The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Face the Fear by Chris Archer

Book #150 of 2024:

Face the Fear by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #8)

This installment of the 90s middle-grade Mindwarp series moves the larger story forward, but as the second volume in a row to take place entirely in the dystopian future, it doesn’t feel especially distinctive. There’s less worldbuilding on display too, with the majority of the plot concerning the superpowered teenage protagonists sneaking into the enemy’s base to plant a bomb, rescue their friends, and hijack the time machine to return to their present. Slaughtering the Omegas en masse feels like a pretty major escalation of the stakes, since the heroes had previously only killed them individually in desperate self-defense, but as with the morality in having Ashley use her mitosis to create sacrificial clones of herself, it doesn’t really get examined or debated much here. I can’t help but compare this unfavorably to similar developments in K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs, which would have given rise to plenty of angst, guilt, and dread over the lack of an easy answer.

(It’s also wild that both cases do have everyday American teens carry out what any reasonable observer would have to call acts of terrorism, and that this novel in particular seems to blithely endorse the strategy. For a title that came out in 1998, one wonders how a delay of only a few years to post-9/11 might have impacted that storyline.)

I’m disappointed by the poor follow-through, which extends to the overall goal that the kids are pursuing at this point. Are they trying to get home just to resume their regular lives, or is there something they can do back there to avert this timeline in advance? Why bother striking a blow for the resistance by taking out the facility, if the whole scenario is going to be undone and prevented later on? Or if it’s not, why are they fleeing rather than sticking around to continue the fight and overthrow the inhuman conquerors? These are fairly basic questions of motivation and logistics that sadly don’t get addressed at all, and while that was understandable back when the characters were in the dark and the genre was an X-Files conspiracy thriller, it’s less acceptable now that they appear to have all the relevant facts to make informed decisions.

In the end, two-out-of-three missions succeed, destroying the target and leaving the good guys reunited with their classmates but still stranded in 2118. With only two books remaining, I’m hoping author Chris Archer has a satisfying conclusion planned, as this antepenultimate adventure ultimately doesn’t do much besides deliver some solid action thrills and incrementally shift the status quo.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

Book #149 of 2024:

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

This is a novel that starts off on the wrong foot, bites off way more than it can chew, and ultimately fails to develop any of its ideas into anything distinctive for the genre. It’s by far the worst of the five titles I’ve now read from author Matt Haig, and a sharp disappointment after his moving bestseller The Midnight Library, winner of the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction.

Let’s take the framing device first, because if the story had been told without that, I probably would have given it a two-star rating in the end: below average but not wholly awful. Instead, unfortunately, this is a one-star read through and through.

The work opens with a plaintive email from one of the protagonist’s former students, who is due to graduate college soon but is plainly at a low point in his mental health. He mentions several specific crises he’s been going through lately and says he doesn’t even know why he’s reaching out to her, except that she was kind to him once. He needs a lifeline, and alludes to some pretty intense feelings of isolation, depression, and suicidal ideation (a topic Haig knows well, having written the nonfiction The Comfort Book as a self-help guide of lessons learned in dealing with his own such issues).

The retired teacher’s response to all this is not to offer practical solutions or refer the young man to anyone else who might be able to help. Instead she replies in the form of a 300-page manuscript — aka the bulk of the actual text of the book — which she apparently took the time to write out after receiving his message. Even setting aside the contents of what she goes on to relate, that’s a bizarre and insultingly inappropriate reaction to the situation, and it sets me against the nominal heroine from the very beginning of her tale.

And then that tale is, frankly, absurd. She describes how she too was feeling down a few years ago, when an old acquaintance unexpectedly bequeathed her a house in Ibiza, Spain. Upon arriving there to inspect the property, she witnessed several inexplicable events and heard how — sigh — an ancient extraterrestrial intelligence lives underwater off the coast of the island, bestowing gifts on divers it deems worthy. Visiting the area herself grants her incredible psychic powers, unlocking the potential of her brain Limitless-style and allowing her to read minds as well as move objects telekinetically.

