The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Sex Education, season 2

TV #4 of 2025:

Sex Education, season 2

Reliably funny, but not quite as charming as the first installment of this Netflix series. The main problem here is Otis, the awkward virgin and son of a sex therapist at the heart of the program, still dispensing unsanctioned but helpful advice to his classmates. This second season picks up with the love triangle that developed before, with him now dating Ola but hung up on Maeve, who’s belatedly realized that she likes him too. The situation is obviously untenable, and the hero is a really insufferable jerk to both girls about it throughout (as well as to his mom for continuing to see his girlfriend’s dad). I’m beginning to feel the same way I once did toward Piper on Orange Is the New Black, where the wider community of the show is far more interesting and endearing than its aggravating ostensible lead.

That protagonist’s best friend Eric is in a dire storyline this year too, torn between an interested new guy at school and the closeted boy who bullied him for years. I actually do enjoy Adam as the somber and softhearted outsider he’s playing these days, but the writers haven’t done anywhere near the necessary work to reconcile that new characterization with how he tormented the band kid in the past to get me on-board with any serious romance there. (Admittedly, the season finale helps mitigate some of the above concerns for both Eric and Otis. But it doesn’t make the episodes leading up to that point any more fun to watch, even if it potentially sets up brighter skies for the boys ahead.)

Thankfully, the subplots fare better. Jackson reconsidering his extracurriculars; Aimee’s trauma and the subsequent Breakfast Club detention squad that forms up around her; the Groff marriage implosion; Maeve’s ongoing struggles against her bad-girl reputation and the return of her deadbeat mother — these all make for fairly compelling personal dramas! And Jean visiting campus as another unofficial counselor for the students provides some nice episodic plots, in and around those larger serialized arcs. If only the writing could center that sort of material more and the pigheaded Otis significantly less, I’d be far happier with it as a whole.

[Content warning for self-harm, drug abuse, child endangerment, and sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo

Book #10 of 2025:

The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #5)

I’ll admit I was a little impatient during the first half of this latest novella in the Singing Hills fantasy series, which seemed to be setting up a fairly transparent Bluebeard plot. Our returning protagonist Cleric Chih is accompanying a young woman they met on the road to the grand estate of her intended husband, where things feel off-kilter if not overtly sinister and no one wants to talk about the lord’s previous wives. And yet there’s a twist to that tale after all, and once it’s deployed, the whole narrative takes on a new shape that I’ve personally found much more appealing.

I still wouldn’t call this one of the best entries in this loose sequence, which often delve more deeply into the power of storytelling itself and why different tellings of common legends might differ both from one another and from any verifiable historical facts. But it’s significantly better than it initially appears, and the nonbinary monk is as endearing as ever, even if their talking bird companion is absent for much of the text. I’ll give this installment three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Adventures Before by Mark Griffiths, Steve Cole, Janet Fielding, Gary Russell, Beth Axford, Janelle McCurdy, E. L. Norry, and Ingrid Oliver

Book #9 of 2025:

Doctor Who: The Adventures Before by Mark Griffiths, Steve Cole, Janet Fielding, Gary Russell, Beth Axford, Janelle McCurdy, E. L. Norry, and Ingrid Oliver

This short story collection has a fun concept that’s mostly executed rather well, depicting new prequel events for eight Doctor Who episodes: The Daleks (First Doctor, 1963-1964), The Seeds of Doom (Fourth Doctor, 1976), Arc of Infinity (Fifth Doctor, 1983), The Five Doctors (Fifth Doctor, 1983), Rose (Ninth Doctor, 2005), Planet of the Dead (Tenth Doctor, 2009), The Girl Who Waited (Eleventh Doctor, 2011), and The Day of the Doctor (Eleventh Doctor, 2013). That range could stand to be more even / more representative of the program’s full history — there’s nothing from the past decade, for instance, despite the book being released in late 2024 — and readers who aren’t familiar with the Classic serials presumably won’t find those entries as entertaining. But for what we’re given and the sort of Whovian that I am, I’ve enjoyed it.

I think it helps that the Doctor isn’t actually on-hand for many of these tales, providing the supporting cast a greater chance to shine. I’m reminded of the Star Wars: From A Certain Point of View project, which likewise finds interesting ways to deepen the smaller roles from on-screen. And sure enough, the weakest title here is definitely the Tenth Doctor outing “Smiley’s Mirror Effect” by Janelle McCurdy, which both centers that usual Time Lord hero and doesn’t really tell us anything new about either the character or the upcoming TV plot.

