The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Hawk by Steven Brust

Book #37 of 2025:

Hawk by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #14)

Way back in the fifth volume of this fantasy series, the hitman / mob boss Vladimir Taltos turned on the criminal organization that had previously employed him, resulting in them putting a bounty on his head and forcing him to flee his familiar home and friends. He’s had a bumpy journey since then, but it was always an untenable turn of events, and it finally comes to a boil here, nine years further on (or 24, for readers following along with the releases in real time).

Having returned to the city in the previous novel, and resolved to stay there at the end to remain close to his ex-wife and son, the protagonist has found the Jhereg attention on him steadily amping up, to the point where he’s now pressing his luck dodging multiple assassin teams a day. With no obvious solution besides leaving for the wilderness again, he spends this installment setting up a way to get out from under his former bosses forever, which will take every last scrap of his cleverness, his witchcraft, and the remaining friendships he can call upon.

His ultimate scheme is ingenious in all its contingencies, though the logistics are a little shaky upon closer consideration. (Spoiler alert: all he had to do was essentially catch the higher-ups conspiring to do something illegal? When it’s an open secret their operations are nearly all illicit anyway? Unauthorized psychic surveillance is somehow a bigger deal than all the murdering? I just don’t get it.) But it’s fun to watch him deploy the endgame and run circles around the enemies who think they’ve got him cornered, at least.

It’s not my favorite Vlad adventure — there’s no real emotional depth or feeling of significant challenge anywhere — but I appreciate how it seems to clear away the longstanding threat hanging over the character and reset the basic premise / stakes going forward. I’ve never read this far into the saga before, so I wonder where his story goes from here?

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Agatha All Along, season 1

TV #12 of 2025:

Agatha All Along, season 1

I had initially brushed off this show — an unnecessary-seeming spinoff of Marvel’s WandaVision, with the villain now reframed as an antihero — only to belatedly circle back to it on the basis of a few rave reviews. Ultimately I think it was better than I assumed it would be, but not exactly the gem I’d been hearing about, either. Overall I’m giving it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up: stronger than Echo, Moon Knight, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and certainly Secret Invasion, but not as well-executed as Loki, Hawkeye, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Ms. Marvel, or especially its own parent series.

To start with the good, the cast is fun, and notably unusual in its gender skew for television. Besides Joe Locke as a teenager who comes seeking Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha to kickstart the plot, the main ensemble are all women, with 75-year-old Patti Lupone standing out in particular for the sort of character most shows wouldn’t flesh out and highlight to this extent. The coven is racially diverse too, and features Marvel’s first lesbian romance since the days of Jessica Jones. While Teen’s backstory is kept mysterious for far too long, he’s subsequently revealed to be in a queer relationship as well.

I mention that level of representation because I know it means a lot to some viewers, and this is obviously a program that passes the Bechdel Test each week with aplomb. In the process, it also delivers a couple really fine episodes, like the one where Lillia gets unstuck in time to revisit earlier moments of the story or the one where the young hero’s past is finally shown to us. And I do love the two big twists in the season finale, which serve to recontextualize some of my previous issues with the scripts.

But to that end, I haven’t enjoyed all the front-loaded ambiguities here, and I’m still frustrated with the arbitrary nature of the Witches’ Road and its various challenges. For a while it feels like showrunner Jac Schaeffer is attempting to recreate the clever structure she deployed on WandaVision, with a different decade of witches in popular culture for each trial, but it’s far less motivated in this instance and mostly plays out as mere random costume changes for everybody. (The ultimate answer as to why the Road is like that does get explained later on, sort of, but it’s a just-so solution that doesn’t make those features land any more meaningfully.) Starting the first episode with an indulgently long Mare of Easttown crime drama pastiche is a strange step too, unmatched by anything that follows. And for a series that seems pitched on sisterly solidarity and community, it’s odd how many characters exit the stage before the end until it’s basically just the Hahn and Locke show alone.

I do like what we eventually learn about the boy’s identity, and I wish it could have been presented sooner and given more focus throughout. Take his Judaism, for instance — I loved the flashback scenes set at his bar mitzvah, but since those culminate in what’s effectively amnesia, it results in a person who, like Moon Knight, only technically has that background and doesn’t actually engage with his Jewishness as a part of his daily life at all. An alternate storyline that made the tension between his two selves more vivid could perhaps have alleviated that. The mystery of Teen is moreover one of those elements that I fear lands differently for audiences who had a week between every episode release and access to an eager internet of fandom speculation versus those like me who are able to watch the series straight through. In my opinion, the puzzle is a distraction hiding a certain emptiness in the rest of the narrative.