This is all fairly silly, especially once the villain of the piece is revealed as an evil rich developer who wants to destroy the environment for no particular reason. This Captain Planet bad guy has superhuman abilities of his own, although the main plot involves the old woman and her new friends merely trying to convince a local politician to join an upcoming protest demonstration against him.

Certain elements here could have worked, with a little finesse and proper expansion. But it’s all so abbreviated, and so generic-seeming, and so bogged-down in woo-woo mysticism about the hidden connectivity of the universe that it’s just impossible to ever take seriously as a premise. It’s certainly a terrible answer to give a vulnerable person looking for support, despite the story ending with another note back from him, saying that reading about her wild Spanish adventure was somehow enough to turn his whole outlook around. That makes one of us, at least.

[Content warning for death of a child.]

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: Orca by Steven Brust

Book #148 of 2024:

Orca by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #7)

This 1996 fantasy novel finds its reformed antihero still in fugitive drifter mode, on the run from his former employers rather than working for them as an assassin-for-hire and district crime boss. It’s about a year after the events of book #6 Athyra, and Vladimir Taltos has arrived in a new city with his young friend Savn in tow, looking for a specialist to heal the boy’s injuries. The hedge-witch they find has trouble of her own: mysterious eviction notices from a company that only seems to exist on paper. The Easterner promises to look into it, unaware that he’s tugging on a thread that will soon prove connected to some very powerful people and moneyed interests.

It’s a fun plot that casts Vlad as a sort of noir detective, and is further distinguished from the other volumes in this sequence by the inclusion of a secondary narrator, Kiera the thief. She’s a previously minor character who takes center stage here, and provides a nice calculated counter-energy to the ex-hitman’s more impulsive blundering. Their chapters alternate throughout the text, mostly in the form of them updating one another on the latest developments in their parallel investigations. There’s a neat reveal at the end too, concerning a background detail that’s been hinted at since at least book #4 Taltos.

The story ultimately involves a collapsing ponzi scheme, widespread corruption, and a lecture on government monetary policy, although author Steven Brust’s politics thankfully aren’t quite as heavy-handed as they were back in book #3 Teckla. Generally speaking, this is a series that continues to improve as it goes along, and I do appreciate the writer committing to the serialized elements and taking risks to vary his usual formula, instead of just cranking out unchallenging episodic filler.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Pairing by by Casey McQuiston

Book #147 of 2024:

The Pairing by by Casey McQuiston

Four years ago, childhood-best-friends-turned-adult-sweethearts Kit (he/him) and Theo (they/she, as we eventually learn) broke up on the eve of a three-week romantic food and wine tour across Europe. With the voucher about to expire, Theo decides to finally go on the vacation solo, only to discover that Kit has had the same idea. The exes — who haven’t spoken to each other since they split — are now forced into close contact once again, which of course entails hiding how they’re both secretly still in love.

This is a story that I’ve liked almost entirely due to the characters, and not at all for the plot they’re caught up in. It’s easy to root for these kids to make a renewed relationship work, but maddening how much rom-com miscommunication plagues them. Their present situation seems like it could be resolved with one quick honest chat, and while the proximate cause of the breakup remains hidden from us for the first third of the text, it turns out to involve yet more unspoken misunderstandings. This is so frustrating for me as a reader! I tend to hate any big backstory secret that the protagonist(s) know and we don’t, and this has to rank as one of the worst. Even once the couple realize they were being foolish in the past, and even after they’ve admitted they’re still attracted to one another and begun hooking up, they’re somehow afraid to drop the L word and suggest reuniting for real.

The sex is also a bit much for my tastes, involving the two bisexuals first competing to see who can sleep with the most people on their trip and then ultimately (repeatedly) doing it together. I do admire the frank and judgment-free atmosphere that author Casey McQuiston establishes here, which feels accepting of all consensual proclivities and activities, but as with the sumptuous descriptions of what’s available to eat and drink at every new destination, it all blurs into a steady hedonistic jumble at some point. I buy the chemistry between these former lovers and find their mutual yearning to be reasonably compelling — give or take Theo’s weird nepo baby complex, refusing to accept their rich sister’s offer to invest in their failing dream business — but I just don’t need so many scenes of someone jumping someone else’s bones rather than talking openly about their feelings.

