The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

Book #134 of 2024:

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano (Finlay Donovan #1)

A fun suburban crime thriller that feels sort of like northern Virginia’s answer to the ‘zany Florida’ books of writers like Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, and Tim Dorsey. The premise here is just as wild: an author talking to her agent about problems in the story she’s writing is overheard by a stranger, who misunderstands and thinks she’s a hired killer renegotiating a contract. (So shades of Pest Control by Bill Fitzhugh, I suppose, which features a similar plot about an exterminator service, or the movie Throw Momma from the Train, which hinges on yet another confusion of fiction with reality.) The next thing you know, our cash-strapped protagonist — divorced with two kids and no income stream besides finally finishing her novel — has been approached and asked to kill the woman’s husband, for a fee so astronomical that she decides it’d be interesting to scope him out and see what she can learn. Whereupon of course things go south, and the screwball satire spins out from there.

Finlay is an engaging heroine, and I loved spotting all the familiar DC-suburb place names and local institutions, but I do think the front half of this book is stronger than the back, which grows extremely coincidence-heavy by the end and never quite gets me to care about either of the two hunky love interests. It also suffers from the same issue as shows like Dexter or Dead to Me, where everyone is quick to trust the wrong person and include them in their confidential conversations without ever realizing that that’s the exact suspect they’re trying to find. I’m surprised to discover this is a whole series now, with the fifth volume expected next year, as this one already struggles to keep its central character in the mix while still maintaining a conscience and not actually doing any intentional killing. But I’ve liked it enough to check out the first sequel, at least.

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

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

Book #133 of 2024:

The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

This novel is largely fine, but I want so much more from it. The premise is convoluted in a River Song / The Time Traveler’s Wife sort of way, and it takes so long to get fully established that it seems like the story is over before anything is really resolved.

In summary: our protagonist learns that the women in her family have the ability to travel through time, although they can only ever do it three times each. Her own mother traveled back to the early 20th century, but then fled an abusive marriage there to bring her daughter (aka the heroine as a baby) home to the present. Now in her mid-thirties, June finds herself drawn to 1951 — except she’s already been there before without her knowledge, because she initially visited slightly earlier in that era in a personal timeline that subsequently got erased due to someone’s actions in the meanwhile. So she’s greeted with people who know her and have complicated feelings about that, including a husband, a young child, and a police detective who suspects that she murdered his father (who’s also HER father) when she was there the last time. And the longer she stays in the past, the more her memories from her previous self are overwriting her own.

It’s a decent scenario, but by the time it’s all spelled out for us, there’s not enough book remaining to dig into all the implications or process the subsequent fallout. I’m not a big fan of the whole Outlander ‘woman from today falls for a gruff man from the past’ style development either, especially in this case where it feels as though she’s just remembering their prior connection, which a) reads like boring instalove and b) has some unsettling consent issues that aren’t addressed at all. (There’s also the setup for a love triangle with a close friend she left in 2023 that winds up completely dropped, as do her concerns about a hereditary mental illness.) I do appreciate the twistiness of the plot and a few eventual reveals on that front, but I think a title attempting to do so much would have needed substantially more pages to wholly succeed for me.

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Babylon 5, season 1

TV #38 of 2024:

Babylon 5, season 1

Although an improvement over the pilot movie The Gathering, this first full season of Babylon 5 still isn’t at a consistent quality level for me to raise it higher than my personal 3-star rating tier. I thought I might, during a few episodes! The comparison to its 90s contemporary Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — my favorite of that rival franchise — remains apt, with a slowly-unfolding serialized story taking place on a frontier space station where tensions and intrigues between clashing alien species add a rich background depth to the episodic business of the day. (There are shades of something like Deadwood in the town square setting too, for a non-sci-fi point of reference.)

But the larger plot and character arcs don’t build to much, at least not yet, and a lot of those filler hours are deeply silly, like the one where an old man is searching the archives for any sign of the literal holy grail. It’s times like that when the Trek series that this one most resembles is instead the worst indulgences of hokey early TNG. The acting and writing can also each seem rather stilted, especially at such moments.

