The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

Book #213 of 2018:

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (Cormoran Strike #4)

I love the characters in J. K. Rowling’s pseudonymous detective novels, but I’m often disappointed by their plots, and this one feels particularly aimless. The investigation shifts from a cryptic remark about a disturbed man’s childhood memory to a case of political blackmail to a suspicious death, all of which are nebulously connected but don’t quite feel like they should justify Cormoran Strike’s sustained attention throughout. It’s a step up from the derivative serial killer business in the last book, and I always enjoy seeing Strike’s evolving partnership with Robin, but this is now the third novel in a row that has essentially failed to recapture the magic of The Cuckoo’s Calling for me.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde

Book #212 of 2018:

Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #2)

Two books in, I think I have to conclude that this series is just not working for me. There are plenty of clever ideas, but they’re delivered in such a scattershot manner that none of it really coheres together. I’m frustrated by the lack of clear rules for the central notion of ‘jurisfiction,’ and I don’t get the same enjoyment that author Jasper Fforde apparently does from seeing classic literary characters like Miss Havisham behave in incongruous ways. Perhaps the series would work better in a short story format, given how Fforde prioritizes individual scenes over an overarching plot, but I find that these first two novels are not living up to its potential.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

Book 210 of 2018:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter #4)

This middle volume marks a major shift in the Harry Potter series in a number of ways. It’s much longer than the previous novels, but it’s also significantly darker and more mature. The title wizard and his friends are growing up, which brings both a burgeoning interest in their dating lives and a more nuanced understanding of the principles that they’re fighting for and against. The villains no longer seem just evil and power-hungry; they are instead cruel bigots whose supremacist ideology extends far beyond their group.

Indeed, this book is immediately political in a way that takes my breath away even on the umpteenth reread. In the first chapters, hooded figures march to strike terror by night and a well-meaning ally says dismissively that “now is not the time” to address injustice. Later on, the insulting notion of blood purity from earlier in the series is developed even further as a key belief of the antagonists and a weapon they use to oppress people perceived as different. Against this, the heroes are exhorted to band together, to see diversity as a strength, and to judge a person’s character by “how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

It’s to author J. K. Rowling’s great credit that these important messages never come across as overly moralistic, but are simply further details woven into the tapestry of her story. And it’s a great story too, full of interesting characters and new inventive elements of magic. Ending on a bold game-changer for how the narrative will progress from here on out, this novel is both a clear pivot point for the Harry Potter series and a deeply enjoyable tale in its own right.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Wildcard by Marie Lu

Book #211 of 2018:

Wildcard by Marie Lu (Warcross #2)

One of the best things about author Marie Lu’s novel Warcross is its surprise ending, which pulls the rug out from underneath characters and readers alike and dramatically raises the stakes of the series. Accordingly, it’s the failure to adequately deliver on that promise that galls the most about this sequel, followed by the general sidelining of both the imaginative VR game and its colorful cast of characters from the first book. I honestly have a hard time reconciling these two stories as part of the same duology, and it often feels as though the heroine is as lost as I am, lacking any of the clear goals, motivation, or proactive agency that she’s had before. I hate to be so negative, and perhaps I’ve just gone into this novel with the wrong set of expectations for it, but I’m pretty disappointed at how little it resembles what I remember enjoying in Warcross.

This book: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Book ranking: 1 > 2

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Book Review: Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor

Book #209 of 2018:

Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor (Strange the Dreamer #2)

A lovely conclusion to the story set up in Strange the Dreamer, especially for how it resolves that wicked cliffhanger from the first book. Author Laini Taylor’s fantasy storytelling and rich mythic worldbuilding is as terrific as ever (with even more connections to her earlier Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy), and the poetry in her prose is the same soothing balm that I’ve loved before.

The pace is a little slow, and there are probably a few too many scenes of people just standing around talking, but I love how the major conflicts in this story revolve around traumatized characters processing their grief and how the apparent villains are just hurt people who need healing too. It’s quiet and cathartic in a way that many genre works would avoid, but the end result absolutely justifies the writer’s bold narrative choices.

The duology ends with a hint of further tales in this setting, and I eagerly await what Taylor dreams up for us next.

This book: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Book ranking: 1 > 2

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Book Review: Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed

Book #208 of 2018:

Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed

An arresting blend of The Giver and The Handmaid’s Tale, depicting a dystopian island community ruled over by a patriarchal cult that insists the rest of the world has been destroyed. Girls are brought up to submit to men in all ways, and what they take for granted — often presented in euphemisms that a reader can’t help but understand — is all quietly awful. Debut author Jennie Melamed shifts among the perspectives of four teenage girls, each facing a distinct torment she can barely articulate yet unable to even imagine anything different.

