it hard for women like Westover to stand up for themselves. Even after the author earns her PhD, she is beset by their disapproval and constant gaslighting, forced to grapple with her sense of loyalty to a family that honestly doesn’t deserve it.

Westover is clearly brilliant, but she doesn’t hide the ugly side of her past, panic attacks, physical assaults, grad school depression, and all. She questions her own memories, seeking confirmation from journals and witnesses that she isn’t the crazy person her relatives claim when she goes against them. It’s scary to spend even the length of this book with such people, and a true sign of the author’s resilience that she’s gotten this far away.

[Content warning for all of the above issues, as well as graphic violence both from domestic abuse and the aftermath of accidents, plus multiple uses of the n-word when discussing the family’s racism.]

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Book #193 of 2018:

Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (Strange the Dreamer #1)

I love this book, and I think my review from when I first read it in 2017 still stands:

“A gorgeously-written fantasy novel about a boy raised in a library, who spends his early life chasing down obscure references to the faraway city whose name was removed from the world by magic. It’s a bit reminiscent of The Kingkiller Chronicle, but with a far less arrogant and thus more likable protagonist. When our hero finally gets a chance to visit the mythical city, the story blossoms into one of star-crossed lovers who can meet only in slumber, and author Laini Taylor paints beautiful imagery in their shared dreamscape. It’s a fairy tale of gods and desert magics, and of the struggle for the generation after a war to make peace with the children of their parents’ enemies. This book is currently my top read of the year, and I highly recommend it to all lovers of fantasy.”

The only thing I’ll add is that Taylor has mentioned that this novel is technically in the same universe as her Daughter of Smoke & Bone series, and having now read that trilogy as well, I was pleased to spot the connections in this reread of Strange. Like Brandon Sanderson’s early Cosmere writing, the links between works are subtle enough that a reader won’t miss anything if they go unnoticed, but are fun for anyone who picks up on them. I’m excited to now read the sequel to this book, Muse of Nightmares, to see both how the dreamer’s story resolves and what other surprises Laini Taylor has in store.

★★★★★

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds by Brandon Sanderson

Book #192 of 2018:

Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds by Brandon Sanderson (Legion #1-3)

This new book collects the three novellas in author Brandon Sanderson’s Legion series (technically unrelated to the X-Men character / FX show of the same name, although there are similarities that Sanderson maintains are coincidental). I had read the first two stories previously, but the third has so far only been published in this collection. Individual reviews below:

Legion: A strong introduction to the series, in which a troubled genius hallucinates manifestations of his expertise. These people are invisible to everyone else, but they advise and assist in the hero’s work as a consulting detective, here tracking down a camera that can apparently take pictures of the past. Both the case and the character are fun concepts and a refreshing change from Sanderson’s usual high fantasy. ★★★★☆

Skin Deep: The plot beats are very similar to the first story, and the new case, which involves encoding computer data into the human genome, feels like the most ludicrous pseudoscience this side of Dan Brown. Most disappointingly, there’s effectively no movement on the overall series plot. ★★☆☆☆

Lies of the Beholder: A largely satisfying conclusion, hampered by how little work the previous stories have done at advancing the series narrative. There’s a lot of additional backstory that Sanderson has to cram into this one, and not all of it lands effectively. Still, as a final adventure it’s a fine send-off to the character. ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Novella ranking: 1 > 3 > 2

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

Book #191 of 2018:

The Book of Essie by Meghan MacLean Weir

I’m not quite sure what to make of this book, in which the secretly pregnant teenage daughter of a prominent televangelist family arranges to marry a gay classmate in order to provide cover for them both. It’s technically well-written, but the characters all feel very simplistic to me, without much nuance or shading. A subplot with a journalist who was involved in a separatist cult as a child also seems to add little to the narrative and go nowhere in the end. I want more than this out of a story, especially one whose title and epigraphs suggest a link to the biblical Book of Esther.

[Content warning / spoiler warning for incestuous rape, discussed but not depicted.]

