The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

Book #55 of 2025:

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix

Another outstanding horror title from author Grady Hendrix, this one focusing on the real-life horrific institution of mid-twentieth-century homes for expectant teenage mothers. Parents would forcibly check their daughters into such places for the duration of their pregnancies, after which the girls were strong-armed into giving the babies up for adoption. One character in this novel refuses to sign the papers in order to keep her child, only to have that decision used by the hospital staff as evidence of her immaturity / incompetence to justify separating her anyway.

The starkly terrifying thing about all this is that for the most part, it isn’t fiction at all. I had previously read a historical account of these practices — Gabrielle Glaser’s American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, which was also excellent — and Hendrix nails the awful coercion and endemic abuse. In fact, my only note on the degree of accuracy here is one area where he doesn’t go far enough: while the heroines are guilted with tales of the happy couples eagerly waiting to welcome their new children, Glaser describes how that claim was often a lie, with the infants instead being routed straight to the nearest available orphanage. (She also goes into infuriating detail about the cruel administrative barriers that kept birth families apart from one another for decades after, which is somewhat beyond the scope of this particular fictional plot but certainly fits with its running themes.)

And then there’s the witchcraft… eventually. The writer actually delays the arrival of anything supernatural until almost a quarter of the way through the text, providing us ample time to settle in with the protagonists and their circumstances. They then encounter a mysterious woman and her spellbook, which they first use in an extremely satisfying passage to give their obnoxious doctor a taste of their regular morning sickness. Soon they want to do more, but that will come with a price, as such stories demand.

Overall the magical element is handled well, and I think the book especially does a good job of capturing the witch as both an antagonist and a sympathetic figure. The teens themselves are clear victims and underdogs, and so it’s fun to root for them to keep growing in their craft and lashing out at their oppressors until it’s suddenly quite horrifyingly not. The power dynamics are interesting to consider, and I love how Hendrix grounds us in the 1970 setting with reminders of contemporary news items like the Kent State shootings and the Manson Family murders that made people feel as though the traditional social order of America was failing all around them. It’s a ripe era for something witchy, while also carrying the dramatic irony that in a few short years Roe v Wade would usher in a new age of abortion rights that would make the maternity houses obsolete. Left unspoken, of course, is how those same protections have recently been stripped away, a subtext which gives this 2025 publication significantly more bite.

It’s not a comfortable read, with some graphic self-harm and gory depictions of miscarriage and childbirth, not to mention discussion of one member’s child sex abuse. I do not recommend this if you or a partner are currently expecting! But for the rest of us, it’s a macabre tale powered considerably by the terrible truths behind it.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Last Bookstore on Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold

Book #54 of 2025:

The Last Bookstore on Earth by Lily Braun-Arnold

The best part of this novel is the initial premise reflected in the title: after acid rain and other climate disasters have ravaged the planet and decimated the population, the teenage protagonist is the only person left working in her shop, which she continues to operate for any of her fellow lonely survivors who happen to pass by. I would have loved a story that really dwelled in the quiet rhythms of that sort of life, which might have lived up to the lofty Station Eleven comparisons in the publisher’s blurb.

Unfortunately, petty YA drama soon rears its head, and the book worsens substantially as it goes along. First another girl arrives, promising to fix up the place before the next storm hits in exchange for sharing its shelter, and while she’s initially standoffish, she then settles in as the de facto love interest. (Hooray for lesbian representation, if you’re satisfied with characters who do nothing more than blush and kiss and share a bed.) Of course, she has a mysterious backstory, as does our heroine, though those secrets all prove pretty mundane once they’re finally aired. There’s conflict with a local band of scavengers, which is treated more dramatically than it probably deserves, and an injury to the main character’s hand that seems to vary wildly in its impact to her functioning or threat to her survival as the plot barrels predictably on. Everything is oh so very by the numbers; people leave the narrative only to return exactly when you think they will.

It’s bad, dear reader. I wish that it wasn’t! I wish that a work that repeatedly name-checks A Canticle for Leibowitz had anything close to that level of stirring humanity or post-apocalyptic worldbuilding. I wish that these kids would slow down and just run a bookstore together, and that we got to see more of their irregular customers. There’s so much wasted potential here, and certainly none of the genre’s typical sweet poignancy for a world gone by. I give it one-and-a-half stars, grudgingly rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson

Book #53 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Apocalypse by Nigel Robinson (Virgin New Adventures #3)

This volume doesn’t quite deserve its reputation as a series low point — it’s far better than Lungbarrow, for instance — but it’s an early indication of the limitations of the concept here. Classic Doctor Who wasn’t exactly a consistently excellent TV show, and this novel turns in a solid rendition of one of its standard forgettable plots. The Doctor stumbles across an alien underclass being exploited by their mysterious masters — stop me if you’ve heard this premise before!