So round it up to four stars for some nice witchy fun. The vibes are great if that’s your thing, and I’m sure it was neat to have this as a spooky weekly appointment around Halloween season when it originally aired. But its most exciting sequences tend to fall into that Marvel trap of existing simply to set up the next property, and I’m not entirely impressed with the project even now that I can see the full shape of it in hindsight.

[Content warning for death of a child and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Betrayal by John Peel

Book #36 of 2025:

Betrayal by John Peel (2099 #2)

A propulsive sequel that picks up right where the first installment of this middle-grade sci-fi series left off, with a doomsday computer virus ravaging all of New York City. It’s actually impressive how well author John Peel, writing in the 1990s and imagining a century ahead, manages to nail the vulnerabilities of an interconnected Internet of Things to outside attacks. Autopilots going offline resulting in vehicle crashes, electronic doors locking up, alarms and fire suppression measures failing to operate — these are real worries we’re starting to face today, and they make for gripping fiction from yesteryear.

The plot is more focused now too, and the four main characters are all given interesting goals to pursue. The evil clone who made the virus is attempting to escape from his handlers, the good clone is trying to find him and disable the program, the cop is on the track of the wrong boy and worried about turncoats in her ranks, and the street kid’s past crimes finally catch up to her, with the authorities dragging her away from the detective’s side to stand trial. It’s still a little hokey at times — the two teen boys, separated at birth and raised apart, have both grown up to be genius coders whose work is so similar that observers mistake one’s for the other’s — but between the genre, the era, and the intended audience, I think I can suspend my disbelief enough on that front.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Terec and the Wall by Victoria Goddard

Book #35 of 2025:

Terec and the Wall by Victoria Goddard (Terec of Lund #2)

To recap: the imperial valet Conju, a minor character in author Victoria Goddard’s best-known work The Hands of the Emperor, recounts in that novel the unknown fate of his lost love Terec, who fled civilization as a young man with the fire of wild magic burning within him. Their shared backstory gets explored a little more in the servant’s reminiscences in The Game of Courts, while the mage’s own journey commences in Terec and the Wild.

This sequel, the second of four planned novellas in its sequence, picks up where that initial volume leaves off, with the protagonist first stepping outside the empire of his birth. (Oddly, Terec and the Wild was largely about the experiences leading him to the wall bordering Astandalas, while Terec and the Wall is much more about the wild landscape beyond it. Those maybe should have switched their names!) He loses all sense of self in the process, and spends the opening half of this book wandering the wilderness on pure animal instinct, kept alive and warm by the flames he subconsciously continues to wield.

Then around the midway mark, he unexpectedly encounters someone else and wanders into a separate story altogether. I’m not being figurative there — without warning, his arc has suddenly connected up with the Greenwing & Dart series, a branch of the Nine Worlds saga that’s previously been rather independent. Terec’s presence answers a small mystery hanging over that corner of the map, and suggests a radically different direction for the remaining installments ahead.

I am generally a fan of the patchwork way in which Goddard has built up this diverse narrative, and of the increasing impression that any single thread could cross over into another, Cosmere or MCU-style. I would not have guessed that these particular strands would ever wind up weaving together, and I think it’s a development that’s both fun in the moment and promising for the future.

On the other hand: once the wow factor has diminished, there’s not a lot of meat to that section of the plot here, and even less before the hero meets the stranger and begins regaining his faculties. Goddard remains a very talented cozy fantasy writer, but so many of these shorter releases feel like they could have been joined into something more substantial instead of published as solitary wisps like this.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: This Book Kills by Ravena Guron

Book #34 of 2025:

This Book Kills by Ravena Guron

I was expecting this novel — in which a student’s classmate is murdered in the same way as the victim in a story she wrote — to be a YA thriller, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it’s more of a traditional whodunnit instead. Like Veronica Mars or the guy in the movie Brick, our teenage detective protagonist wanders the British boarding school setting, investigating leads and looking for clues, before ultimately and inevitably getting in way over her head when the killer notices what she’s doing.

I thought the identity of that hidden culprit was pretty easy to determine, although as I mentioned in another recent review, I may just be growing too comfortable with a genre that only has so many different underlying plot paths available to it. (Keep asking yourself as you read what claims we really only have one person’s word for, and the mystery often clears right up.) There isn’t quite enough here to make the title stand out for me as truly exceptional, but it’s a solid example of the craft.

[Content warning for racism, bullying, underage alcohol abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Babylon 5, season 3

TV #11 of 2025:

Babylon 5, season 3

Babylon 5 is so very nearly frustratingly close to being a good show. There are times when it manages to kick into that higher gear, such as this season when the rising authoritarianism on earth forces the station crew to openly break away from their homeworld and declare independence. Indeed, watching this series now in the era of DOGE gutting America’s federal government, there’s a real resonance in these officers feeling torn between their sworn duty and the blatant malfeasance in the upper ranks. The arc involving the paramilitary Nightwatch movement — loyalists to the corrupt president who inform on their neighbors and claim to exist outside the regular chain of command — is also rather apt. (It’s not that showrunner J. Michael Straczynski or the other writers predicted our current moment, of course; it’s that they fairly skillfully articulated a fictional parallel to historical processes that we are unfortunately now seeing repeat.)

So the problem isn’t a lack of great ideas per se, but merely the inability to drill down on those and discard more of the chaff. The Centauri/Narn conflict in the previous season registered so strongly because it was channeled through representative personalities that we’d come to know well, and there’s no such figures standing in for the mysterious Shadows who dominate the storyline here. It’s all just a lot of portentous talk about doom and destinies, with even the villains’ fundamental motivation behind the war ultimately delivered as an abstract offhand line from one of their interchangeable flunkies in the finale. For its era, the program had a reputation of daring serialization, but absent the personal element clicking into place, that often feels like meaningless pieces getting shuffled around a game board. The long-teased reveal of what happened to Babylon 4 and the fate of Commander Sinclair finally arrives, and I guess it all fits together logically enough, but it’s in no way satisfying to watch.

The basic framework is there, to be clear! Strip away the hokier elements like Dr. Franklin taking a penitent walkabout to “meet himself” or, uh, everything concerning Marcus, and there are characters who shine. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the abruptness of either Sheridan’s introduction or Delenn’s transformation last year, on their own terms as we find them here, I think they work fine. But the wider plot is too much of a bland chaos, without the necessary focus on any people or events we have a solid reason to care about.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling

Book #33 of 2025:

Last to Leave the Room by Caitlin Starling

Dr. Tamsin Rivers is losing her mind. She’s not sleeping well, she’s exhibiting odd memory lapses, and she’s going long periods without remembering to eat or leave the house. She’s also studying a strange House of Leaves phenomenon where her basement seems to stretch in size whenever she isn’t looking, its floor ever so slightly further away from the ceiling each time. When it reaches far enough, an odd doorway suddenly appears that she can’t open or materially affect at all. And then an exact duplicate of herself is there too, her blank mental state giving no indication of whether she came through the mysterious portal or not.

Some of these things are objective facts, at least so far as the protagonist can tell. She’s both going crazy and experiencing a crazy event, although the causality isn’t especially clear early on. (Are the forces that summoned her doppelgänger also responsible for her deteriorating cognition, or is the other woman’s presence all a fever dream from her already unwell brain?) Eventually the plot discards the ambiguity and endorses the former option, as her condition continues to worsen. Meanwhile the naïve double is growing ever crueler and more sure of herself in a reverse of the original’s own progression, and it isn’t long before she’s taken her place and reduced the doctor to a frightened mess cowering in their home with the dwindling fragments of her memories.

This is a fascinating piece of psychological horror from the author of the equally excellent The Luminous Dead, heavy on themes of domestic abuse and with some eventual queer and disabled representation as well (the heroine sharing a complicated quasi-romantic dynamic with both her mirror self and her flinty corporate handler). The scientist’s Flowers for Algernon transformation is eerie enough to witness even without the addition of her unnatural tormenter, who like the villain in Stephen King’s Misery soon takes steps to forcibly limit her mobility. It’s a slow burn overall, and while I don’t understand either the title or the cover art — which suggests many such copies for some reason — it’s been a gripping experience to read.

Four stars instead of five simply because the peripheral stuff with the office politics, the Silicon Valley satire, and the corporation’s wider area of study isn’t developed in as much detail as I’d like, and since there are a few matters I would have preferred to get more closure on by the end. But on the level of the immediate character-driven story, this has been a real page-turner for me regardless.