We’re on stronger footing with our looks into the psyches and family lives of companions Tegan Jovanka (“Little Did She Know”) and Petronella Osgood (“The Morning of the Day of the Doctor”), each written by the respective actress in question, although my favorite piece is probably the unexpected origin story for the villainous Harrison Chase and his henchman Scorby in Steve Cole’s “The Roots of Evil.” I’d also note that this Doctor Who anthology is far superior overall to the actual recent Origin Stories one, which in my opinion relied too heavily on memory wipes to preserve the timeline and keep specific characters from knowing things / people that they shouldn’t have so far in advance of their television debuts. Since these new offerings generally function as more immediate prologues, that particular creative constraint is removed, and the work as a whole is significantly better for it.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart

Book #8 of 2025:

The Gods Below by Andrea Stewart (The Hollow Covenant #1)

I appreciate the distinctive premise of this epic fantasy novel, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by two different magical afflictions: the initial curse that made everything a wasteland and another that followed later and is now gradually spreading, restoring each new region’s natural growth at the cost of killing half its population to fuel the spell and turning the remaining half into monsters. The setup of the primary conflict is nice too, centering on a pair of orphaned sisters who get separated across such a border for ten years, with one undergoing the transformation and the second desperate to find a way back to her.

In practice, though, none of this feels especially urgent. Both women have their own lives, and even when they wind up face-to-face again on opposite battle lines, their connection doesn’t seem like a major factor anymore. Amid this we have three other POV characters we split our time amongst — each heroine’s eventual love interest and one of their cousins — who are generally not as interesting. I’m not trying to be rude or flippant here, but one thread consists solely of flashbacks that deliver perfunctory exposition about the setting’s history, while another follows a person journeying through a long mineshaft for the entirety of the plot. There’s just no tension or personal stakes ever worth investing our emotions in.

The worldbuilding is also a bit confusing. I get the broad strokes: the gods supposedly live underground, in the area the explorer is aiming to reach, while on the surface one particular deity commands his radical worshippers to kill all others and feed them to him. But it’s never really clear what’s supposed to separate those so-called divinities from mere altered humans, which results in a few twists where someone apparently in the latter category is revealed to secretly be in the former instead, which understandably lands without any significant impact. At least there’s a sapphic romance and some genderfluidity on the margins, which is still a rarity for the genre. But overall this strikes me as more of a creative writing exercise than a polished story, and I doubt I’ll bother going any further with the series.

[Content warning for body horror, genocide, violence against children, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 16

TV #3 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 16

Ambitious in concept but significantly less impressive in execution, unfortunately. This 1978-1979 season of Doctor Who introduces two major elements: the incoming companion Romana played (for now) by Mary Tamm, and a larger plot arc focused on a powerful artifact called the Key to Time. The former is a new sort of character for the show, a co-lead who as a fellow Time Lord is intentionally positioned as the Doctor’s putative equal, rather than another junior assistant, friend, or travelmate. In practice, however, she’s not so radically different from her predecessors — a situation which led to the actress exiting the role after just this one season and the next one starting with her having already regenerated into somebody else offscreen.

As for the linking narrative, which was likewise a bit of a novelty for the time, it sadly doesn’t amount to much either. It’s introduced grandly enough as an assignment from a godlike being calling himself the White Guardian, who instructs the Doctor to assemble the six segments of the device to prevent the universe from falling into chaos (an abstract notion that’s never quite defined for us in any real concrete terms). But as it plays out, the serials that follow are basically traditional Who stories with a random macguffin stuck on at the end, somewhat like The Keys of Marinus all the way back in season 1. The overall conclusion to the storyline is rather weak too, with the evil Black Guardian posing as his opposite and asking our hero to hand over the pieces he’s now assembled. Instead, the Doctor sees through the disguise and scatters them back across time and space, apparently undoing all his hard work of collecting them in the first place. Was the villain the one who sent him on the mission initially? How does the actual White Guardian feel about not receiving his completed item? Are there any consequences for the protagonist not doing what he was told? The script isn’t remotely interested in answering those questions or giving us any kind of closure there.