It’s all understandably heavy, and I feel a bit let down by the end of this book, which shifts away from a character-driven plot to one in which the heroines are mostly reacting to outside events. (To be fair, their lack of agency is sort of the overall point of this worldbuilding experiment, but it does make the story less interesting to read.) I think I need to sit with this one for a while to figure out how I feel about the novel as a whole, but there are plenty of individual moments that are going to haunt me for quite some time.

[Major content warning for rape, domestic abuse, incest, pedophilia, forced marriage, and similar mature themes.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

Book #207 of 2018:

The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

This is a ridiculous collaboration on its face, but it never quite lives up to that inherent goofiness, and even ignoring who the authors are, it’s not that great of a story either. (It’s also bizarrely titled… Despite some early fake-outs, the title character is never missing; he’s in contact with his top advisors for practically the entire novel.) This is an airport thriller whose middle third mostly involves people standing around talking, and whose dramatic climax involves the president’s national security team shouting out suggestions like “freedom!” and “amnesty!” in an effort to guess the password that will disable a terrorist virus from wiping out America’s computers.

Okay, I guess it’s a little goofy. But with a former president co-writing a novel that presumably draws somewhat on his actual experiences, I want so much more than this.

[Side note: Like most political fiction, this book never quite reveals when its timeline diverges away from our own, but since there’s references to Gitmo, the Iraq War, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, I’m pretty sure both the last two presidencies happened. And it’s set in 2018. So… Bill Clinton wrote a post-Obama fanfic where someone besides Trump won the White House, but that person still wasn’t Hillary.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

Book #206 of 2018:

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians #1)

I haven’t yet seen the new movie adaptation, but this original novel is pretty trashy. And that’s not a bad thing! This story is exactly what it’s aiming to be, which is a fictionalized Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous for the modern Singapore jet-setting class. Most of its characters are petty, frivolous, and obsessed with the latest gossip in their exclusive social circle, and they’re entertaining (if not exactly relatable) in a reality TV trainwreck sort of way.

Still, that’s not really my preferred style of storytelling, and the repeated shock of characters and the narrative alike over someone’s latest extravagance soon bears diminishing returns for me as a reader. I also feel as though the book ends without resolving any of its major plotlines, and I’m nowhere near invested enough to carry on with the sequels. It’s neat to read a popular novel with an all-Asian cast, especially one that subverts stereotypes like this, but I don’t think I’m the ideal audience for this series.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Beartown by Fredrik Backman

Book #205 of 2018:

Beartown by Fredrik Backman (Beartown #1)

An intimate portrait of a small town pinning all of its hopes on a junior hockey championship, packed with well-drawn characters and insightful reflections into the human condition. The third-person omniscient narrator that bounces around Beartown to illuminate the web of connections between its residents and their particular local sports culture feels like Little Fires Everywhere crossed with Friday Night Lights (the TV show, at least — I haven’t seen the movie or read the original book). Like those stories, this one depicts its central community in such detail that it’s almost hard to believe it doesn’t actually exist out there in the world somewhere.

My only qualm is the first chapter’s framing, which tells readers that we are going to learn why “a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.” That is, indeed, one of the last things that happens in this novel, but the narrative isn’t really built around it. The much more powerful driving act is one hockey player’s rape of a female classmate about halfway through the book. Every moment before then builds up to that attack, and everything after — including the business with the shotgun — is about the fallout. Knowing that right from the start would have made me appreciate the construction of this novel all the more.

[Trigger warning for rape, as well as victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and other awful aspects of rape culture.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Book #204 of 2018:

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

This debut sci-fi novel from author Rivers Solomon is one of those books that many readers will justifiably love but that doesn’t quite hit the spot for me. With a dark-skinned intersex autistic heroine — and plenty of other diversity among the supporting cast — it’s a real triumph of representation, yet a bit of a disjointed reading experience on a plot level. No one in particular is proactively driving anything that happens over the course of the narrative, and it’s not always clear what the characters are aiming to do beyond simply survive the harshness of their world.

That world is an interstellar spaceship housing an oppressive racial caste system, and the worldbuilding — the sense that a creator has fleshed out a believable, lived-in setting for their fiction — is of variable success. That is, although I believe wholeheartedly in what we see of life aboard the HSS Matilda through the perspective of its lower-class inhabitants, I’m frustrated by how much we don’t get to see at all. It never feels as though Solomon has neglected to think out any specific details, but I wish that more of those details were known to their characters so that they could be shared with the rest of us.

In the end I guess I would say that this is a well-written and distinctive piece of Afrofuturism that unfortunately lacks a lot of what I look for in a story. But again, other readers will likely enjoy the many good qualities that I have hopefully highlighted here.

[Content warning for racist violence and other terrors of slavery, as well as homophobia and transphobia. All presented as villainous, but not necessarily easy to read.]

★★★☆☆

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