The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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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Movie Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Movie #19 of 2018:

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

A big improvement over the first Ant-Man movie, which was funny but had some definite character issues and lousy gender representation. This one feels stronger on all fronts, and there are a lot of clever uses of the shrinking and growing technology that don’t just copy what happened in Ant-Man or Captain America: Civil War. And I really did laugh the whole way through it, which counts for a lot in my book.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Fargo, season 3

TV #47 of 2018:

Fargo, season 3

This show has always been in danger of substituting style for substance, given that its essential MO is to just remix the themes, characters, and events of the original Coen brothers movie. And while the first two seasons largely managed to chart their own strong courses of midwestern lawful good going up against small-time criminals in over their heads, I found this season to be a bit hollow and unfocused. (Too much unexplained coincidence / deus ex machina for my liking, as well.) The acting is as good as ever, and I get where the writers were going with all the fake news stuff, but my understanding a craft choice in this case doesn’t equate to my really having enjoyed the final product.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King

Book #203 of 2018:

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King (Mary Russell #1)

This tale of a Jewish teenager being trained as a detective by a retired Sherlock Holmes in the early twentieth century is a lovely bildungsroman and portrait of a budding partnership. Mary Russell is a great character in her own right, every bit as clever as Holmes, and author Laurie R. King engages thoughtfully with the original Arthur Conan Doyle canon, producing a reasoned and respectful feminist critique of Doyle’s blind spots. It’s only one of any number of unauthorized sequels and reinterpretations of the legendary detective, but King’s clear love for the canon makes this one feel as though it truly could be where Sherlock’s story goes next.

(Despite my enjoyment of this novel, however, I am not planning to read any further into the series, which apparently develops Holmes and Russell’s relationship into a romance starting in the very next book. These characters are four decades apart in age and clearly established here as having both a father-daughter and teacher-student dynamic. I have no interest in reading a love story between them, which I can’t see as anything other than the coercive abuse of an older man’s power. Thankfully, there is no element of that in their debut.)

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Doctor Who: Lungbarrow by Marc Platt

Book #202 of 2018:

Doctor Who: Lungbarrow by Marc Platt (Virgin New Adventures #60)

This is a fascinatingly weird book, the culmination of a series of adventures that the Seventh Doctor continued to have after the classic run of Doctor Who was canceled as a television program in 1989. When that version of the Time Lord hero was officially succeeded by the Eighth Doctor in a 1996 TV movie, Virgin publishers’ New Adventures series drew to a close by filling in the final stories of the earlier incarnation. Lungbarrow, the last of these novels, also attempted to answer long-lingering questions about the Doctor’s origins and properly canonize the so-called Cartmel Masterplan that script editor Andrew Cartmel had been building towards when the show went off the air.

It’s subsequently famous in fan circles, but understandably a bit of a mess. The main plot revolves around the Doctor’s titular family home, a Gormenghast-inspired gothic manor of eccentric relations, indoor swamps, and giant living furniture. We learn that Time Lords are created in the “looms” of such houses, a technological process made necessary after the species stopped giving birth countless eons ago. We are also given strong evidence that irregularities in the Doctor’s own looming link back to the Other, a shadowy figure of power from the dawn of Gallifreyan history. Around all this there’s some good old-fashioned Gallifrey politics, the return of TV companions Leela, Romana, and Ace, two versions of the robot dog K-9, and a ton of surreal madness as Lungbarrow comes to life.

All in all, it’s not a very good story. This book is simply trying to do too much, and for a purported conclusion, there’s a lot that is left ambiguous, understated, and unresolved at the end. It’s still a worthwhile read for a dedicated Whovian looking for a snapshot of the era’s mythology, but as an actual reading experience it’s more frustrating than enjoyable.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander

Book #201 of 2018:

The Black Cauldron by Lloyd Alexander (The Chronicles of Prydain #2)

I like this second adventure through the land of Prydain even more than its predecessor, perhaps because it has more twists and turns (some easy to predict, others not) and a greater focus on characterization over plot. But there’s the same sense of humor, and the same love of traditional Welsh folklore informing the narrative.