The story’s main fault is that it’s just sort of dull throughout, but it ends somewhat strangely too, with some mysticism and the larger Timewyrm arc getting shoehorned in at the last minute. There’s also an attempt to link these events with the Fourth Doctor serial Logopolis and a few cameo flashbacks to the Second Doctor’s era, none of which makes much of an impression either. Still, the characterizations of Ace and the Seventh Doctor (impetuous and manipulative, respectively) are both pretty decent, and the whole thing isn’t bad per se, merely unremarkable and not particularly apocalyptic. I give it two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence, cannibalism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones

Book #52 of 2025:

A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones

Some Diana Wynne Jones stories — both Archer’s Goon and the Chrestomanci series come to mind — I read and reread countless times as a child and found that they still carried that same magic when I returned to them later in life. Others made so little impression on me in the first place that I’ve never bothered seeking them out again. This 1987 title belongs to a third category of her books, which I somehow missed as a kid to begin with and am approaching now as a complete blank slate.

Unfortunately it turns out to be another dud in my opinion, and that’s coming from someone who tends to love time-travel fiction in any medium. The initial premise here is great: a young girl being evacuated during the London bombings of World War II (as was the author herself, not to mention Narnia‘s famous Pevensie siblings) is met not by her distant relative in the countryside, but by two boys from a future century who have mistaken her for a certain figure of historic significance. Before she’s able to convince them of the error, they’ve taken her away to the titular city that exists outside of all regular chronology, where agents like their parents try to keep history on track.

The plot that follows is less impressive, however. The worldbuilding is both thin and kept largely obscure, the eventual villains have no clear motivation beyond megalomania, and the protagonists’ actions basically amount to an extended fetch quest for generic maguffins. (It also bears no resemblance to the Charles Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities, despite the obvious homage in the name.) There are some interesting ideas in here that I wish could have been developed at greater length, but as is, it’s a surprisingly tedious and mildly racist affair from a writer I know can do much better.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Bear, season 2

TV #13 of 2025:

The Bear, season 2

I wasn’t as immediately impressed with this sophomore effort, since the switch from the characters managing a struggling restaurant to launching a fancy new one made everything feel somewhat tamer. There’s still a great deal of chaotic scrambling and neurotic vulgarity, but in this case it’s all to meet deadlines that are entirely self-imposed and thus harder to take seriously than the desperate energy that fueled season one.

Luckily things develop more compellingly within that space as the plot unfolds, and a pair of later episodes in particular are absolutely stunning: “Fishes,” which flashes back to a stressful family gathering with help from ringers like John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk, and Jamie Lee Curtis, and “Forks,” in which series regular Richie takes center stage for a surprising transformation from comic relief to dignified soul of the operation. His arc is a neat embodiment of the overall ethos here, about setting difficult standards for improvement rather than accepting the comfortable status quo.

Those two hours are so good and so self-contained that I almost think they’d work in isolation for someone who’d never seen the show before, but that also speaks to the disjointed nature of the storytelling. It’s an elliptical sort of narrative that coasts on vibes instead of spelling out every detail of every connection, which doesn’t always land for me as a viewer. I want to know stuff like how everyone’s related or what the different shouted-out kitchen orders actually entail, and The Bear as a program seems increasingly uninterested in providing ready answers like that.

All of which is to say that this second course is way more uneven than the first, but on balance, it continues to deliver.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

Book #51 of 2025:

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

This collection of interconnected stories offers some pretty sharp observations on modern internet culture, and it reminds me of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface in its sympathetic depictions of certain objectively horrible protagonists, whom we can at least understand no matter how much we presumably disapprove. Author Tony Tulathimutte also nails how such people can unconsciously co-opt the language of therapy and/or social justice in defense of their own twisted behavior, which is neat if unsettling to read. But as that might suggest, it’s a bit mean-spirited at times, and the last few sections descend into metafictional navel-gazing that I don’t find nearly as interesting as the earlier character pieces. The novel-like structure makes me wish that more figures returned for some sort of closure after their time in the spotlight, too. Overall I’d say the writer’s talent is plain but I unfortunately don’t think I’m the exact right reader for it.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, bullying, and graphic descriptions of sexual obscenities including gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Book #50 of 2025:

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

I wasn’t a huge fan of author Suzanne Collins’s first prequel effort The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but this new title thankfully recaptures the old Hunger Games magic. It’s a challenging target for this sort of release to hit — similar enough to the original to carry the same appeal, different enough to not feel like a simple repeat, and moreover developing some interesting new angle of canon to really justify the return. In this case, the premise of finally telling the story of Haymitch Abernathy’s time in the arena is a solid hook to begin with, but the novel that plays out from there contains unexpected riches that distinguish this from any number of potential accounts of the second Quarter Quell that fanfic writers have imagined over the years.