The best thing about this title is its treatment of Theo’s gender identity. They realized they were nonbinary sometime after dating Kit, and while that’s initially kept from us too, the clues are strong enough that my radar was pinging well before it gets officially brought up. I was actually worried this element would be played for drama at the novel’s climax, but instead it comes out around the midpoint and is greeted with total understanding and acceptance, which is lovely to see. Our male narrator switches seamlessly into using the new pronoun in his dialogue and internal reflections, and there’s no transphobia of any kind from him or anybody else. That’s the sort of queer-friendly / normative detail from an #ownvoices writer that makes me imagine this book will reach a certain audience, but at the end of the day, it has too much going against it to wholly win me over.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Archer’s Goon, season 1

TV #42 of 2024:

Archer’s Goon, season 1

I won’t lie and say that it’s great television, but for anyone who loves the 1984 Diana Wynne Jones children’s fantasy novel, this six-part 1992 adaptation is a neat way to revisit the story. If anything, it’s faithful to a fault: hardly adding any new material to what was already present on the page, and generally depicting every scene exactly as it was originally described. Thankfully, this is not a particularly effects-heavy plot, as the low budget tends to strain at those moments when more extravagance should be called for (Archer’s machinery, Torquil’s parade, and the business at the end with Venturus’s temple and spaceship, primarily).

No, the primary drawback here is the quality of the acting. I won’t critique Jamie de Courcey as Howard too much, as he was a child actor in his first credited role –although I’ll mention Angela Forry is significantly stronger as his little sister Awful — but his shrill delivery is matched by Morgan Jones as the Goon, who turns in an equally one-note performance. He’s basically loud and angry at all times, where his written counterpart is more low-key overall and regularly modulates between charming, sardonic, and glum as the tale unfolds. In fact, I’d say that his development from threatening first impression onward is one of the key strengths of the book, and it’s nowhere to be found on-screen. Some of the cast is better — it’s especially fun to see Annette Badland as Shine, years before she’d face off against Christopher Eccleston on Doctor Who — but with the two main characters so compromised, the work never really comes to life as it ideally would.

Still: the premise remains gold, dealing with a family of eccentric immortals secretly running an unnamed British town, and the episodic structure is nice for not overwhelming us with all of them at once. Though that’s another element borrowed from the original writer, it fits well with the pace of a TV season. We meet the Goon and learn that Howard’s father owes a regular payment of 2000 words to a man named Archer in episode one, then see the boss and his sister Dillian in episode two, their brother Torquil the next week, Shine and Hathaway the time after, and so on. The steady clip of each new sibling helps shape the mystery of just what’s going on as they each unleash their own form of chaos on the Sykes household, driving the series through to a reasonably-satisfying conclusion.

The whole show seems to be available only through a random YouTuber who uploaded their home recordings of the initial BBC broadcast, which means it’s on the verge of lost media, since it likely never will be released via any official channels. I’m glad someone out there preserved it long enough for me and any other fans to watch… but if you haven’t read the book before, I’d honestly say you should just do that instead.

[Content warning for gun violence and fatphobia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Love-in-a-Mist by Victoria Goddard

Book #146 of 2024:

Love-in-a-Mist by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #5)

After several false starts, I’m delighted to report that this series has finally reached the level I had expected from the other titles in author Victoria Goddard’s wider Nine Worlds saga. Every previous Greenwing & Dart installment carried clear potential and a share of excellent individual moments, but was ultimately saddled with too many elements that didn’t work well enough for me to assign a rating higher than three-out-of-five stars. In contrast, this fifth volume is wholly charming through and through, especially when it shifts gears at the midpoint from a rambling journey to a murder mystery at a snowed-in country estate. Even before then, however, it establishes a terrific genre blend of cozy fantasy with Shakespearean comedy, full of endearingly misfit characters struggling to pair off appropriately — some of whom we’ve already grown to love over the course of the earlier stories, and some of whom only pop here for the very first time. (Roald Ragnor, can you ever forgive me?)