We’re on firmer ground with the stories that stem from dynamics among the main cast: the respective ambassadors of the Centauri and the Narn, for instance, whose peoples are only just emerging from a fraught colonial relationship and whose personal interactions are colored by that as much as by their own distinctive personalities. I also like the backstory that gets revealed for the human officer Susan Ivanova, whose family is Russian Jewish — already more ethnoreligious representation than is present in all of Star Trek, I’m afraid.

I keep coming back to that other series as a contrast for this one, perhaps because it was the dominant TV space opera of the late 20th century, and so formed a context in which Babylon 5 would inevitably be received. This show is scrappy, and much less interested in a utopian society or wondrous new technology of the future. It’s a grittier look at the genre that presages later works like Battlestar Galactica, which is definitely an argument in its favor and a reason for me to continue watching. But it doesn’t quite pull enough of its threads together to satisfy in this initial run.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The January 6th Report by The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol

Book #132 of 2024:

The January 6th Report by The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol

An incredibly damning account of the January 2021 riot and then-President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting it, as meticulously assembled by the members of a bipartisan congressional committee and their staff who investigated the matter. I was expecting this book to cover only the events of that bloody day itself, but it’s actually a far more extensive deep dive into Trump’s antidemocratic efforts from November 2020 onwards to subvert the results of the presidential election where he was defeated by Democrat Joe Biden, and how those actions ultimately culminated in violence.

As the evidence laid out in this report makes clear, the president repeatedly spread outlandish conspiracy theories about fake ballots, rigged voting machines, and corrupt local officials, some of whom he doxxed and called out by name, leading to confrontations at their homes and racial slurs, accusations of pedophilia, and rape and death threats launched against them and their families. His top advisors and White House legal experts informed him at every stage that there was no proof to his claims, which they dutifully investigated every time the fringe rightwing circles of the internet convinced him of something new. Nevertheless, he continued to repeat them as fact with increasingly violent rhetoric and got his lawyers to file dozens of spurious lawsuits across the country, which were — barring one small win on a meaningless procedural matter — universally thrown out for lack of evidence.

Despite knowing that the charges of voter misconduct were baseless, Trump pressed on with an illegal attempt to arrange alternate slates of electors in key battleground states (and pressure people like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to falsely amend their vote count figures, in order to provide theoretical grounds for the move). This was part of an effort to convince Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as president of the Senate overseeing the certification of the election results, to either set aside the authorized electors in favor of the false ones or else to use the apparent existence of both sets to justify handing over the decision of which slates to recognize to the Republican-controlled state legislatures. When Pence refused to do this by correctly noting that his role in proceedings was strictly ceremonial — and that no one could possibly think that the Vice President had the legal power to overrule millions of voters and effectively single-handedly determine elections — Trump incorporated the VP into his angry Twitter rants and TV appearances, publicly identifying him as the person with the supposed power to act and increasingly pressuring him to do so at the upcoming hearing on January 6th.

In the lead-up to that day, he repeated all those lies and encouraged his followers to visit Washington, D.C. on the 6th, using the language of violent revolution and promising that he’d be on their side both physically and legally. At a rally that morning, he spoke for an hour on similar themes, after which a large mob did indeed storm the Capitol building, where they killed several police officers, injured over a hundred more, and actively hunted for Pence and other perceived traitors.

Not all of this can be laid at Trump’s feet. The book also discusses the organized militia movement of the Proud Boys and similar far-right agitator groups who were galvanized by his statements and made their own plans to ensure the gathering on January 6th turned violent. However, some of their online chatter was intercepted in advance and passed to the president, who did nothing to act on it. In fact, witnesses told the committee that he was enraged at the security procedures that were in place for his speech, because screening for weapons was limiting his crowd size. Later that day, he retired to the White House dining room to watch the ensuing riot on TV, where he sat for three hours refusing to speak out to calm the protestors or call in military or other government resources to repel them, even as his closest allies and relatives implored him to intervene.

