The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

Book #40 of 2025:

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

This is an odd little story. It’s a translated version of a Japanese bestseller, and I’m sure there are some cultural nuances that I’m missing, as I’ve had a particularly hard time swallowing the basic premise here. Not the mirror that magically transports the tween protagonist to a mysterious castle; that’s a perfectly fine fantasy element as far as I’m concerned. But she and the other young kids she meets there are just indefinitely staying home from school, for various personal reasons? No parent or government authority compels them to attend? Apparently this is a genuine phenomenon in Japan known as futoko, but it’s so far removed from my expectations and understanding of educational pedagogy that I think I’ve struggled with how to approach this novel as a result.

For our heroine, the inciting cause of her seclusion was a severe case of bullying and bodily threats that’s led her to quit being a student and stay home all day while her parents continue to go into work. Once through the looking glass, she encounters six fellow dropouts, who gradually share their own sad backstories as they come to bond Breakfast Club-style. They’re additionally greeted by a strange girl in a mask, who tells them that they can come and go via their mirrors during normal school hours until the term ends in March. If they ever linger past curfew, a wolf will eat them. If they can find a secret key that’s hidden somewhere in the building, one of them will be granted their heart’s desire at the cost of the whole group losing their memories of the castle. If no one finds the prize or uses it to make a wish, the portals will still close for them in April, but at least they’ll get to remember it all.

Those rules are a bit too weird for me as well, and although the overall experience is eventually explained (in what’s easily the book’s most moving sequence at the end), the arbitrary logic still chafes. There’s also a connection between the children — who don’t know each other in their real lives — that seems so obvious that I wish it had been moved up earlier in the text, as I’ve spent too long impatiently waiting for the characters to realize it for themselves.

I do like certain parts of the plot, and I’ll readily grant that I’m outside of the original intended audience, but in my opinion not enough of the project coheres together for me to wholly embrace it.

[Content warning for incest and child sexual abuse.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Book #39 of 2025:

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown (The Wild Robot #1)

A cute but aimless little story about an industrial robot who washes ashore on an island after a shipwreck and begins to make a home for itself. She’s fresh from her factory and there are no humans around to give her directions, so she instead teaches herself to communicate with the local wildlife, who eventually accept her as one of their own. The plot, such as it is, involves the protagonist gradually winning the trust of those creatures and raising a young gosling she adopts as an orphaned egg.

It’s pretty lightweight, but falls easily within the talking-animal tradition of pastoral children’s literature like The Jungle Book or The Wind in the Willows. I could imagine younger readers being hooked on these proceedings, although I myself would prefer greater character stakes and harder-to-resolve conflicts throughout. (Author Peter Brown nods to the reality of carnivore diets, but he still has predators and their prey working together as a happy community more often than not.) I’ve heard the recent movie adaptation is good, so I might check that out at some point, but I doubt I’ll continue on with any of the sequel novels.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

Book #38 of 2025:

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #26)

Circling back to one of the Discworld novels I’d never read before. I’ve been away from the series for a while, but this one strikes me as even more of a random mishmash than usual, with characters wandering in from other titles and not really explained or developed fully in the present adventure. The stuff about the horsemen of the apocalypse also seems like a rehash of what author Terry Pratchett had already done with the concept a decade earlier in Good Omens, and the plot gets a bit hard to follow once time freezes around the midway point of the story. The monks whose job it is to keep history happening on schedule show a certain Doctor Who-meets-James Bond potential, but that element is bogged down in some dubious Asian stereotyping that hasn’t aged well since 2001.

As ever, the wry humor is endearing enough to earn at least a passing grade regardless, and I do like the little touches of neurodiversity here, like the protagonist who’s very passionate about his niche interest and takes medication to help regulate that. Unfortunately he disappears from the narrative rather abruptly — merging with another character and subsequently displaying none of his former personality — and his other half is so effortlessly gifted at everything he does as to become uninteresting to me. (I have a massive side-eye for the ending suggesting that this sixteen-year-old has gotten romantically involved with his adult schoolteacher companion, as well.)

Overall not Pratchett’s best work, but the clever jokes just about make up for it.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Hawk by Steven Brust

Book #37 of 2025:

Hawk by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #14)

Way back in the fifth volume of this fantasy series, the hitman / mob boss Vladimir Taltos turned on the criminal organization that had previously employed him, resulting in them putting a bounty on his head and forcing him to flee his familiar home and friends. He’s had a bumpy journey since then, but it was always an untenable turn of events, and it finally comes to a boil here, nine years further on (or 24, for readers following along with the releases in real time).