Setting the fetch quest aside, the episodes this season are largely fine but unremarkable. Romana I, the Fourth Doctor, and K-9 Mark II are a fun team of clever rivals always seeking to upstage one another, and the program generally uses them well. The low budgets are definitely beginning to show, however, especially when the story ideas are so thin on the ground. It’s not that the creativity isn’t there, but promising concepts like android dopplegangers, a time loop to stop an interplanetary war, and a mechanical planet that crushes smaller worlds inside it for resources simply aren’t developed enough to stick out as particularly memorable. Only one adventure this year really grabs my attention with its surprising degree of anticolonial anger, but if Doctor Who has proved anything by this point, it’s that the franchise offers a wide umbrella that can encompass many sorts of permutations like that. I just wish this latest iteration were stronger throughout, much as I begrudgingly admire the effort.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
THE ARMAGEDDON FACTOR (16×21 – 16×26)

★★★☆☆
THE PIRATE PLANET (16×5 – 16×8)
THE STONES OF BLOOD (16×9 – 16×12)
THE RIBOS OPERATION (16×1 – 16×4)
THE ANDROIDS OF TARA (16×13 – 16×16)

★★★★☆
THE POWER OF KROLL (16×17 – 16×20)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, season 1

TV #2 of 2025:

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, season 1

Call it popcorn entertainment if you want, but this show absolutely nails its Star Wars children’s adventure vibe. The franchise has never really done anything like this before, give or take the old Ewok movies, but the mashup of the traditional science-fiction trappings with the rollicking energy of a suburban 80s Amblin feature turns out to be a pretty winning combination.

The Goonies with its own pirate treasure hunt is the most obvious point of comparison, with the late director Richard Donner even getting a sly call-out in the name of Captain Rennod — read it backwards — but the series overall understands its genre and its swashbuckling predecessors well, including other character names like Silvo* in a Long John Silver kind of role and the droid SM-33 as a bit like Captain Hook’s second-in-command Mr. Smee. Now, are kids liable to catch these references? Perhaps not. But it’s a good sign of how the writers have approached the material, resulting in intelligent fare that the whole family can enjoy, rather than mindless children’s programming or lazy nostalgia bait.

Plotwise, four students stumble across a buried spaceship in the woods and accidentally reactivate its systems, rocketing away from their home planet with no clear way to return and interested pirates hot on their trail. There’s not really a puzzle-box mystery here, but we soon discover that nobody in the wider galaxy has ever heard of their world as a real place, just a legendary repository of riches. The young protagonists are likewise unaware of outside happenings like the recent Rebellion against the Empire, which helps the story feel like a complete standalone. We don’t even get Carson Teva as the requisite X-Wing pilot in this New Republic / Mandalorian era, which again suggests a piece that’s meant to stay largely independent of such connections.

(At the same time, the Easter Eggs are there for the spotting: a Star Tours ride vehicle floating near the space station that the heroes visit, an opening sequence reminiscent of Vader’s original entrance from A New Hope, and so on. There’s even a holographic display that looks a lot like the one from the Star Wars Holiday Special, which…. bless this production team for pulling into the proper canon. No notes.)

But although it may feint that way a few times, there’s no big twist* or plot to be theorizing about beyond the kids returning home, those lingering oddities surrounding their planet, and whatever the resident scoundrel played by Jude Law has up his sleeve. It’s simply fun, with a well-developed cast of youngsters who are both endearing and believably impulsive, and it delivers some striking disability representation in one particularly memorable scene. I don’t know whether we’re getting another season, or where the storyline would go if we did, but I’ve had a blast with the first year of this title. And overall, I’d say I’m very pleased that Star Wars as a brand is proving malleable enough to do both this and the darker work on Andor or The Acolyte so well.

*While a minor issue, Jod’s multiple names — Jod Na Nawood, Captain Silvo, and Crimson Jack — never really get explained or resolve into anything meaningful. It’s a needlessly confusing detail. I’ve also heard from viewers who were convinced that there *were* big mysteries like secret identities to speculate about, and though I never felt that way myself, I can see how the construction of the season could feed that sort of frenzy in the fandom. (Why don’t we get to see Rennod’s face? Why don’t we learn more about the Supervisor before the finale, when all the people on At Attin apparently share that knowledge already? Etc.) As a whole, I’d still call this the strongest Star Wars show besides Andor, but those rougher elements do tend to stick out a bit once you notice them.

