The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: My Friends by Fredrik Backman

Book #113 of 2025:

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

Bestselling Swedish author Fredrik Backman is hit-or-miss for me, and this latest story squeaks in straight down the middle. I’m going to give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up, because while I don’t think it’s nearly as strong as Beartown or A Man Called Ove, it is better than the remaining four titles I’ve read from him. The mood generally lands as more sweet than cloying, and the text is peppered with the writer’s cheeky observations on life from the delightful first paragraph on.

(That opening: “Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans. The only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults, which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.”)

Our heroine is an orphaned graffiti artist who’s introduced breaking into a fancy art exhibition, although her motives there turn out to be fairly pure. By chance she collides with a friend group in their late thirties, and the main plot involves her learning the personal history of their own teenage years. Backman neatly captures the boundless feeling of emotional intimacy at that age, and it’s lovely how they recognize the almost-eighteen-year-old as a lonely kindred spirit and take her under their wing, without any hint of impropriety or manipulation.

The author does make some weird choices throughout the novel. I think referring to one person only as “the artist” is incredibly pretentious (at least in the English translation), and it’s very strange to have an epigraph attributed to Anton Ego with no indication that that’s a fictional character from the Disney-Pixar movie Ratatouille. I’m not quite sold on how everyone can apparently identify nascent generational artistic talent, either, or on why the protagonist would be so interested in these older people herself. But luckily the ultimate resolution is endearing enough to largely paper over such concerns.

[Content warning for substance abuse, domestic abuse, bullying, suicide, and child rape.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Return of Fitzroy Angursell by Victoria Goddard

Book #112 of 2025:

The Return of Fitzroy Angursell by Victoria Goddard (The Red Company Reformed #1)

There’s not really a wrong order in which to read author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy saga, but I would say that this particular volume is probably best picked up sometime after The Hands of the Emperor, to which it functions as an immediate spinoff sequel. At the end of that novel, which follows the bureaucrat Kip Mdang in a third-person limited fashion, his liege the former Emperor embarks on a solitary quest to magically locate his one true heir. This story picks up directly afterwards, with that individual narrating his subsequent misadventures in a rollicking first-person tone. In the process, it neatly punctures the occasional self-seriousness of the former tale, much like the change in narrators for The Vampire Lestat does to Interview with the Vampire.

It also matter-of-factly reveals a certain coy secret at the heart of the series in its first few pages, which is why I’d personally recommend reading the prequel novella The Tower at the Edge of the World in advance of this title, for maximum dramatic impact. (You may wish to at least sample the Greenwing & Dart sequence at this point as well, since the final section of this story crosses over into that world Dark Tower-style and features a few of its recurring characters.) But if you don’t already know how the vanished folk hero and outlaw poet Fitzroy Angursell is connected to the protagonist of this installment, you’ll learn soon enough when you start here.

That aspect aside, this is a propulsively fun if meandering read, as the main character careens wildly from one unlikely scrape to the next. (I am reminded, not at all unpleasantly, of the tall-tale texture of Walter Moers’s The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear.) Though his imperial handlers would never have expected it, their sovereign’s staid role was masking the soul of a happy wanderer who seems intractably drawn into larger-than-life situations and loves mingling with the common people, out-of-practice though he is at it. He’s well past middle age now too, which further provides us with the rare delight of an older and dark-skinned fantasy hero traveling the realms on basically just his wits and his charms, affably agreeing whenever his subjects exclaim how the incognito gentleman bears a striking resemblance to His Radiancy.

The legend of the title figure is woven throughout these pages too, especially once the remaining members of his notorious Red Company begin joining up with the wandering lord. This is in part a getting-the-gang-back-together-again plot, full of mature adults reuniting and reminiscing with the companions of their youth. I will note that that element might land more meaningfully had we seen more of those fabled adventures firsthand; as it is, even completionists like me will have gotten that material largely as piecemeal allusions in other works, although the writer does apparently have plans to go back and flesh out the bygone era at some later date. But even without readers knowing the characters’ full histories, there’s a definite poignancy in seeing them come together again after so long apart and finally start addressing some lingering hurts.

The closing arc of the book slows down for those conversations, which firmly situate the narrator as a classic Goddard protagonist. In the same model as Kip in The Hands of the Emperor, Jemis in the early Greenwing & Dart novels, or Rafael in Till Human Voices Wake Us, this is a man who privately aches to be recognized for his accomplishments by his loved ones but doesn’t know quite how to tell them everything he’s done without it seeming like a brag or a jest. Or to quote my own review of that last volume I mentioned, “the soul suffering its traumas in lonely silence, yearning for the catharsis that estranged relations could provide but unable to muster the courage to ask them for it.” It’s a type that the author plainly adores and pulls off rather well on this occasion.

