The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

Book #125 of 2024:

The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

An excellent and appreciably queer new prequel to 2021’s The Blacktongue Priest, although the two stories are so standalone that they could probably be read in either order. Approaching them by release date, as I have, merely underscores the tragic nature of the present title: we already know that the veteran knight Galva has a sad backstory from her army days, while a newcomer who picked up this volume first could theoretically be surprised by the degree of carnage and loss. But because she’s so closed-off and not a POV figure in the original tale, there are few details that are spoiled by meeting her later in life instead of here.

The two books are dissimilar in some ways, though alike in eschewing the traditional plot beats of epic fantasy. But where Priest carries the rollicking spirit of a picaresque adventure or a tabletop roleplaying campaign, this installment is a simple war story. Its heroines and their trained giant crows are soldiers preparing for and then engaging in bloody combat with their inhuman enemies, with long bouts of downtime in camp or on the march between skirmishes. (Those goblin foes threatening to overwhelm the allied kingdoms of humanity remain creepy alien things, drawn more from the horror genre than from the typical cartoonish representation of their species.) The tone avoids the bleak nihilism endemic to certain ‘grimdark’ works — one senses that author Christopher Buehlman cares deeply for the dignity of his characters and the heartbreak of their survivors, even when the former are literally being eaten alive on the battlefield or carved up for decoration after — with a focus on emotions and interpersonal dynamics that could almost be called cozy aside from all the surrounding gore.

It all ends in sorrow, as you might expect, with its 20-year-old protagonist barely escaping her extended ordeal and hardening into the jaded woman from the sequel. Nevertheless, it’s a journey well worth taking with her.

[Content warning for rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Stone Speaks to Stone by Victoria Goddard

Book #124 of 2024:

Stone Speaks to Stone by Victoria Goddard

A roughly-standalone prequel novella to author Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart series (which is itself just a smaller piece of her overarching Nine Worlds fantasy saga). I’ve chosen to read it after the first three G&D novels, which feels like the right choice, as a central question throughout those stories concerns the actions and fate of Jemis Greenwing’s father Jack during a recent military campaign, which doesn’t get fully resolved for his son until the end of book 3. Reading this title first, with its explicit depiction of one particularly important event that receives conflicting reports later on, would have punctured some of that tension, or at least replaced it with a certain dramatic irony.

But there’s not much meat on the bones of this installment, and I’m personally not a fan of how it depicts the Astandalan Empire. In other books from this setting, like The Hands of the Emperor, the gradual expansion of that ruling body has been seen as a neutral or positive result of natural cultural contact, with newly-annexed lands gaining from being brought into the fold of the wider civilization and its magics and largely retaining their original character and customs. Here we see it instead as an outright strategic conquest that’s being resisted brutally by the locals, and while that may be more realistic and add nice shading to our understanding of the realm, it’s hard to square with the cozy vibes of Kip and his liege in Hands. (It’s also not as though this story is anticolonial on the level of its surface text — the would-be colonizers are the good guys whose poor captured soldiers are being tortured by their barbaric enemies, after all. The subtext behind the conflict is ugly and not to the invaders’ favor, but it doesn’t exactly feel intentional on the writer’s part.)

But Goddard can still spin a yarn like the best of them, and the adventure plot here of a desperate rescue mission behind enemy lines is thrilling enough if you can ignore the above implications. It won’t go down as a favorite of mine, but it’s not a bad read overall.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

Book #123 of 2024:

You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

A heavy but hilarious dark comedy / noir mystery investigation / trenchant antihero character study, this tale of a suburban female serial killer has major early Dexter vibes in all the best ways (mixed with something like Where’d You Go, Bernadette, perhaps). Claire is having difficulty adjusting to her father’s recent death, which makes her sloppier than usual at killing the people who offend her personal sense of justice and decorum. This time someone has witnessed one of her murders and infiltrated her local bereavement support group to blackmail her, which kicks off a twisting plot as she tries to get to the bottom of who knows what and how hard it will be to silence them for good.

So long as you can find the entertainment in such amorality, it’s a pretty fun read, with some genuine emotional breakthroughs for the protagonist amid the steadily-increasing body count. I don’t know if I’d say this has sequel potential, but it’s pitch-perfect as a standalone story and would be great to see adapted for film someday.

[Content warning for child abuse, elder abuse, sexual assault, gun violence, suicide, claustrophobia, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Prodigy, season 2

TV #37 of 2024:

Star Trek: Prodigy, season 2

A thoroughly excellent time-travel adventure, and probably the best season-over-season improvement in all of Star Trek. The debut year of this animated program was endearing but clunky, with an unclear intended audience and a disappointing incorporation of its Delta Quadrant setting. However, the show improved as it went along and its initial Farscape-esque premise of a group of misfits commandeering a ship together gave way to an actual coherent storyline and relevant character stakes. This followup, which finds the young heroes at the start of their new Starfleet careers before a sudden threat looms, benefits tremendously from that transformation: we’re no longer watching a gang of strangers with merely tenuous connections to the rest of the franchise, but rather a central component that registers as an earnest continuation for fans.

(In fact, with Wesley Crusher from TNG joining a cast that already includes Janeway, Chakotay, and the EMH from Voyager, this is now as fully-fledged a sequel series as Star Trek: Picard. I only wish Deep Space Nine was getting this much loving attention from contemporary Trek, beyond the occasional irreverent bit on Lower Decks.)

Asencia is a better villain with a more clearly-defined motivation than the Diviner ever was, but I also appreciate that the writers found a way to keep John Noble around as an actor past his natural exit, somewhat like The Flash did with Tom Cavanagh or Sleepy Hollow with Noble himself. Redeeming his character as an ally for the protagonists is a great move, as is the basic concept here of the cadets having to fix the broken timeline in an increasingly convoluted manner. We even get an appearance from the mirror universe and its hilariously evil whales, not to mention tribbles, hologram malfunctions, and powerful noncorporeal beings with a hidden dark side. If the first season could sometimes feel like a Star Wars cartoon with the serial numbers filed off, this is absolutely Star Trek through and through. I just hope the story is able to continue, though the odds of renewal don’t seem high at this point.

★★★★☆

Book Review: On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci, M.D.

Book #122 of 2024:

On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci, M.D.

Dr. Anthony Fauci may not have become a household name until the recent COVID-19 pandemic, but that experience capped off a long and distinguished career in patient care, scientific research, and public health policy. In this 2024 autobiography, the newly-retired author reflects back on that time and the seven presidents he’s had the honor to serve under, all of whom except Donald Trump seem to have been genuinely interested in listening to the science on infectious disease and committed to saving lives from it both domestically and abroad.

Which is not to say that this title is a political hit job, but it certainly joins a wide body of tell–all memoirs that confirm just how dysfunctional the Trump White House was, with warring factions of petty tyrants, an insistence on wishful thinking over expert advice, and the paranoid assessment of every dissenting voice as a partisan enemy. As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the increasingly public face of the government’s coronavirus response, Dr. Fauci pushed back against that environment as best as he could, always sharing the latest honest updates on the virus with the American people even when it meant publicly contradicting the president himself.

But most of this book isn’t about that presidential term at all, although there’s a common theme of the good doctor speaking truth to power. Instead, he walks us through his start as one of the first researchers to pay attention to the burgeoning HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, and how he came to listen to activists from the gay community and involve them in the decision process for future studies and outreach plans, even when they were hostile towards him in the press and shunned by his peers in the medical field. He lost several close friends to the disease, but was instrumental in ultimately deciphering a way to combat it, which he explains in clear terms for the lay reader. We then follow him and his team over the course of the 2001 anthrax scare and other relatively minor outbreaks across the next few decades, like swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, Zika, and SARS — incidents that were contained in large part due to the writer and his colleagues taking decisive actions with the federal support that was so lacking in early 2020.

All of which brings us back to Trump, for whom Fauci does not hold back his criticisms as a man whose decisions swung wildly based on which advisor happened to talk to him last and who regularly put the perception of a strong economy (and his subsequent reelection odds) over the health of his fellow citizens. And while none of that is exactly news, it hits hard after reading the author’s effusive praise for other conservative figures like George Bush, George W. Bush, or even Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence. As a civil servant who happily aided previous Republicans and Democrats alike, he chafed against Trump’s leadership not over politics, but over all the chaos and dangerous willful abandonment of the truth.

This memoir also addresses the hatred and lies that have been directed at Tony Fauci himself over the past few years, with the explicit encouragement of Trump and his cohort of MAGA Republicans. From death threats against his family to bizarre claims blaming him for all manner of outlandish conspiracy plots, it speaks to a troubling trend in the right-wing disinformation chamber to drag down anyone and everyone seen as aligning themselves with the left. I’m reminded of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s own recent memoir on that subject, and how, like Fauci, she wasn’t aiming to be political at all. But for the thoughtcrime of openly opposing a particular conservative, both individuals were reviled as liberal liars by the supposed patriots under Trump.

Luckily, Anthony hasn’t let the attacks bother him too much, and writing now in his 80s after finally stepping down from his various responsibilities, he seems content to enjoy his well-earned retirement with his wife, his three daughters, and his grandchildren. While he’s somewhat bemused by his new status as a recognizable celebrity, he’s still eager to share his hard-won insights into the spread of contagion with the same natural communication style that’s served him so well over the years. On behalf of a grateful nation — or the non-Trumpy parts of it, at least — I thank him for his service and for this excellent read.

★★★★☆