A lot of these events will be familiar to those of us who lived through them, but this volume is helpful for walking readers through the sprawling ‘stop the steal’ movement that Trump championed over the months following the election. It’s occasionally repetitive to read through as a single text, as its various chapters all have their own focuses and were not specifically written as segments of a larger whole, but it adds up to an utterly disqualifying dereliction of duty on the former president’s part.

For me, the main takeaway is how knowingly Trump acted throughout — how he was told over and over again that he lost the race, that there was no evidence of fraud, and that the strategy to get Pence to declare him the winner was entirely illegal. He wasn’t some low-information voter deluded by conspiracies like many of those supporters he convinced to storm the Capitol; he was a shameless knowing spreader of the lies himself, with no care for the rule of law or the human impact of his words. Heaven help us if we ever elect him to office again.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Book #131 of 2024:

Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Novelizations are an interesting business. There’s a long history of them in the Doctor Who franchise, and back in the days before home video recording and on-demand streaming, they originally served the purpose of making TV stories more accessible to anyone who missed the initial broadcast and/or wanted to revisit a certain episode any way that they could. In an era where the show is always available at a click, that’s obviously less of a concern, and so such book treatments today are generally pitched as bonus content: a chance to explore a familiar plot at greater depth of detail, especially when it comes to internal characterization of thoughts and feelings that wouldn’t have already appeared on-screen.

By that rubric, this title is a success. It helps that the adventure it’s adapting is a fun one — the 2023 Christmas special that was Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s first full-time outing as the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday, respectively — because adaptations also rest pretty heavily on the quality of the material they happen to be drawing from. But even beyond all that, we get more insight into these new friends at the start of their time together, with narration that emphasizes a neat story structure audiences might not have noticed while watching — the beginning of this holiday romp is shown through Ruby’s (and briefly a random police officer’s) perspective, with the Doctor as an elusive dashing figure who swoops into her life to save the day against the uncanny menace of baby-stealing goblins, and it’s only when she too vanishes in the final act that the action switches over to center on the Time Lord as a protagonist with his own interiority. (Contrast this with, for example, the introductory Ninth Doctor episode in 2005, where we have exactly zero scenes that situate us in his POV over Rose Tyler’s. Or the Eleventh Doctor’s debut in 2010, which splits the focal role between him and Amy Pond in roughly equal shares.)

Getting to see first Ruby and then Fifteen thinking and reacting to events strengthens them as characters, with author Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson plausibly fleshing out the concepts inherited from Russell T. Davies’s original script. Of particular note would be the Doctor’s reflection on his recently-discovered adoption and his companion’s reaction to seeing him dance from across the club, which are each rendered rather beautifully here. The only thing we’re really missing besides the acting is that delightful show-stopping goblin song, which unfortunately doesn’t quite carry the same impact on paper. But overall, the project has me feeling satisfied and hopeful about this latest run of Whovian novelizations.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World’s Most Beloved Musical by Barbara Isenberg

Book #130 of 2024:

Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World’s Most Beloved Musical by Barbara Isenberg

The stage musical Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway in September 1964, so with its sixty-year anniversary coming up, I thought I would check out this title, written to coincide with the fiftieth celebration in 2014. It’s informative and fun for fans of the show, drawing on years of author Barbara Isenberg’s interviews with various figures associated with the production — an oral history that only grows more valuable and poignant over time, given how many of the older folks are no longer with us now.

The book captures Fiddler’s barnstorming success and legacy, and particularly its ability for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike to relate to its timeless themes of family and traditions in the face of a changing culture. (My favorite anecdote, although I don’t know why it’s included twice in two different chapters here: the producer of the first touring company in Japan reportedly asked, “Do they understand this show in America? Because it’s so Japanese.”) But Isenberg also describes how that reception was far from guaranteed to begin with, and how the primary reaction to news of the play’s development was a healthy skepticism that a story so rooted in such a specific ethnic/religious history would manage to sell many tickets at all.

