The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

Book #119 of 2016:

The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

A moving YA novel that brought to mind both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the Buffy episode “The Zeppo.” Like those stories, The Rest of Us Just Live Here focuses on the people who are background characters in large epic contests, fleshing out their stories with dignity. As Mikey’s classmates engage in supernatural battles with primordial forces, he is focused on more mundane matters like his relapsing OCD and his crush on his best friend.

What’s key to the success of this novel is that these things aren’t mundane to Mikey, and the supernatural stuff takes a backseat to them. This is a story that could easily go off the rails if the tone wasn’t just right, but writer Patrick Ness manages to highlight the genre tropes going on in the background without ever tipping into overt parody or detracting from the seriousness of Mikey’s own story. After reading this book, I’m really looking forward to Class, the Doctor Who spin-off for young adults that Ness is the lead writer for. If it’s anything like this novel, it will be an excellent balance of speculative fiction and realistic teen drama.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Forever by Maggie Stiefvater

Book #118 of 2016:

Forever by Maggie Stiefvater (The Wolves of Mercy Falls #3)

One thing I really appreciate about this book series, beyond its great character work and fairly original spin on werewolves, is how much the status quo changes from novel to novel. Structurally speaking, Forever is largely an inverse of the first book in the series, with characters playing opposite roles in their interactions with one another, and those parallels and divergences deepen our understanding of the larger text. It’s a lot richer than I was expecting from a series about teenagers turning into wolves.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers

Book #117 of 2016:

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins #1)

I haven’t seen the Disney movie of Mary Poppins since I was a very small child, so I can’t say how the film version compares to this novel. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Mary Poppins of the original book is a mean bully who berates, gaslights, and straight-up steals from the children under her care. I’ll grant that they seem to love her in spite of her cruelty, but this reader did not.

(Maybe I’m just not cut out for this sort of story – I also take the side of the fish in The Cat in the Hat, protesting that that stranger-danger feline should not be there when your mother is out.)

Mary Poppins is a strange fey being, and the adventures she provides are fairly inventive. But I just couldn’t get past how awful she was as a person.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Giver by Lois Lowry

Book #116 of 2016:

The Giver by Lois Lowry (The Giver #1)

I remember really liking The Giver when I was growing up, but I was still a teenager at the oldest the last time I read it, so I only really had fuzzy memories of its specifics. Of course, it more than lived up to my recollection, as the story of a repressive utopia and the lone preserver of its forbidden memories is quite deservedly a classic. On this read-through I was particularly struck by how immediate and immersive Lois Lowry’s world-building is. The Giver is not that long of a book, but the society she creates within its pages is striking in its details, and the novel unfolds beautifully with the readers’ growing understanding of how it differs from our world and Jonas’s growing despair and horror over the hollowness at its core. I’ve never gone on to read any of this novel’s sequels before, but now I feel like I might have to.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Desperation by Stephen King

Book #115 of 2016:

Desperation by Stephen King

Desperation is a decent Stephen King story, flavored with hints of Dark Tower connections but never really connecting with that other mythos. This novel features King at his scariest, but only for its first hundred pages or so, when it appears to be just about a deranged police officer jailing, attacking, and killing strangers who pass near his small Nevada town. It loses a bit of the terror when the threat is revealed to be a supernatural one of an ancient evil unearthed in the nearby mine, now possessing the cop and others to wreak havoc. The story that unfolds is a fine one, if a bit derivative of other King novels, but I can’t help but wish the author had just stuck with the original human horror instead of escalating the issue to a battle between good and evil.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

Book #114 of 2017:

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters (The Last Policeman #1)

Apocalyptic fiction and detective stories are two genres that I particularly enjoy, but I believe this is the first time I’ve ever seen them blended. The result is The Last Policeman, a novel about a detective trying to solve the case in front of him despite the fact that a humanity-ending asteroid has been detected on an unavoidable collision course with Earth. Six months before the impact, as society crumbles and many people are either killing themselves or quitting their jobs to pursue their bucket lists, Hank remains intent on doing the police work he always has. It’s an interesting take on the stoic upright lawman character, and a decent detective story amid a very distinct setting.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones by Brandon Sanderson

Book #113 of 2016:

Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones by Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz #2)

Another fun YA novel from Brandon Sanderson, who blends his usual high fantasy style with something closer to Harry Potter and then adds a snarky narrator offering meta-commentary on the nature of stories throughout. Book 2 in this series fleshes out the history of its setting a little bit more, although we won’t get serious worldbuilding until the next novel when Alcatraz finally leaves the Hushlands behind. It also adds several fun new characters with their own wacky magical talents that sound bad but are actually highly useful (like Alcatraz’s uncle whose ability to get lost allows him to escape from a crashing plane without a scratch). These books are quick and entertaining, and I’m quite enjoying this reread.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: A Whole New World by Liz Braswell

Book #112 of 2016:

A Whole New World by Liz Braswell (Twisted Tales #1)

This novel offers a “what-if” spin on Disney’s animated Aladdin movie: what if the evil Jafar made wishes with the genie’s lamp before the hero got the chance? The result has some interesting moments, especially with Aladdin and Princess Jasmine leading a populist uprising against Jafar, but on the whole it’s rather flat. It’s also incredibly dark, to the point where I kept wondering whether Disney’s lawyers had read through the final draft before signing off on the official licence. (At one point, Jasmine’s narration points out the section of the palace dungeon where rapists are held. I was personally a lot happier before knowing Agrabah had that problem.)

Plus the first 20% of the book is essentially just a faithful novelization of the movie up until Aladdin finds the lamp, which is a huge waste given that pretty much any interested reader will already know those events. There’s potential for a good story here, and I particularly enjoyed the new female characters that Braswell adds, but in the end it’s a bit of a mess.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Runaway King by Jennifer A. Nielsen

Book #111 of 2016:

The Runaway King by Jennifer A. Nielsen (The Ascendance Trilogy #2)

This book is the Catching Fire to its predecessor’s Hunger Games – a sequel that faces the tricky task of recapturing what readers loved about the very particular scenario of the first book. The plot mechanics that get the orphan-turned-king from The False Prince back in his rags and living on his wits again are slightly smoother than a Quarter Quell, but as a whole The Runaway King stands in the shadow of the previous story. The adventure with the pirates offers some much-needed worldbuilding, but Sage seems to have fewer cards up his sleeve this time, yielding a more straightforward and predictable narrative. He’s still a fun character to read, but the plot just doesn’t crackle as much this time around.

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: Hamilton’s America (2016)

Movie #21 of 2016:

Hamilton’s America (2016)

This documentary is a fun look at the Broadway musical sensation as well the real-life history of US Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. It’s informative enough on that last count that I could see schoolteachers getting away with playing it to their classes, and it’s charmingly bipartisan in having Elizabeth Warren, Paul Ryan, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush all talk about Hamilton’s political legacy. But the real draw here is for fans of the show, with behind-the-scenes insights and plenty of footage from the stage production. It’s no substitute for seeing the play – or even listening to the soundtrack – but it’s a lovely sampling of moments that always stays accessible to the part of its audience just now hearing about the musical.

★★★☆☆

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