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Movie Review: The Shining (1980)

Movie #18 of 2018:

The Shining (1980)

Nearly four decades on, this movie is still terrific. I do think the pacing could be a lot tighter, especially early on, and even though it’s true to the book and what gives the film its title, I don’t think the little boy’s psychic abilities really add much to the story. But the heart of the tale, of an angry man driven crazy in an isolated and likely haunted hotel, is as chilling as ever. Jack Nicholson is delightfully unhinged, and Stanley Kubrick’s direction captures the terror in a way few Stephen King adaptations ever manage (even if King himself famously hates this version of his story). It’s not a movie I feel drawn to rewatch again and again, but it’s quite deservedly a classic.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Theonite: Planet Adyn by M. L. Wang

Book #190 of 2018:

Theonite: Planet Adyn by M. L. Wang (Theonite #1)

This YA novel has a neat hook: its thirteen-year-old protagonist has spent her whole life hiding superpowers, only to discover that her new neighbors have special abilities of their own and are here from a parallel dimension in search of a dangerous criminal hiding out in Joan’s reality. I like this storyline a lot, and I think it would be good material for a TV or film adaptation. The worldbuilding is pretty imaginative, and I’m guessing author M. L. Wang will develop the concepts she’s introduced even further in the sequel(s).

Unfortunately, this is a self-published book from a young debut author, and the writing is very exposition-heavy. There’s a tendency for the narrative to tell instead of show, and this whole first book ultimately feels more like setup for what comes next in the series than a satisfying story in its own right. The heroine is also a bit overpowered in my opinion; she’s strong, and fast, and telekinetic, and pyrokinetic, and hydrokinetic, and magnetokinetic, and fire-proof, with a perfect photographic memory to boot. (Did I miss anything?) Even the other ‘theonites’ she meets are in complete awe of her abilities, which makes it hard for the plot to maintain any tension or challenge her character effectively.

My copy of this book also contains a few typos, missing words, and other issues that an editor should have caught, although none are substantial enough to impede understanding of what the author means or detract from the story at hand. Still, this would be something else for Wang to keep in mind in her future publications or revised editions of this one. As with the plot, there are solid foundations but definite potential for improvement there.

[This book was passed along to me by a friend who knows the author’s mother. If you’d like to read it next, I am happy to send it your way!]

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Book #189 of 2018:

All Systems Red by Martha Wells (The Murderbot Diaries #1)

A fun novella in what I would have to call the robo-noir genre, with a hardboiled cyborg protagonist reluctantly working security on a planetary survey mission. Murderbot’s narrative perspective is hilarious and relatable: who among of us doesn’t also have bosses we’d like to ignore and TV shows we’d rather be watching? We may not be robots with automatic gun turrets in our arms, but author Martha Wells makes those differences feel minor. This first Murderbot adventure launches the series with a bang, and I’m quite excited to read more.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

TV Review: Marvel’s Iron Fist, season 2

TV #44 of 2018:

Marvel’s Iron Fist, season 2

There are two inescapable facts about this season of Iron Fist: that it’s a huge improvement over season 1 and that the series is still one of the weakest entries in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. (I’d say it’s better than the short-lived Inhumans show, but that might be it.) The plot is nothing special, the motivation driving most characters is a bit murky, and Danny Rand is less of a privileged crybaby but not really any more interesting. If this show gets a third season, I don’t know if I have it in me to keep watching.

★★☆☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler

Book #188 of 2018:

The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler (Emily Windsnap #1)

I don’t read too many middle-grade books, but I decided to give this one a try because I share the author’s last name (although we are not actually related, to the best of my knowledge). It’s the first novel in a series about a twelve-year-old English girl who discovers that she can turn into a mermaid when she swims, and that the father she’s never known was a merman himself. The story has its heart in the right place — I definitely appreciate that it champions love’s ability to transcend boundaries and casts restrictive marriage laws as a cruelty that should be struck down — but the worldbuilding is pretty minimal and the plot feels too easy. I don’t anticipate reading any further in the series, but younger readers may like it more.

★★★☆☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter

Book Review: Arcadia by Iain Pears

Book #187 of 2018:

Arcadia by Iain Pears

This novel takes a little while to get going and clearly establish its plot, but it ends up as a mind-trip of the highest caliber. There are essentially three layers of reality that author Iain Pears is playing with here: 1) the twenty-third century, where a brilliant scientist flees her unscrupulous employers in the time machine she’s created, 2) the 1960s, where she arrives to find a contemporary of Tolkien and Lewis writing his own pastoral fantasy world inspired by Shakespeare’s comedies, and 3) that fictional land itself, which the inventor’s device inadvertently manifests as a real place that people can visit. It’s a bit like The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. crossed with something like Inkheart or Thursday Next, a spy thriller full of meta literary discussions and daft but fun time-travel paradoxes. I recommend it heartily, especially for fans of Steven Moffat’s work on Doctor Who.

★★★★☆

Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter