The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch

Book #14 of 2025:

Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent by Scott Lynch

What a delight it is to reenter the world of Camorr, that medieval Venice-inspired city-state with its elaborate criminal underworld staking out rival gang territories along the canals. Author Scott Lynch has published a variety of shorter fiction in the years since his last Gentleman Bastard novel came out in 2013, but this title — released in two parts over the October 2024 and January 2025 issues of Grimdark Magazine — is the first to return to that fantasy series and its antiheroic lead, the too-clever-by-half Locke Lamora.

It’s a prequel, taking us back to when the protagonist was only thirteen and still learning his illegal trade under the watchful eyes of Father Chains, who has loaned the boy out to a different crew for the summer as a sort of temporary work placement. There he does menial tasks behind the bar at his new bosses’ gambling den and tries hard to stay out of trouble, which of course is never easy for either his temperament or the setting.

The descriptive details are immersive as always, and the story gradually focuses around one of the regulars at the establishment, an old sellsword who’s clearly circling an unhappy end. But he’s friendly with the teen hero in the meantime, and his ultimate fate proves an object lesson for the man that Locke is growing into.

An automatic three stars for the typical excellence of the familiar atmosphere alone, punched up further for the cruel sting of the ending. Ideally I would’ve liked to spend longer on the plot here, and especially to see more of certain other beloved characters, but this is overall a strong offering that makes me eager for the additional novellas that Lynch has announced are coming out soon.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)

Movie #1 of 2025:

Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)

This spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery had a complicated production history, beginning life as an intended sister series to that show and Strange New Worlds before getting derailed by COVID-19 delays and ultimately scaled back to the form of a TV movie with some potential room for a sequel at the end. It finds the character of former Emperor Philippa Georgiou, now returned to her own time (though not her original universe), as she’s recruited once more by Starfleet’s secretive intelligence branch for a dangerous special mission.

This is not the best use of that title concept, which was memoraby introduced on Deep Space Nine and then considerably defanged by Georgiou’s tenure on Discovery. As initially envisioned, Section 31 exists to do the black ops work of assassination and sabotage that Starfleet can’t officially condone but still sees as necessary to maintain order across the quadrant. It was a bleak undercutting of the noble principles that the rest of the franchise tends to espouse, and well fitting with DS9’s darker moral tone. On Discovery, that same organization became more of an open secret and a catch-all taskforce that works hand-in-hand with the regular officer class, their assignments no longer specifically of an otherwise illegal or immoral nature.

Unfortunately, it’s the latter characterization that prevails here, rendering this movie not an implicit critique of Trek militarized power but just a wacky adventure with a gang of misfits a la Suicide Squad or Marvel’s upcoming Thunderbolts*. Even more disappointingly, it’s a pretty uneven example of that genre, its team members not especially remarkable and its story logic often making absolutely zero sense upon reflection of which characters knew what when they made particular choices. The banter is amusing but sometimes noticeably out-of-place in the sci-fi setting, with modern expressions like “whatevs” and “friends with benefits” that I’m skeptical would still be around a few centuries from now.

The strongest parts are those depicting the antiheroine’s backstory in the mirrorverse Terran Empire, which offers its usual blend of dystopia and high camp without feeling like a simple retread of material we already know. But it’s too detached from the protagonist’s full past to be an effective character piece, totally eliding her experiences in the distant future, her impersonation of her prime counterpart, her other jobs for Section 31, and so on. It’s like the producers are pitching the project for an unfamiliar general audience, despite crafting a plot with fairly niche appeal and then dropping it on Paramount+ with minimal fanfare. Overall it’s a bit of a mess, although at least Michelle Yeoh still seems to be having fun with the role.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Balancing Stone by Victoria Goddard

Book #13 of 2025:

Balancing Stone by Victoria Goddard

Another interstitial novella in author Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart cozy fantasy series, this time focusing on Jemis Greenwing’s schoolmate Hope after the events of the sixth / latest novel Plum Duff. As introduced in the book before that one, she’s in love with his best friend Hal and also heir to a magical legacy from the birth parents she never knew, which she can only receive if she somehow learns her true name. This interlude suggests (but doesn’t confirm) a resolution to that thread, but as rewarding as that is for returning readers, it arrives fairly late in a pretty short text. Mostly we follow the new protagonist as she takes a walk through the woods near Ragnor Bella, where she has a mystical experience and a few fruitful conversations that ultimately get her to start thinking about the mystery from her family in a different way.