Having returned to the city in the previous novel, and resolved to stay there at the end to remain close to his ex-wife and son, the protagonist has found the Jhereg attention on him steadily amping up, to the point where he’s now pressing his luck dodging multiple assassin teams a day. With no obvious solution besides leaving for the wilderness again, he spends this installment setting up a way to get out from under his former bosses forever, which will take every last scrap of his cleverness, his witchcraft, and the remaining friendships he can call upon.

His ultimate scheme is ingenious in all its contingencies, though the logistics are a little shaky upon closer consideration. (Spoiler alert: all he had to do was essentially catch the higher-ups conspiring to do something illegal? When it’s an open secret their operations are nearly all illicit anyway? Unauthorized psychic surveillance is somehow a bigger deal than all the murdering? I just don’t get it.) But it’s fun to watch him deploy the endgame and run circles around the enemies who think they’ve got him cornered, at least.

It’s not my favorite Vlad adventure — there’s no real emotional depth or feeling of significant challenge anywhere — but I appreciate how it seems to clear away the longstanding threat hanging over the character and reset the basic premise / stakes going forward. I’ve never read this far into the saga before, so I wonder where his story goes from here?

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Agatha All Along, season 1

TV #12 of 2025:

Agatha All Along, season 1

I had initially brushed off this show — an unnecessary-seeming spinoff of Marvel’s WandaVision, with the villain now reframed as an antihero — only to belatedly circle back to it on the basis of a few rave reviews. Ultimately I think it was better than I assumed it would be, but not exactly the gem I’d been hearing about, either. Overall I’m giving it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up: stronger than Echo, Moon Knight, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and certainly Secret Invasion, but not as well-executed as Loki, Hawkeye, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Ms. Marvel, or especially its own parent series.

To start with the good, the cast is fun, and notably unusual in its gender skew for television. Besides Joe Locke as a teenager who comes seeking Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha to kickstart the plot, the main ensemble are all women, with 75-year-old Patti Lupone standing out in particular for the sort of character most shows wouldn’t flesh out and highlight to this extent. The coven is racially diverse too, and features Marvel’s first lesbian romance since the days of Jessica Jones. While Teen’s backstory is kept mysterious for far too long, he’s subsequently revealed to be in a queer relationship as well.

I mention that level of representation because I know it means a lot to some viewers, and this is obviously a program that passes the Bechdel Test each week with aplomb. In the process, it also delivers a couple really fine episodes, like the one where Lillia gets unstuck in time to revisit earlier moments of the story or the one where the young hero’s past is finally shown to us. And I do love the two big twists in the season finale, which serve to recontextualize some of my previous issues with the scripts.

But to that end, I haven’t enjoyed all the front-loaded ambiguities here, and I’m still frustrated with the arbitrary nature of the Witches’ Road and its various challenges. For a while it feels like showrunner Jac Schaeffer is attempting to recreate the clever structure she deployed on WandaVision, with a different decade of witches in popular culture for each trial, but it’s far less motivated in this instance and mostly plays out as mere random costume changes for everybody. (The ultimate answer as to why the Road is like that does get explained later on, sort of, but it’s a just-so solution that doesn’t make those features land any more meaningfully.) Starting the first episode with an indulgently long Mare of Easttown crime drama pastiche is a strange step too, unmatched by anything that follows. And for a series that seems pitched on sisterly solidarity and community, it’s odd how many characters exit the stage before the end until it’s basically just the Hahn and Locke show alone.

I do like what we eventually learn about the boy’s identity, and I wish it could have been presented sooner and given more focus throughout. Take his Judaism, for instance — I loved the flashback scenes set at his bar mitzvah, but since those culminate in what’s effectively amnesia, it results in a person who, like Moon Knight, only technically has that background and doesn’t actually engage with his Jewishness as a part of his daily life at all. An alternate storyline that made the tension between his two selves more vivid could perhaps have alleviated that. The mystery of Teen is moreover one of those elements that I fear lands differently for audiences who had a week between every episode release and access to an eager internet of fandom speculation versus those like me who are able to watch the series straight through. In my opinion, the puzzle is a distraction hiding a certain emptiness in the rest of the narrative.