[Content warning for gun violence and slavery.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao

Book #7 of 2025:

Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow #2)

An excellent follow-up to author Xiran Jay Zhao’s smash hit Iron Widow, a YA feminist sci-fi reimagining of China’s 7th-century Empress Regent Wu Zetian. Although it doesn’t carry the same gleeful fury or as many giant mecha action sequences as the original novel, this sequel finds the protagonist in another precarious position, having to reign over the new society whose leaders she successfully toppled before. I feel basic for leaping to a Hunger Games comparison here, but both series do ultimately turn on questions of how governments forged from revolutionary violence can avoid terrorizing their subjects unduly, whilst carrying out the reformist agenda their supporters demand and stamping out the final embers of suspected loyalty to the old regime throughout the population. Plus there’s a love triangle!

It’s that last trope that gives me the most pause. One of the great things about the previous book was that it took the possibility of a tired romantic rivalry and instead refreshingly pivoted to the heroine and both men finding comfort in a queer polyamorous triad together. But now, one partner is absent for much of the story, and the empress is thrown in with a third suitor in lieu of spending time with the remaining member of her polycule. This plot effectively recreates the triangle all over again, with the newcomer on one side growing closer to the young ruler while the scribe Gao Yizhi is heavily sidelined on the other. The ending rehabilitates this element to some degree, but it feels disappointingly conventional along Gale and Peeta lines until then.

I’d draw a parallel to Red Rising and some of Brandon Sanderson’s work too, particularly his Mistborn and Skyward sagas. Like the characters in those, Zetian learns in this volume that there are fundamental ideas about her world that are no more than lies spread to control the powerless, and that the universe is actually far bigger and stranger than the immediate conflict she’s been so focused on winning. Thus in addition to figuring out how to rule justly over her new empire below, she must also recalibrate her thinking to take in and begin confronting the greater threats that were previously beyond her horizon.

It’s a good read overall! Slower and heavier on the politics than some readers might want — and the leftist critiques of capitalism sometimes feel a bit direct for a theoretically different planet like this — and I’m not wholly satisfied with the treatment of either disability or gender. On the former topic, the main character’s handicap from her family’s cruel foot-binding practice is healed by a miraculous surgery that she doesn’t even consent to, and on the latter, she goes along with a prisoner’s castration under the logic that his anatomy doesn’t make him a man anyway. On reflection I suppose such matters do help characterize her and her associates as naive and imperfect, but they mostly seem like they could have benefited from more space in the narrative to unpack and consider.

Regardless, I have enjoyed this installment of what’s clearly no longer a duology, and I look forward to seeing what’s coming next after the inevitable betrayal(s) at the end of this one.

[Content warning for sexism, rape, forced pregnancy, domestic abuse, child sexual abuse, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

Book #6 of 2025:

Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

The nicest thing I can say about this 2023 contemporary fantasy novel is that it is a vastly superior execution of certain similar ideas from Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors, which was published the following year. I’m sure the resemblances are coincidental, but both stories happen to revolve around a variety of rare single-trick spellbooks and the secretive community of aficionados around the world who trade in them, one of whom is trying to amass the lot by force. You obviously don’t have to have read that unrelated 2024 title — heck, I wouldn’t even recommend it, as I gave it my lowest rating for a reason — but the comparison and contrast has been helpful for me as a reader to clarify what I like about this one as well as its unfortunate limits.

The first half starts out strong, introducing our three POV protagonists in alternating chapters. One young woman is an electrician on a tour of duty in Antarctica, where she’s just broken her dead father’s rule to never stay more than a year in the same place, lest their family’s supposed enemies magically track her down. The second heroine is her estranged half-sister in Vermont, navigating a fraught relationship with her mother and looking after the collection their dad entrusted to her, whose wards must be renewed every evening in person, preventing her from ever traveling far. Finally, the last figure we’re following is an overprotected British man, never allowed to leave the library where he works at writing new mystic texts, who gradually realizes that he’s effectively enslaved there by a relative who may not have his best interests at heart.