Still: the characters are fun to revisit, and it’s always nice to see Jemis from an outside perspective, not to mention spot the subtle connections to other entries in the writer’s broader Nine Worlds saga. Nobody should begin their read here, obviously, but it’s a pleasant check-in for anyone already familiar with the background.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros

Book #12 of 2025:

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (The Empyrean #3)

I flitted between three and four stars for this latest Fourth Wing sequel, but was ultimately swayed by how wildly off-base the lower-starred reviews on Goodreads seemed to be. So congrats to those users, I guess, who convinced me to push my own rating up a notch in balance.

And look, I get it — this romantasy series is not for everyone. The sex, the gore, the melodramatic relationship barriers, all the vulgar colloquialisms: they’re on full display here, and if you didn’t enjoy those elements in the previous volumes, you won’t find anything different in this installment. The heroine and her bad-boy beau can certainly be exasperating in how they continue to spark drama despite being happily settled for a while now, not to mention the headstrong way in which they each regularly ignore their military orders and rush straight into danger without any particular plan. I sympathize too with the frustrations that not much happens in this novel to move the larger plot along, and yet it somehow takes 500 pages to get there. At the same time, however, I can’t deny the effect that the pulse-pounding action has on me as a reader, or how invested I feel in these characters and their ongoing war. It’s another page-turner in my personal opinion, even if I do miss the original classwork rhythms and cutthroat academy atmosphere.

The story could stand to be tightened up somewhat, as it’s probably the loosest entry yet. There’s a long excursion abroad in the middle of the book that feels meandering and padded, with its sequences entertaining in the moment but not especially relevant by the end. We also get a quick inclusion of a few outside POVs, which are jarring due to how narrowly we’ve stuck to Violet’s thoughts and emotions beforehand. But the overall framework of this title, in which the protagonist is frantically racing to discover a solution to the cliffhanger of the preceding one, is a solid structure for this portion of the tale. With a certain someone fighting to hold a dark fate at bay, there are vibes of Leigh Bardugo’s King of Scars duology that really help to elevate the stakes and set up a future direction for the saga.

More people die, more furniture gets wrecked, and more dragons pretend they aren’t as gossipy and vain as their lowly human riders. It’s a good time!

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Language of Dragons by S. F. Williamson

Book #11 of 2025:

A Language of Dragons by S. F. Williamson

As a fantasy-lover with an academic background in linguistics, I expected to adore this YA historical fiction title from debut author S. F. Williamson, which reimagines Britain’s WWII codebreakers at Bletchley Park as working to decipher the secret communications of dragons, rather than Nazis. Unfortunately, that premise proves to be the best thing about the novel, which never really pushes further to either the thrilling or the nerdy heights that I’d ideally want from it. (Despite the publisher’s comparisons to R. F. Kuang’s Babel, there’s precious little language here, just a sort of emotion-conveying echolocation that the reptiles don’t think the humans know about. And as presented, it’s less of an intellectual puzzle to be solved than an intuitive system that the protagonist is able to grasp without difficulty.) There’s spycraft and warfare and rebellion, at least theoretically, but these all wind up feeling fairly rote as developed on the page.

The heroine is weak and weepy throughout, and while there should be some edge from her backstory — her parents arrested as collaborators; her responsible for secretly getting her best friend demoted to a lower social class in order to secure a better position for herself — it doesn’t come through in the execution. The romantic interest is equally milquetoast, and the story around them struggles to convey the necessary stakes. Even the dragons themselves aren’t as exciting an element as one imagines they properly could have been in other hands.

The worldbuilding is fun, though, both for the inherent what-if of this hypothetical alternate reality where we coexist with intelligent giant deadly beasts and for the dystopian nature of this version of twentieth-century European society. Those pieces are interesting enough for the volume to earn my baseline three-star rating, but with the plot and the characters failing to impress me in turn, I highly doubt I’ll return for the inevitable sequel.

[Content warning for gun violence, child endangerment, sexual assault, slavery, genocide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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.]

★★★☆☆

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: ★★★☆☆