So round it up to four stars for some nice witchy fun. The vibes are great if that’s your thing, and I’m sure it was neat to have this as a spooky weekly appointment around Halloween season when it originally aired. But its most exciting sequences tend to fall into that Marvel trap of existing simply to set up the next property, and I’m not entirely impressed with the project even now that I can see the full shape of it in hindsight.

[Content warning for death of a child and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Betrayal by John Peel

Book #36 of 2025:

Betrayal by John Peel (2099 #2)

A propulsive sequel that picks up right where the first installment of this middle-grade sci-fi series left off, with a doomsday computer virus ravaging all of New York City. It’s actually impressive how well author John Peel, writing in the 1990s and imagining a century ahead, manages to nail the vulnerabilities of an interconnected Internet of Things to outside attacks. Autopilots going offline resulting in vehicle crashes, electronic doors locking up, alarms and fire suppression measures failing to operate — these are real worries we’re starting to face today, and they make for gripping fiction from yesteryear.

The plot is more focused now too, and the four main characters are all given interesting goals to pursue. The evil clone who made the virus is attempting to escape from his handlers, the good clone is trying to find him and disable the program, the cop is on the track of the wrong boy and worried about turncoats in her ranks, and the street kid’s past crimes finally catch up to her, with the authorities dragging her away from the detective’s side to stand trial. It’s still a little hokey at times — the two teen boys, separated at birth and raised apart, have both grown up to be genius coders whose work is so similar that observers mistake one’s for the other’s — but between the genre, the era, and the intended audience, I think I can suspend my disbelief enough on that front.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Terec and the Wall by Victoria Goddard

Book #35 of 2025:

Terec and the Wall by Victoria Goddard (Terec of Lund #2)

To recap: the imperial valet Conju, a minor character in author Victoria Goddard’s best-known work The Hands of the Emperor, recounts in that novel the unknown fate of his lost love Terec, who fled civilization as a young man with the fire of wild magic burning within him. Their shared backstory gets explored a little more in the servant’s reminiscences in The Game of Courts, while the mage’s own journey commences in Terec and the Wild.

This sequel, the second of four planned novellas in its sequence, picks up where that initial volume leaves off, with the protagonist first stepping outside the empire of his birth. (Oddly, Terec and the Wild was largely about the experiences leading him to the wall bordering Astandalas, while Terec and the Wall is much more about the wild landscape beyond it. Those maybe should have switched their names!) He loses all sense of self in the process, and spends the opening half of this book wandering the wilderness on pure animal instinct, kept alive and warm by the flames he subconsciously continues to wield.

Then around the midway mark, he unexpectedly encounters someone else and wanders into a separate story altogether. I’m not being figurative there — without warning, his arc has suddenly connected up with the Greenwing & Dart series, a branch of the Nine Worlds saga that’s previously been rather independent. Terec’s presence answers a small mystery hanging over that corner of the map, and suggests a radically different direction for the remaining installments ahead.

I am generally a fan of the patchwork way in which Goddard has built up this diverse narrative, and of the increasing impression that any single thread could cross over into another, Cosmere or MCU-style. I would not have guessed that these particular strands would ever wind up weaving together, and I think it’s a development that’s both fun in the moment and promising for the future.

On the other hand: once the wow factor has diminished, there’s not a lot of meat to that section of the plot here, and even less before the hero meets the stranger and begins regaining his faculties. Goddard remains a very talented cozy fantasy writer, but so many of these shorter releases feel like they could have been joined into something more substantial instead of published as solitary wisps like this.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: This Book Kills by Ravena Guron

Book #34 of 2025:

This Book Kills by Ravena Guron

I was expecting this novel — in which a student’s classmate is murdered in the same way as the victim in a story she wrote — to be a YA thriller, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it’s more of a traditional whodunnit instead. Like Veronica Mars or the guy in the movie Brick, our teenage detective protagonist wanders the British boarding school setting, investigating leads and looking for clues, before ultimately and inevitably getting in way over her head when the killer notices what she’s doing.

I thought the identity of that hidden culprit was pretty easy to determine, although as I mentioned in another recent review, I may just be growing too comfortable with a genre that only has so many different underlying plot paths available to it. (Keep asking yourself as you read what claims we really only have one person’s word for, and the mystery often clears right up.) There isn’t quite enough here to make the title stand out for me as truly exceptional, but it’s a solid example of the craft.

