The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Book #74 of 2018:

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I was initially quite charmed by this novel and its titular heroine, whose difficulty with social cues and preference for a strict regular schedule would seem to place her somewhere on the autism spectrum. This diagnosis is never made explicit, however, and as the story goes on, it turns into an exploration of the main character’s childhood trauma and a personal journey for her to get better. As a reader who agrees with the diagnosis inherent in the title that there isn’t anything wrong with this character in the first place, it stings a little to see a narrative framed around making her fit in. (There’s also a really atrocious twist in the final pages that I spotted from a mile off and still groaned at once it finally happened.)

There’s enough in this novel to love that I can’t bring myself to give it lower than a three-star rating, but I really feel like the back half of the book squanders the setup for what could have been an all-time great read.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Book #73 of 2018:

We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This short, powerful essay is a good introduction to the weight of gender expectations and the ways that girls, boys, women, and men are all unfairly constrained by society’s conventions for them. It’s not a perfect read — the length doesn’t really allow for extended debate or fleshing out of ideas, and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie regularly conflates gender with biological sex in a way that denies the lived experience of anyone transgender — but it’s a valuable primer for readers who have never thought much about these issues or don’t see the point of the feminist movement. This shouldn’t be the only thing you read on the subject, but it’s not a bad place to start.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Agents of Light and Darkness by Simon R. Green

Book #72 of 2018:

Agents of Light and Darkness by Simon R. Green (Nightside #2)

I’m rereading this urban fantasy series that I loved when I was younger, and while it isn’t quite living up to my memories, this second novel is a vast improvement over the first. The worldbuilding offers a steady stream of clever invention, and its Raymond-Chandler-meets-Welcome-to-Night-Vale vibe leads to plenty of weird pulpy action.

The tone can be pretty irreverent — in this book, detective John Taylor is tasked with tracking down the “Unholy Grail” that Judas drank from at the Last Supper, while angels from both Heaven and Hell tear apart the Nightside trying to find it first — but if you can get on board with that sort of premise, the ensuing adventure is a lot of fun. By the time this story ends we’ve even gotten some decent character growth, and the Nightside is starting to feel like a distinct setting and not just a generic pastiche. In other words, I’m remembering why I liked these books in the first place.

[Trigger warning for some bloody violence and discussion of rape by a family member and subsequent abortion. Readers wishing to avoid such matters should probably give the whole series a miss.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: These Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

Book #71 of 2018:

These Broken Stars by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner (Starbound #1)

This sci-fi love story ends a lot stronger than it begins, especially after a surprise development around the three-quarter mark. The two main characters are teens from different social classes — a young war hero and a spoiled heiress — and as the only two people to survive the destruction of their starship, it’s pretty clear that the narrative is going to bring them together romantically. But since a lot of their early interactions are made up of petty sniping at one another, it’s hard to root for the two survivors either as a couple or individually.

Luckily these characters grow to be more interesting, and so does the story around them as they explore the Solaris-like planet where their escape pod has crash-landed. I’m still disappointed by the beginning of this novel, and at how little worldbuilding is revealed about the larger society where the story is set, but I raced through the ending and I’m eager to see where the series goes from here.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda

Book #70 of 2018:

All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda

The most distinctive aspect of this suspense novel is its timeline, which is presented Memento-style from back to front. After a quick introduction to establish the narrator and why she’s returned to her hometown, we jump forward two weeks to find that her neighbor has been missing for about that long. The rest of the story is told one day at a time going backwards from there, along with occasional flashbacks to the protagonist’s time in high school, when her best friend similarly vanished.

It’s a neat idea, but it necessarily keeps a reader at arm’s length, unable to immerse in the main character’s experience, and that weakens the dramatic impact of certain developments. There are interesting twists, but the chronology can be frustrating and it never quite feels motivated by the otherwise fairly standard story being told.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Squire by Tamora Pierce

Book #69 of 2018:

Squire by Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #3)

I’ve noted before that this quartet of books within Tamora Pierce’s larger Tortall series seems to be the author’s take on the classic boarding school literary genre, like Harry Potter without any looming Voldemort-style threat. Indeed, the plot is the major shortcoming to these stories, which basically just track the heroine growing up, gaining combat skills, and overcoming sexist bullies.