First published in the decade after The Lord of the Rings, this series clearly owes that one a debt, but it comes early enough in the line of Tolkien’s successors that his vision of a fantasy world had not yet calcified into the tropes that later writers must struggle to avoid. As a result Prydain still feels fresh even a half-century on.

★★★★☆

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Review: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Book #200 of 2018:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

A terrific piece of long-form investigative journalism, detailing the shady business practices of the Theranos blood-test corporation. From their heavy employee turnover and their “culture of secrecy and fear” to their overpromises of technical breakthroughs and their lies that directly endangered customer health, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou presents everything that he uncovered in the investigation that eventually brought the company down. I especially like the final quarter of this book, when Carreyrou moves out of a neutral third-person perspective to recount his own interactions with Theranos lawyers and whistleblowers. It’s a modern-day All The President’s Men, a fascinating look at the truth behind a scam slowly breaking through a wall of obstruction.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Trickster’s Queen by Tamora Pierce

Book #199 of 2018:

Trickster’s Queen by Tamora Pierce (Daughter of the Lioness #2)

Tamora Pierce is always hit-or-miss for me, and this particular Tortall novel is unfortunately more of a miss. The spycraft feels mostly like a repeat of the last book, the plot points are easy to predict, and the author ultimately does little to subvert the white savior issues that have been present in this duology from the start. It’s also yet another Pierce story in which the heroine’s magic is so overpowered that she never really faces any significant difficulty in accomplishing her goals. In the end it’s still a fun adventure narrative, and younger readers will likely enjoy it more than I have, but I know Pierce can do better than this.

This book: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Books ranked: 1 > 2

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Book Review: The Outsider by Stephen King

Book #198 of 2018:

The Outsider by Stephen King

Stephen King’s latest novel is also his best work in years (since 11/22/63 in 2011, in my opinion). It’s a compulsively readable mystery-thriller with an irresistible premise: a man is arrested for the horrific rape and murder of a young boy, with irrefutable eyewitness, fingerprint, and DNA evidence linking him to the scene. But he insists that he didn’t do it, and offers up an alibi with its own airtight corroboration. Each version of events seems as though it must be true, but both versions can’t be.

For the first half of this story, King explores with great nuance the ramifications of the case and the doubts that creep into this small town. Is an innocent family man being framed, or has he hidden his true nature and somehow pulled off the perfect crime? I raced through these pages, and was expecting to ultimately award the book 5 stars. Two developments in the back half, however, dampened my enjoyment substantially. Minor spoilers ahead.

First, it turns out that this is a spinoff sequel to the author’s earlier Bill Hodges trilogy, which I’ve liked but never loved. You won’t be lost if you haven’t read those detective novels first, but The Outsider does give away their ending, and it’s a little frustrating that it hasn’t been clearly advertised as a follow-up. More importantly, the paradox posed by the novel’s setup is ultimately given a supernatural solution, and the story’s climax devolves into some standard King monster-hunting.

This part of the book is fine, but it’s nowhere near as strong as the beginning. In fact, it sort of reads as though King, who famously doesn’t plot out his stories ahead of time, wrote himself into a corner and couldn’t think how else to resolve the matter. I almost wish he had instead left the solution ambiguous, as he did in his cold-case novella The Colorado Kid. That would have been a bolder writing choice, more in line with the excellence of this novel’s early chapters.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: ReBoot: The Guardian Code, season 2

TV #46 of 2018:

ReBoot: The Guardian Code, season 2

I ultimately gave the first season of this show a 2-star review, feeling that although it was significantly worse than the original ReBoot cartoon, it had occasional flashes of quality that showed promise. Unfortunately, I can’t be as generous to this second season (which was made in the same production block as the first, but released separately by Netflix). It’s just awful on pretty much every level, from cheesy writing and acting to nonsensical worldbuilding and character motivations. None of the potential that I saw before has been realized in this next batch of episodes, and I really hope this is the end of the line for this show. I love ReBoot so much that I’ll probably feel obligated to keep watching, but what this series has done to the franchise is just atrocious.

★☆☆☆☆

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