[Content warning for racism, bullying, underage alcohol abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Babylon 5, season 3

TV #11 of 2025:

Babylon 5, season 3

Babylon 5 is so very nearly frustratingly close to being a good show. There are times when it manages to kick into that higher gear, such as this season when the rising authoritarianism on earth forces the station crew to openly break away from their homeworld and declare independence. Indeed, watching this series now in the era of DOGE gutting America’s federal government, there’s a real resonance in these officers feeling torn between their sworn duty and the blatant malfeasance in the upper ranks. The arc involving the paramilitary Nightwatch movement — loyalists to the corrupt president who inform on their neighbors and claim to exist outside the regular chain of command — is also rather apt. (It’s not that showrunner J. Michael Straczynski or the other writers predicted our current moment, of course; it’s that they fairly skillfully articulated a fictional parallel to historical processes that we are unfortunately now seeing repeat.)

So the problem isn’t a lack of great ideas per se, but merely the inability to drill down on those and discard more of the chaff. The Centauri/Narn conflict in the previous season registered so strongly because it was channeled through representative personalities that we’d come to know well, and there’s no such figures standing in for the mysterious Shadows who dominate the storyline here. It’s all just a lot of portentous talk about doom and destinies, with even the villains’ fundamental motivation behind the war ultimately delivered as an abstract offhand line from one of their interchangeable flunkies in the finale. For its era, the program had a reputation of daring serialization, but absent the personal element clicking into place, that often feels like meaningless pieces getting shuffled around a game board. The long-teased reveal of what happened to Babylon 4 and the fate of Commander Sinclair finally arrives, and I guess it all fits together logically enough, but it’s in no way satisfying to watch.

The basic framework is there, to be clear! Strip away the hokier elements like Dr. Franklin taking a penitent walkabout to “meet himself” or, uh, everything concerning Marcus, and there are characters who shine. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the abruptness of either Sheridan’s introduction or Delenn’s transformation last year, on their own terms as we find them here, I think they work fine. But the wider plot is too much of a bland chaos, without the necessary focus on any people or events we have a solid reason to care about.

[Content warning for gun violence, genocide, torture, body horror, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling

Book #33 of 2025:

Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling

Dr. Tamsin Rivers is losing her mind. She’s not sleeping well, she’s exhibiting odd memory lapses, and she’s going long periods without remembering to eat or leave the house. She’s also studying a strange House of Leaves phenomenon where her basement seems to stretch in size whenever she isn’t looking, its floor ever so slightly further away from the ceiling each time. When it reaches far enough, an odd doorway suddenly appears that she can’t open or materially affect at all. And then an exact duplicate of herself is there too, her blank mental state giving no indication of whether she came through the mysterious portal or not.

Some of these things are objective facts, at least so far as the protagonist can tell. She’s both going crazy and experiencing a crazy event, although the causality isn’t especially clear early on. (Are the forces that summoned her doppelgänger also responsible for her deteriorating cognition, or is the other woman’s presence all a fever dream from her already unwell brain?) Eventually the plot discards the ambiguity and endorses the former option, as her condition continues to worsen. Meanwhile the naïve double is growing ever crueler and more sure of herself in a reverse of the original’s own progression, and it isn’t long before she’s taken her place and reduced the doctor to a frightened mess cowering in their home with the dwindling fragments of her memories.

This is a fascinating piece of psychological horror from the author of the equally excellent The Luminous Dead, heavy on themes of domestic abuse and with some eventual queer and disabled representation as well (the heroine sharing a complicated quasi-romantic dynamic with both her mirror self and her flinty corporate handler). The scientist’s Flowers for Algernon transformation is eerie enough to witness even without the addition of her unnatural tormenter, who like the villain in Stephen King’s Misery soon takes steps to forcibly limit her mobility. It’s a slow burn overall, and while I don’t understand either the title or the cover art — which suggests many such copies for some reason — it’s been a gripping experience to read.

Four stars instead of five simply because the peripheral stuff with the office politics, the Silicon Valley satire, and the corporation’s wider area of study isn’t developed in as much detail as I’d like, and since there are a few matters I would have preferred to get more closure on by the end. But on the level of the immediate character-driven story, this has been a real page-turner for me regardless.

[Content warning for biomedical experimentation, dehumanization, gaslighting, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