Those plots progress nicely on their own for a while before they begin to converge, but once they do, the whole enterprise grinds to a halt for me. Everything then becomes a tedious extended affair of trading explanatory exposition back and forth, with some romance shoehorned-in at the last minute that’s not especially interesting or convincing. We’re also treated to several instances of a character not being able to say what’s driving them because of a silencing spell, yet demanding that their associates somehow take their recommended course of action on blind trust anyway. So they do, and they save the day, and it’s all very pleasant and significantly more competent a story than that terrible Gareth Brown attempt. But at the end of the day, there’s nothing here that really makes me sit up and fall in love with it, either.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Sex Education, season 1

TV #1 of 2025:

Sex Education, season 1

Thankfully much stronger than the raunchy comedy I was half-expecting this series to be, although it certainly doesn’t shy away from its mature subject matter and offers some admittedly hilarious laughs along the way. The concept of a shy virgin with his own share of hangups channeling his sex therapist mother’s wisdom to become a sort of sexuality whisperer for his fellow British teens is inherently fun, and the relationship drama that underpins all that is a neat framework for the episodic cases he consults on at his unofficial school clinic. True, Otis is a bit of an entitled Nice Guy™️ in his unrequited(-ish) crush on Maeve, but the narrative generally seems to recognize that and not reward him for it. She’s also a pretty well-drawn character in her own right rather than simply a manic pixie love interest for him, with her self-sabotaging insecurity behind her bad girl act regularly the most interesting thing happening on the screen.

(In fact, she and Gillian Anderson as the protagonist’s mom are among the most developed characters overall — though the two of them never interact all season, and the show occasionally fumbles the Bechdel test from episode to episode. There are plenty of girls and women here, but they’re often siloed into storylines where their major contributions are defined solely by the male relations around them rather than by themselves or one another.)

And then there’s Eric, the hero’s gay best friend. Ncuti Gatwa is phenomenal in that role, so much more flamboyant than I’ve seen him be on Doctor Who, and I appreciate that he gets meaty plots of his own instead of only ever supporting his white costars. His dynamic with his dad is a particularly nice surprise, turning what could have been a boring bigotry trope into a man who genuinely loves but struggles to understand his son, and who worries (correctly!) that he’ll be hurt for living so loudly as himself. That’s the thread I’m most hoping to see more of in the seasons ahead.

For now, everything builds to a climax — pun intended — rather nicely with all the ongoing story arcs, whilst leaving open several lingering issues yet to be resolved. This feels like a program that easily could have ended after just the one year, so I’m very pleased that Netflix appears to have renewed it a few times instead.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, panic attacks, sexual assault, drug and alcohol abuse, homophobic / transphobic violence, racism, revenge porn, suicide, and stalking.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos

Book #5 of 2025:

From Dust, a Flame by Rebecca Podos

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This novel is pretty YA, in a way that I think I’m finally starting to outgrow as I approach my late-thirties. There are lots of flowery poetic descriptions of how the teenage protagonist feels about her newly-discovered love interest, for instance, although the two girls share nothing more physically intimate than a brief kiss near the end. Even the body horror is relatively tame — the strange curse afflicting Hannah may cause her to wake up with forehead horns one morning and a long tail the next, but the transformations aren’t painful or especially off-putting as they’d probably be in a work for more mature audiences.

I’m also a little disgruntled at how the story frames its very Jewish subject matter. The whole thing hinges on classic elements of mysticism from that tradition like sheddim and golems, but since the heroine’s mother ran away from her family at a young age and never told her children anything about her past, they are outsiders to Judaism themselves, forced to do quick research on things like sitting shiva or havdalah rather than having such knowledge and feelings of Jewish community naturally incorporated into their lives already. It’s of course #ownvoices author Rebecca Podos’s right to frame the narrative that way, and I’m sure it rings true to certain reader experiences, but it seems like a surrender to the tired idea that Jews are a category of Other that must always be carefully explained to the mainstream, and it chafes against me in an era when we’re getting so many brilliant titles that ground their Jewishness as the default instead.

At the same time: this is a sort of plot that I can’t recall ever seeing before, and I don’t want to undersell the point that nearly every major character is both Jewish and queer. (The cursed teen’s adopted brother is gay, the golem they encounter is genderless, etc.) I would have been blown away by this level of representation back when I was in high school myself, and that’s not something I can easily set aside just because the fantasy genre has thankfully expanded over the decades since then. And I appreciate too how the centuries-old supernatural being who claims a mortal child for his lover is categorically framed as a monster and a villain for that behavior, whereas the usual trope in Twilight or whatever would problematically position that kind of figure as a swoonworthy lothario. Now that’s a writing decision with some real teeth to it, and worth the extra half-star in my opinion.

[Content warning for pogroms and other historical antisemitism.]

★★★★☆