As usual for the Nine Worlds, the storytelling is cozy with some sporadic darkness on the edges: mention of a distant tribe that exiles its gay and lesbian population, acknowledgment of abusive marriages, and so forth. But the major stakes involve simply how much trouble the hero will have to get into before using his trump card of revealing his royal identity, along with his slow rediscovery and settling back into the kind of person he used to be, before the duties of state fell upon him. The result is generally lighter in tone than The Hands of the Emperor but no less wholesome, and for those missing Kip, you can rest assured that his friend Tor is thinking about him all the time and sending him plenty of headache-inducing reports to sort out back at the palace.

Not all of the Red Company gets reassembled here — nor is the next ruler of Zunidh ultimately discovered — but as this is only book 1 of its subseries, I assume such further excitement lies ahead. I’m thrilled to read on and see.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

Book #111 of 2025:

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

This new science-fiction novel offers a modern spin on Minority Report, in which people can be arrested and indefinitely detained on the basis of an algorithm determining they’re statistically more likely to commit an upcoming violent crime. It’s a kafkaesque nightmare for the Moroccan-American protagonist, who is presented with all kinds of seemingly-inconsequential data points that the authorities say collectively pushed her score over the critical threshold. A distant cousin’s criminal history, a misunderstanding with another passenger on a recent flight, passing too near a protest site, or sharing something inflammatory on social media — these are the sorts of meaningless incidents they tally against her, although of course they insist that the equation itself is proprietary and cannot be challenged or examined.

So much of this feels scarily possible in a world where our identities are increasingly monitored in the permanent record of the digital panopticon and companies focused on cost-savings over accuracy risk delegating their important decision-making to knowingly-flawed AIs. The one off-note for me is that the heroine’s dreams — recorded and sold by the manufacturer of a device she uses to lower her required sleeping hours — apparently also factor into the calculation, which is maybe just a little too farfetched in my opinion.

But the rest seems maddeningly plausible, especially with regards to the petty tyrants who abuse their positions to make everything worse for the woman and her fellow detainees. Such scenes will be familiar to anyone who watched Orange Is the New Black, but they’re another chilling reminder in today’s climate of how easy it is for the government to grab you, reduce you to a case file, and thrust you into an inhumane system operated by unsympathetic subcontractors with minimal accountability or oversight. It’s an awfully blunt political allegory, though perhaps unrealistically bipartisan (the liberals supporting the surveillance-state detention program for its apparent impact on significantly reducing the number of deadly shootings nationwide).

The human element is relatively moving too, as the main character grows estranged from her husband and their two young kids as her time away from them drags on. But I suspect the overall premise will linger with me a lot longer than she herself does.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Galavant, season 1

TV #37 of 2025:

Galavant, season 1

This medieval-pastiche musical comedy marginally improves over the course of its first year, but it’s still pretty far from the ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend meets The Princess Bride‘ showcase that I want it to be. The songs by Alan Menken are fine — I’ve even added a few to my Spotify library — and yet hampered by the 22-minute episodic runtime, often cutting off for dubious comedic value after merely a verse or so. The characters also aren’t impressing me much yet, with only Richard and Gareth showing a glimmer of any significant development by the time this season wraps. I’m particularly underwhelmed by the central romance, which is one of those that seems to rest on a man and a woman falling for each other by default due to their extended proximity, rather than demonstrating any actual spark and enjoyment of one another’s personalities.

The major problem here, besides the short episodes, is the truncated length of the season itself. At just eight installments, there’s hardly enough space for the writers to figure out which elements work best and start leaning into those, let alone to tell a compelling ongoing story and its weekly component plots. I’m genuinely amazed this effort was renewed for a second run, but I’m hopeful that that additional time allowed for the growth that ideally would have happened during the production of this one.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Bear, season 4

TV #36 of 2025:

The Bear, season 4

A welcome improvement over the previous year, but still not quite as thrilling or affecting as the first couple seasons of this show. As usual, the standout moments tend to be found in the episodes that forgo the more typical rhythms of the restaurant kitchen to spark emotional breakthroughs outside of it — like that scene with everyone crowded beneath the table in 4×6 Bears for instance, assuming you can set aside the lingering logistical questions of how they’re all fitting under there or why they’d necessarily be invited to that particular wedding in the first place. Framing nearly the entire finale as one single three-person conversation in the back alley was a bold choice that worked for me, too.