Most readers will come at this volume with the background knowledge that the teenage protagonist is due to be selected as one of his district’s tributes and ultimately wind up the lone survivor of the ensuing slaughter. Luckily, the plot involves more than merely bullet-point summaries of how exactly that transpires. It’s instead a character piece exploring just how the hero gets ground down into the jaded alcoholic of the later era, fueled by the poignant mystery of what fate will befall his tender romance, given that his young sweetheart doesn’t seem to still be around as an adult. We also get a more intriguingly revolutionary motivation for the boy beyond pure survival, plus fascinating early looks at the dystopian Capitol setting and other familiar figures like Plutarch Heavensbee.

In finishing this book, I’m left with the urge to revisit the original trilogy with fresh eyes for how those characters are informed by their new backstory, as well as to spot any additional connections that I may have missed. That’s the sign of an exceptional prequel, in my opinion.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge

Book #49 of 2025:

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge

Nearly but not quite the last of Marvel’s Dark Tower comic adaptations, as this volume — already smaller than the first two — for some reason leaves out the closing arc The Sailor. Instead it includes only The Prisoner, House of Cards, Lady of Shadows, and Bitter Medicine, which collectively represent volumes 61-80 of the 85-issue series, covering the early lives of several key people from our world and how they eventually get drawn into the gunslinger Roland’s epic quest.

Most of this material comes from the novel The Drawing of the Three, although Eddie’s section in particular has expanded upon the available backstory, to somewhat mixed effect. In general I like his first-person narration, but I don’t think we especially needed so much detail about his childhood or how Roland’s enemy Walter was apparently trying to kill him back then. The story also doesn’t come to any major conclusion at the end, presumably in part because the present publication cuts off before the ending of the comics run. On the other hand, the artistic choices for Odetta’s chapters are very striking, and really illuminate her inner struggles with her dissociative identity disorder.

In reviewing the previous two omnibus releases, I observed that the one adapting The Gunslinger was stronger than the one handling Wizard and Glass, perhaps since the weaker Gunslinger source book represented a flawed canvas that could more readily be improved in adaptation. The Drawing of the Three, by contrast, is like Wizard and Glass in being an excellent novel to begin with that the illustrated version fails to wholly replicate or surpass. (The romance here feels significantly shortchanged from the original Stephen King prose, for instance, much as was the case before.)

Ultimately: if you’re an existing fan, I do feel this is an interesting attempt at a new take on the tale. But it’s not essential or definitive by any means, and it must be noted how many of the threads developed here never wind up going anywhere, as Marvel canceled the overall Dark Tower line shortly thereafter.

[Content warning for drug abuse, racism, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Vallista by Steven Brust

Book #48 of 2025:

Vallista by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #15)

In this installment, Vlad Taltos goes full Gormenghast, and the results are somewhat underwhelming. I do appreciate how author Steven Brust continues to periodically shake up his usual storytelling rhythms for this series, and it’s hard to name a bigger change than this adventure, which confines the ex-assassin to a magical manor of shifting realities populated by members of a decadent household. As he moves from room to room and through the surrounding environs having one-off conversations with the various lonely residents, the geography of the place seems disconnected in both space and time, resulting in him traveling back and forth across the centuries as he goes. It’s all very weird, and while he eventually pieces together a few family mysteries, learns more about the larger franchise worldbuilding, and manages to escape intact, it’s not the most satisfying plot. I give it two stars for providing another fun hangout session with the protagonist and his snarky reptilian familiar, but I need more from a story than a character wandering around being told stuff for 350 pages.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros

Book #47 of 2025:

Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros (Ring of Solomon #1)

[Disclaimer: I am Twitter mutuals with this author.]

Overall a solid entry in the Percy Jackson genre of middle-grade fiction, where tweens battle fantastical monsters drawn from some culture’s traditional mythology (increasingly #ownvoices for the writer’s particular background, as here). In this case the source domain is ancient Jewish folklore, with the demon lord Ashmedai, King Solomon, a ziz, a behemoth, and a leviathan all making an appearance. The twelve-year-old protagonist is also gay and subjected to intense antisemitic bullying from a tormenter at school, which further helps the title stand out among a crowded field of peers. Generally speaking, however, this feels too much like a sort of story I’ve encountered many times before, with not enough to specifically recommend it that I haven’t mentioned already. It’s apparently the launch to a series, so I hope that author Aden Polydoros manages to find a more distinctive key for the worldbuilding and plot going forward.

★★★☆☆