To its detriment and benefit alike, this sequence of novels is rather heavily serialized, and so a reader probably couldn’t / shouldn’t jump in at book #5, no matter the leap forward in quality. The present title begins with its protagonist having recently come back from the dead, and rests upon all sorts of intrigues that have been humming along across his various post-collegiate adventures to date. You’d be lost if you skipped over those — and you would miss certain sporadic but genuinely great scenes, anyway — but anyone who’s made the investment and gotten this far into Jemis Greenwing’s tale will find this next chapter a most rewarding experience.

[Content warning for drug abuse and homophobia.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Umbrella Academy, season 1

TV #41 of 2024:

The Umbrella Academy, season 1

This urban fantasy (I guess?) comic book adaptation has some interesting and/or entertaining characters, but it falters significantly throughout its first year in developing a compelling and coherent plot to actually showcase them for us. The stakes are a big issue here; once one person establishes that he’s traveled back from a future wasteland in order to prevent the impending apocalypse, it’s hard to take anybody else’s unrelated drama seriously or understand why the dysfunctional group of superpowered siblings aren’t teaming up to tackle the obvious threat. Instead they all keep wandering off into their own less-pressing subplots, which is somewhat maddening to repeatedly observe. There are also structural oddities in terms of what we learn when and how poorly it all ties together, with basic logistical explanations either presented as would-be grand reveals or else left out entirely.

(How come no one ever asks for any specifics on why and how the world is going to end, even when theoretically trying to avert that fate? What’s the main villain’s motivation? Why is a prosthetic eye linked to him, when he doesn’t lose his real one until there wouldn’t be enough time left to get a replacement? On a simple worldbuilding level, how do the kids’ cyborg mother and live-in talking chimpanzee fit with the idea that their own powers were a one-off aberration? For that matter, what caused them to be born that way, from women who hadn’t even been pregnant, and what happened to any of the other children of that cohort around the globe who weren’t adopted by their same dad? What did their father know about the coming doomsday and how they could potentially stop it? And how exactly did their brother Ben die, by the way?)

I’ll concede that some of these questions might get addressed in further seasons, although that’s always a dicey proposition for a Netflix show, given that streamer’s well-known propensity to cancel its series prematurely. But more importantly, none of this plays in the moment as an intentional mystery left to handle later — rather, it all feels like a collection of details the writers were eager to introduce but then forgot to ever follow up on and resolve. I’ll keep watching in hopes that matters improve, but I’m pretty disappointed by this 2019 debut.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, gaslighting, gun violence, incest, body horror, torture, drug abuse, suicide, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead by Elle Cosimano

Book #145 of 2024:

Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead by Elle Cosimano (Finlay Donovan #2)

I’m still not totally hooked on this comedy-thriller series about a Northern Virginia suburban writer who gets mistaken for a hitwoman and caught up in some increasingly-convoluted organized crime, but I think this sequel does a nice job of continuing certain threads from the first volume, while delivering a less coincidence-heavy plot overall. Author Elle Cosimano is plainly having a blast juggling all the complications in her heroine’s life — family, childcare, love interests, publishing agent, money problems, AND all the lies and illegal activity to boot — and yet her control over that sprawling narrative feels more confident and polished this second time around.

The last novel ended on the cliffhanger that somebody on an anonymous message board was apparently looking to hire a killer to take out the protagonist’s ex-husband, and so this one picks up right there, with Finlay and her live-in nanny / friend / accountant / co-conspirator Vero investigating the matter. The two big mysteries hanging over the work concern the identities of the client and of the assassin who replies back to accept their assignment, and although I wish the story answered the latter along with the former, I’ll concede that teeing up that hidden enemy to be the focus of book 3 may well be the smarter play. Like Vero’s debts or Finlay’s romantic entanglements and custody arrangements, it’s an element of serialization that demonstrates how Cosimano has clear plans ahead for the wayward duo.