A ticking clock of how long the enterprise can apparently continue to operate adds a degree of both structure and stakes to this run, but too many of the subplots set up an obvious resolution that then gets needlessly dragged out across multiple installments. Way too much time is spent with Rob Reiner’s new character, for example, stretching a reasonable development — his advice to franchise the Beef window as the most profitable part of The Bear — into a whole extended arc for some reason.

At least this season finally resolves a few ongoing matters that have likewise lingered for far too long, like Sydney’s option to join Shapiro’s new venture or Carmy’s unexplained insistence on changing the menu every day. I’m not happy that the program has taken all this time to get there, but I do appreciate how it clears the storyboard for a cleaner direction going forward.

(And hey, the Faks were more tolerable in a smaller dosage here as well. That’s worth celebrating in and of itself.)

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

Book #110 of 2025:

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

A fun take on the magical school archetype. The setting reminds me a lot of Naomi Novik’s Scholomance, where the spellwork attracts hungry monsters from a terrifying hell dimension, although at least this time the teenaged students aren’t locked-in and left fending for themselves. In fact, the protagonist is one of their teachers, who offers a delightfully exasperated perspective on what it’s like to have to keep up with lesson-planning, grading, and career guidance while also battling such incursions.

The publisher’s blurb calls this standalone novel a “sapphic dark academia fantasy,” and I don’t know that I’d quite go that far. It’s more focused on administrative minutiae (alternating with sporadic action sequences) than the gothic aesthetic and air of mysteries I normally associate with that subgenre, and while the heroine is canonically bisexual, her main love interest throughout the text is a man. We do meet both an ex-girlfriend and a female colleague she eventually kisses, but readers looking for heavy F/F romance themes are likely to be disappointed.

Still, a queer millennial approaching middle age is a neat choice for this sort of lead, and though the plot around her isn’t the most revelatory, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, either. All told, I’m happy to give this story three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for amputation and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Meltdown by John Peel

Book #109 of 2025:

Meltdown by John Peel (2099 #5)

After a promising start, this middle-grade sci-fi series has stalled out in a major way, and I can only hope that the sixth and final volume manages to tap into that original sense of imaginative fun that propelled the earlier books. Just like in the last entry, Jame’s corner of the story about the rebellion against the corrupt ruler on Mars is the sole piece that’s really still effective here, though it remains sadly isolated from everything else. His clone brothers are meanwhile stuck in their same old patterns: the psychopathic Devon again terrorizing people on the moon, while Tristan and his new friend Genia spend the whole novel trying to track down that villainous doppelgänger (and being inexplicably accompanied by the boy’s ex-girlfriend Mora, who brings literally no relevant skills to the table). At least Shimoda finally makes headway in cracking the big conspiracy case she’s been investigating, although it’s fairly inert in how it plays out on the page.

As we head towards the conclusion, Devon is holding Earth hostage with a ship full of radioactive waste and has set up bombs to explode behind him on Luna, while the Quietus conspirators are heading off to join the Martian administrator, who’s managed to suppress the local resistance movement with his own threats of widespread violence. Will the clones meet up before the end? Will we get more of that goofy futuristic worldbuilding that initially drew me into this setting? I’m pretty sure I read this far way back in the day, but it turns out I don’t remember any of these later installments at all.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Poker Face, season 2

TV #35 of 2025:

Poker Face, season 2

I wasn’t a huge fan of this modern Columbo riff in its debut year, but it had enough charms that I gave it a grudging three-star rating overall. This followup, unfortunately, is considerably worse. I do like a few elements here and there — Giancarlo Esposito as a funeral home director in 2×2 Last Looks; the little sociopathic grade-school overachiever in 2×6 Sloppy Joseph — but for the most part, the show’s standard episodic formula is growing stale and its efforts to tell a larger serialized story are increasingly dire.

Steve Buscemi’s very distinctive voice pops up as a recurring CB radio acquaintance, for instance, who forms such a bond with the protagonist that he lets her borrow his keys and stay in his apartment for an extended time, which is quite a departure from her usual drifter ways. But we never meet him in person, or indeed even hear from him again after he’s set her up with a place to live, which seems like a remarkable unfired Chekhov’s gun. Meanwhile, ‘human lie detector’ Charlie Cale is at first running from another mobster, then inexplicably continuing her life on the road once that threat has been resolved, and then finally settling down in the NYC homebase that Buscemi’s character provides, which turns out to be a mistake that allows a villain to get close… for the express purpose of tricking her into leading the way to someone from an old case who’s now in witness protection and that she has no reason to know how to contact.