Nevertheless, this third novel is the strongest one so far, and it benefits from having an older protagonist with more nuanced, mature relationships. (This goes beyond romance, but the love interest here is possibly the least problematic I’ve yet read from Pierce, so kudos are due in that regard.) Keladry goes from fourteen to eighteen in these chapters, and the end of her knightly training comes to an enjoyable — albeit expected — conclusion. This quartet so far has revolved entirely around her education, so it will be interesting to see what the final book in Kel’s saga has to offer next.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Ready Player One (2018)

Movie #7 of 2018:

Ready Player One (2018)

As a disclaimer, I really like the novel this movie is based on, which I think gets a bad rap for some GamerGate-style gatekeeping associations that aren’t really present in the narrative itself. It’s also a story that seems really hard to adapt faithfully, and I think Steven Spielberg mostly succeeds in capturing the feel and ethos of the story if not all its particular plot details. The puzzles that our heroes have to solve are completely different, but they work well on-screen and really bring the digital OASIS universe to life much as I had imagined it while reading.

That being said, the love story somehow ends up being even flimsier in the movie, and I hate that Art3mis is often reduced from someone on Parzival’s level of competence and nerdity to a wide-eyed naif that he keeps having to educate about the easter egg they’re hunting. The plot near the end of the movie (basically from when Z gets kidnapped onwards) is also really muddled and makes me long for some of the scenes in the book that have been left behind in adaptation. In the end the spectacle largely lives up to the hype, but you’ll get a better story out of the original novel.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

Book #68 of 2018:

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

This bildungsroman of a young woman growing up in the early 20th century pleasingly recalls both The Color Purple and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but it carves out a distinct space for itself with its vibrant characters and pitch-perfect depiction of Jewish-American life. Presented as an 85-year-old telling her youngest granddaughter about her past, this book is a great example of how characterization and setting can carry a story even in the absence of much plot. There’s never any major drama, but the narrator is a whip-smart and funny first-generation American, and it’s a thrill to see the Boston of a century ago taking shape through her eyes. I do wish the narrative hadn’t ended so abruptly and without apparent motivation right after the main character’s wedding, but I’m holding out hope that author Anita Diamant might come back with a sequel that tells the rest of this woman’s story with the same warmth and humor she brought to her youth.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King

Book #67 of 2018:

The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #4.5)

This book was written after the conclusion of the author’s main Dark Tower series, but it takes place squarely in the middle, just after the fourth novel Wizard and Glass. (As with the prequel novella The Little Sisters of Eluria and other tangentially-related King stories, it’s best read either there, when the Dark Tower world is well-established but the fifth novel Wolves of the Calla hasn’t yet kicked off the series endgame, or else after a reader has already finished the main storyline and is hungry for more Tower connections.)

The Wind Through the Keyhole wasn’t written to plug any particular plot holes, so its events are fairly extraneous to the main Dark Tower story. A reader could easily skip this book and not feel anything was missed, as indeed we all did before its initial publication. But if you don’t mind the lack of plot movement, it’s a fun narrative of nesting stories showcasing King’s trademark weird blend of the fantasy, sci-fi, and western genres. There’s another glimpse at Roland’s ka-tet on their way to the Tower, another flashback to the gunslinger’s youth, and a new Mid-World fairy tale, all woven together and delivered with a master storyteller’s aplomb. It may not move the series plot along, but it’s a pleasant way to sit a spell by the campfire before we get to the Calla.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Star Wars: So You Want to Be a Jedi? by Adam Gidwitz

Book #66 of 2018:

Star Wars: So You Want to Be a Jedi? by Adam Gidwitz

This junior novelization of the second Star Wars film is a significant step down from The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farmboy, which was author Alexandra Bracken’s similar take on A New Hope. Whereas Bracken splits her story into three different sections, each from the perspective of one of the lead characters, Adam Gidwitz approaches his assignment primarily through the second-person. Most of the book asks readers to imagine they’re Luke Skywalker living the events of the movie (“You are lying in a medical bed aboard a Rebel starcruiser. You flex the muscles in your right arm.”), interspersed with meditation lessons to try at home (“Stand on one foot or put a book on your head. Count to ten. Okay? Now, while still balancing, say your telephone number backward.”).

I actually find the the latter chapters to be an enjoyably goofy way of teaching mindfulness behaviors to kids under the guise of Jedi philosophy, although it’s an odd fit for a retelling of The Empire Strikes Back. But the passages about Luke are often clunky, and on the occasions when Gidwitz needs to cut away to show what other characters are up to, the third-person perspective floats around without any cohesive anchor. The result is a remarkably poor rendition of a sci-fi story we know can be great.

★☆☆☆☆

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