In the meantime, this title finds the pair in a bidding war with the unknown player, hoping to undercut their contract, and scrambling to protect Steven and the kids without giving away what’s actually going on. As in the previous installment, I appreciate that the main characters avoid actual violence themselves — give or take a well-deserved skillet to the head — while still ending up in dangerous situations with bullets flying and dismembered corpses found in freezers. These books aren’t quite nailing the tonal balance across the peril, the love-triangle drama, and the slapstick farce for me, but I’m invested enough to keep on reading for now.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan

Book #144 of 2024:

The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan (The Mirror Realm Cycle #1)

A lovely fantasy debut, with major vibes of other tales I’ve adored from that genre like Strange the Dreamer or Spinning Silver. Like the latter, this is an #ownvoices Jewish novel, peppered with mentions of ketubahs and genizahs and more (all unexplained but generally clear enough by context, I’d say). It’s set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition — or technically not Spain, but the analogue is fairly direct– under which the kingdom’s Jews were ordered en masse to either convert to Christianity or else abandon all property and flee the land. Two such departing refugees discover they have a magical heritage and a connection with another world, whose politics and intrigues loosely parallel those of their own.

What follows is a slow-paced coming-of-age plot for the two core protagonists, each of whom gets the beginning of a sweet romantic arc (one of them queer, with no sign of textual homophobia) as they more fully step into their respective destinies. As with several larger matters, events there don’t wrap up especially neatly at the end, underscoring how this is merely the first volume of a planned series, but I’m riveted by the characters and eager to return for more of their story in the sequel that’s releasing later this month. I hope that next installment delves more deeply into the worldbuilding details, which besides the lack of resolution is the only big element keeping me back from awarding this one a full five stars. But if it matches the present title’s delivery of endearing heroes poring over ancient texts and baring their souls in a shared dreamscape, I’ll be plenty happy regardless.

On a personal note, I was also delighted to read in Ariel Kaplan’s author bio that she was a Monroe Scholar at the College of William and Mary, as I was myself in my own undergraduate days. She graduated eleven years before me, so our paths never would have crossed on-campus, but like our common Judaism, it’s a fun point of intersection for me as a reader of this book.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

Book #143 of 2024:

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

YA horror / thriller author Andrew Joseph White’s third novel is unfortunately the first one that doesn’t wholly work for me, although I appreciate the continued #ownvoices trans and autistic representation. The strongest thing about this story, in fact, is the confidence in its characterization, with the assigned-female-at-birth protagonist standing as both a valuable mirror for readers who can recognize their own experiences in his and an equally-helpful window into that life for others. (The autism traits are also well-incorporated, but unnoticed by the hero until fairly late in the text, at which point he has a bizarre moral panic over them. Like, you’ve just seen two classmates die violently in front of you, dude. You’ve been misgendered and beaten up pretty badly yourself. Why are you freaking out about potentially being on the spectrum? Both that and the brief mention that the teen is demiromantic feel like artificial didactic inserts, in a sharp contrast to how naturalistically the gender matters are handled throughout.)

The plot is a further letdown. The basic idea here has promise — a poor Appalachian town with a corrupt sheriff in a generations-long blood feud with the main character’s family — but the villains are so over-the-top evil as to be almost unbelievable, and the plan to get back at them is poorly devised and yet never once called out. The characters bring their cell phones to intended murder scenes, search online for how to dispose of bodies, borrow a relative’s gun and leave bullets behind in a corpse, and so on, but those missteps somehow aren’t flagged and don’t end up mattering in the slightest.

There’s also the ghost of the boy’s murdered ancestor hanging around, which doesn’t ultimately amount to much either. It’s definitely the lightest supernatural element in one of White’s books yet, and is so disconnected from anything else that it could have been easily excised from the project completely.

Despite all those issues, I do enjoy Miles and his West Virginia hometown a lot. The sense of place and of character alike are terrific, which is why it’s such a shame that the rest of the title struggles to adequately showcase and live up to them.

[Content warning for gore, sexual assault of children, underage revenge porn, gun violence, and animal cruelty.]

★★★☆☆