None of this reporting is especially insightful, I imagine because it’s fundamentally difficult to explain why some particular piece of art caught on in a way that others failed to do. But the account of that process is interesting, tracing the evolution of the musical from the short stories of 19th-century writer Sholem Aleichem to the endless drafts and rewrites of the music and libretto to the further changes necessary for the 1971 film adaption. A total of fifty songs were initially written for the work, which eventually got whittled down to under twenty. And many big personalities made their mark on the act like original Tevye star Zero Mostel, who was notorious for improvising lengthy comedy bits each night that would grind the already-long performances to a halt.

In the end: not a great book and certainly not a must-read for anyone. But a nice way to learn a little bit more about a show that’s important to me as both a theater-lover and a Jew.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Babysitters Coven by Kate Williams

Book #129 of 2024:

The Babysitters Coven by Kate Williams (The Babysitters Coven #1)

Given the title, I was expecting this 2019 series debut to be a smart and loving homage to The Babysitters Club, with some nice new witchy twist thrown in on top. Instead, it’s unfortunately more of a half-baked Buffy-meets-Labyrinth affair, with the heroine and her friends racing to save their kidnapped charge from a supernatural enemy before her parents return home. (And no, having your characters explicitly point out how their secret society of magical teenage girls sworn to protect the world against the forces of evil while being guided by older male mentors are just like the slayers and their watchers on TV doesn’t make it any less of a ripoff.) It’s not even the fun 80s/90s period piece that it could have been for a story that’s dealing in such tropes; the action is firmly set in the modern day with smartphones and rideshares and the like.

The tone is all off, too. Although the protagonist is seventeen, I wouldn’t call this a Young Adult novel by any means. It’s rather just middle-grade fiction with an older cast — which is to say, teenagers written for younger children like the Power Rangers or something, and a far cry from the rich inner characterization that someone like the original Buffy would receive.

It doesn’t help that Esme is so cruel, either, with a major not-like-other-girls complex. She makes fun of people’s names and their spellings, slut-shames and body-shames, and keeps insisting in her interior monologue that she’s ugly while nevertheless being wooed by her crush. It’s a bit like that 30 Rock flashback where it turns out that Liz Lemon was the bully everybody feared in her high school, and only never realized it because she happened to be a giant nerd as well.

The plot itself is fine, although it takes far too long to actually kick off and plainly establish the premise and the stakes. There’s no comeuppance / payoff for the Faith character abusing her abilities to shoplift and avoid schoolwork, despite another person getting punished by the narrative for the misguided but nobler crime of trying to contact a dead parent. The adult authority figure in the Giles role is pushy and boundary-crossing — he abducts the underage sitters and forces them into a soundproofed room in his basement before telling them he’s their ally — and everyone is overly flippant about deploying memory wipes to prevent “normies” (read: muggles) from learning the truth. A certain hidden traitor’s identity is all too easy to guess due to the sparseness of the ensemble, but then that situation isn’t even fully committed to and is left totally unresolved in the end.

I’m frustrated because so much of this could have been better. The raw materials are there for it, but the haphazard way they’ve been assembled cuts against the book at every turn. Needless to say, I will not be reading the sequels.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Aftershock by Chris Archer

Book #128 of 2024:

Aftershock by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #6)

Another excellent and propulsive installment of this 90s middle-grade alien conspiracy series. We’ve got time travel now! The latest protagonist to turn thirteen and unlock special powers from her extraterrestrial heritage is one of the popular kids in school — not quite a mean girl, but someone of that social strata, which is different from the nerds and outcasts we’ve previously been following. (If you’re looking for Animorphs parallels, this newcomer is very much the Rachel of the team.) She learns that she can absorb electricity from the machines around her and then discharge it back into the atmosphere, which she uses both as a weapon and to punch a hole in spacetime and temporarily visit the past.

That leads to some fun sequences of culture shock — 80s fashions! — and Back to the Future-esque moments of her dodging her earlier self, interacting with her now-dead mom, and the like. It all builds to a climactic showdown at the local mall, and an ending that rockets the storyline even further ahead. I don’t remember much of what comes after this, but it feels like we’re finally out of the episodic formula that’s driven these books so far, which is pretty exciting. At this point, our teen heroes are all assembled and their enemies are intent on actually destroying them, rather than just sending one-off shapeshifter assassins on their birthdays with no particular follow-through. Let’s see where the resistance effort goes from here.