It’s a mess! The finale appears to again reset the premise to the old status quo of our heroine on the run — just from the FBI this time — and maybe that’s for the best, since it doesn’t seem like this season really knew what to do with her otherwise. It might even be the strongest ending that we realistically could have hoped for, given how the program still hasn’t officially been renewed for round three. But whether it comes back someday or not, I doubt I’ll be returning as a viewer.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Book #108 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel (Virgin New Adventures #6)

Andrew Cartmel served as the script editor for the last three seasons of Classic Doctor Who (1987-1989), which were also the years that produced the final protagonist team of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace. The author thus had great control over their specific personalities, which he transfers well into this first novel he contributed to the ongoing Virgin New Adventures line in the 1990s that continued their journeys through time and space after the TV series went off the air. It’s technically the middle volume in the Cat’s Cradle trilogy too, although it’s almost entirely unrelated to the book that came before it, Time’s Crucible by Marc Platt. (That story set up a strange glowing feline as a sort of avatar for the TARDIS, which was going through a bit of a crisis. The timeship is still largely out of commission here, and the cat makes a cameo appearance, but that’s about it as far as the continuity goes.) Meanwhile, two characters introduced midway through this adventure, Justine and Vincent, would reappear in the subsequent Cartmel titles Warlock (VNA #34) and Warchild (VNA #47), though that’s all I know about the later works so far.

As for this installment, it’s a thrillingly globe-hopping spectacle, set in a dystopian cyberpunk near-future in which the world is choked by smog and one corrupt megaconglomerate functionally runs everything. The Time Lord is in his full manipulative chessmaster mode, operating less as a traditional action hero and more as a quiet presence nudging pieces into place from behind the scenes. Ace is his reluctant catspaw — pun intended — and it’s clear that she’s growing into a more battle-hardened and jaded young woman than she’d previously been characterized as, although the development certainly fits her character and what all she’s been through. The Doctor drops her in Turkey with no support to recruit a dangerous group of mercenaries, one of whom she ultimately has to kill in desperate armed combat, on a mission to retrieve what turns out to be the cryogenically-preserved body of a teenage boy with latent psychic powers.

I do have a few critiques. This is a tale that’s heavy on atmospheric worldbuilding but thin on a legible plot, and the ultimate aim of the villain is to create a process for digitally uploading the consciousnesses of the uber-rich… which isn’t particularly evil save for his methods to accomplish it, which for some reason require sacrificing his wife and son. And while the Doctor foils that scheme, he doesn’t even attempt to topple the overarching system that preys on the working class — literally harvesting them for body parts after arresting and executing them on trumped-up charges — and is steadily poisoning the planet, driving girls into underage prostitution, and other such sins. He and Ace stride off triumphantly in the end despite the widespread suffering they’re leaving behind, which doesn’t feel especially earned. There’s also a totally unnecessary scene at one point when that heroine, stepping naked out of the shower to save the still-drowsy telepath from drowning in the nearby bathtub, gets groggily groped for her efforts. It’s a step up from the pervasive misogyny and threats of sexual violence that hung over John Peel’s Timewyrm: Genesys, but maybe only just — and the one genuine romance of the piece is too predicated on instantaneous attraction to ever register as a meaningful opposite.

And yet! This is overall a neat departure for the franchise, and one not bogged down in the usual lore-heavy complications. It’s full of clever insights into the Doctor and how he thinks about history, and my understanding is that its darker turn proves very influential on the volumes that follow. There’s little indication of the so-called Cartmel masterplan, in which the former editor apparently intended to reveal if the show had gone on that the Doctor was a mysterious figure from Gallifreyan prehistory — as the preceding Platt title did ironically start to explore — but we do get a strong sense that that character constitutes an ancient and implacable force hiding behind a jester’s act, somehow powerful and inscrutable beyond normal human morality, which is one of my favorite characterizations in Doctor Who. We see those hints through the eyes of the ordinary people who populate this text, as he repeatedly swirls into somebody’s life and completely upends it with but a few well-placed words.

Does it hang together as a coherent narrative? I’m not so sure. But the mood is fairly intoxicating throughout.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho

Book #107 of 2025:

Aisle Nine by Ian X. Cho

An unfortunate dud for me. I appreciate the satirical anticapitalist edge here — sure, I’ve seen Buffy; I’ll accept that if portals were spitting out monsters worldwide, including in the middle of a crowded grocery store, business would continue unaffected and shoppers would go on asking inane questions and otherwise treating the low-salary workers like dirt — but that comes at the cost of some hazy worldbuilding about the nature of the situation and an overall comedic tone that I think ultimately cuts against the effectiveness of the piece. I couldn’t really connect to the characters, either, with the amnesiac hero in particular feeling like a perpetual generic blank slate. Add to that a tepid plot and a few predictable twists, and well, I can’t say that I’ve found too much in this YA apocalyptic horror novel to actually recommend.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