[Content warning for racism and implied threat of sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #127 of 2024:

The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The bulk of this novel surrounds the production of a fictional Hollywood movie in the 1950s, centering on its insecure young starlet who’s been recently plucked from obscurity in Mexico and thrust unexpectedly into the glitzy limelight (not to mention its dark racist underbelly). There’s a definite Taylor Jenkins Reid vibe to this plot, especially given the inclusion of gossip columns and documentary interviews to help complement the main narrative, and I’ve generally enjoyed following the heroine as the shape of the personal tragedy around her comes into focus.

I’m less enamored of the secondary viewpoint character, a jealous rival whom Vera doesn’t even know exists. She’s both an extra on the film who delusionally believes the starring role was stolen from when the younger actress was discovered and — coincidentally — the spurned ex-lover of the protagonist’s new romantic interest. She’s also a domestic abuser, the most explicitly bigoted person in the book, an alcoholic, a divorcee, a former nude model, and a woman who cheats and sleeps around as our upright lead never would. (Not that all of these are things to actually judge her for, of course, but they are negatively-coded and collectively function to make her opposite seem more darling and special.) It’s a bit much to cram into a single antagonist, though her desperate feeling that she can’t break into the industry and can sense her window slipping away from her manages to be reasonably sympathetic despite all her flaws. But I do wish she were more centrally incorporated into her ignorant enemy’s life, in addition to being less of a catch-all villain for her.

The biggest problem, however, comes from the third and final POV, which is that of the biblical figure Salome herself, whose story is being told in the feature that the others are making. Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia mostly follows the Wilde play / Strauss opera in her interpretation of this girl and her infatuation with the priest Jokanaan (aka John the Baptist), which is not an element present in either the bible or the available historical record. Nor does it appear to be in the script for the sword-and-sandal flick later on in Moreno-Garcia’s tale, for whatever reason. But there’s no attempt to reconcile the diverging narratives or emphasize a thematic point about reliability or anything, and I don’t ultimately feel that Herodias’s daughter parallels the two twentieth-century women enough for her to occupy such a large portion of the text.

Three-out-of-five stars because the writing is fine and I like the core of this work, but those issues with the supporting cast are just too significant to rate the title any higher.

[Content warning for incest, sexual assault, gun violence, racial slurs, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Phoenix by Steven Brust

Book #126 of 2024:

Phoenix by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #5)

I’m perhaps a bit biased, as this was the first Vlad Taltos book that I ever picked up back in the day, but I do think it’s a big step forward from the previous volumes and possibly a series-best entry. In typical bouncing timeline fashion, we’ve returned to soon after #3 Teckla for the chronologically latest installment yet, dealing with the repercussions of that earlier story on our protagonist’s marriage and his estranged wife’s involvement with the growing protest / rebel movement. First, however, he’s summoned to the divine realm of a goddess, who calls upon him to assassinate the king of a small island nation just outside the borders of the familiar Dragaeran Empire.

Although Vlad is a hitman by trade, this is the clearest look we’ve gotten at him carrying out that particular profession; in previous adventures, he’s acted more in his capacity as crime boss or reactive brawler, so it’s an interesting change to see him actually plotting out and then executing — pun intended — his strike, especially on a plainly innocent victim. That presents him as more of an amoral antihero than ever before, but it also nicely sets up his character growth over the course of this tale, which finds him ultimately turning his back on the Jhereg organization when they go after Cawti to protect their nefarious business interests.

Along the way we get the usual sardonic wisecracking and witchcraft, a delightfully offbeat new sidekick in the form of a native musician who may or may not be more than he appears, and some welcome cleverness in navigating the ensuing political intrigues from both Baronet Taltos and his friends. The topic of his crumbling relationship is handled with more grace and nuance than before, and, like the mystical firebird of the novel’s title, he proves able to rise up from his apparent doom to embark on a fresh start of things by the end. I can only hope that that level of quality is maintained as I continue on with this series reread.

[Content warning for sexism and gore.]

★★★★☆