[Content warning for biomedical experimentation, dehumanization, gaslighting, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang

Book #32 of 2025:

Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang

This standalone fantasy novel is a total delight, and also probably represents the biggest improvement I’ve ever seen an author display from their debut, which for M. L. Wang was the somewhat forgettable YA title Theonite: Planet Adyn. Her talents have grown considerably in the time since then, as well as her distinctive narrative voice. There are rough plot similarities here to works from more established names — Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need, and R. F. Kuang’s Babel: an Arcane History all come to mind — but the aggregate effect resembles none of them at all. It’s entirely refreshing.

Our story is set in a crowded city-state surrounded by a magical barrier, outside of which a strange and deadly affliction preys upon the local nomadic tribes, striking seemingly at random to unknit their bones and sinews at increasing frequency the closer they draw to the settlement. The prologue sees a starving clan launching a desperate rush to reach the safety inside regardless, with only one hunter and his young niece making it across the boundary alive. Once there within the protective magic, they find themselves marked as racial minorities, barely tolerated as the lowest social class and forced into jobs of menial labor.

A decade later, the heroine of the piece is struggling to break through a barricade of her own: a gender restriction on who can ascend to the highest order of mages. She’s the first woman in years to even be allowed to take the entrance exam, and although her brilliance and dedicated studying pay off, her new peers disdain her and saddle her with a nearby janitor — the protagonist from the beginning — in lieu of a properly trained research assistant. The assignment is plainly intended to mock and infuriate her, and yet Sciona finds in Thomil an eager mind and a personality forceful enough to push back against her ignorant assumptions about his people.

There is a romance here, but it’s understated to a degree that I appreciate. These characters are not hormonal teens; they are working professionals striving for a scientific breakthrough who wind up uncovering a shameful secret their leaders have suppressed. A certain twist in the worldbuilding is downright Sandersonian as mentioned, but the spellwork surrounding it is strikingly original — more like lines of computer code that must be fed into a typewriter device in order to take effect. Such spells can do great wonders, including powering the vehicles and other forms of advanced technology throughout the society in a seamless blend of science-fiction and fantasy.

Plotwise, this is a tale that starts off strongly and then ratchets up in intensity several times before the end, ultimately arriving at an effort to tear apart a vile institution all the way down to its corrupt foundations. The scholar is initially off-putting in her casual racism — the genre equivalent of white feminism — but that’s by design and gives her an excellent personal arc at gradually overcoming those blinders as she seeks the truth about the Omelas world she’s inherited and the bloody cost of its conveniences. She’s a richly-drawn and complicated figure, and her colleague is likewise far from the noble savage that such a role might have been reduced to in other hands. I’ve loved following their journey towards understanding and the commitment to strike out against injustice, and I could not have asked for a more satisfying conclusion.

[Content warning for suicide, sexual assault, and gore.]

★★★★★

TV Review: The Bear, season 1

TV #10 of 2025:

The Bear, season 1

I’ve never worked in a restaurant kitchen before, but the first year of this FX drama* is so evocative in conveying the chaos and stress of one that I can practically feel my body tightening up with every episode. (“But you’re enjoying it?” my wife asks in concern, a worried frown darting across her face. Yes! Good art is supposed to evoke a chemical, emotional reaction in you; that’s how you know it’s working.) The Bear is pitch-perfect in capturing the rhythms and nuances of its Chicago setting, from the workplace lingo to the many arguments that seem to consist of frazzled people shouting profanity-laced tirades over one another.

If the program has a major fault — besides a sudden turn for the unrealistic in the season finale — it’s that it can occasionally be too opaque. The naturalistic approach results in stories that don’t feel like a typical fiction, but that means less of the customary artificiality of characters spelling out exactly what they’re doing and thinking, too. This isn’t a cooking show or even a procedural, so we don’t get to see enough steps to really understand the scope of the problems anyone is facing or how they manage to solve them. Instead, the plot is more focused on the workers themselves, and how those challenges impact their mental health. And sometimes, my knowledge as an amateur cook admittedly gets in the way here. (What do you mean a risotto is something you can quickly put together with the materials you already have on-hand for other orders, Sydney??)

But the cast is great, revolving around Shameless‘s Jeremy Allen White as a world-class chef who returns to his hometown to take over the struggling family establishment in the wake of his brother’s suicide. Like Jon Snow reorganizing the Night’s Watch, he’s a talented outsider with a vision for reforms who faces distrust and resentment among the folks who were there before him and apparently don’t mind the old inefficiencies. He’s also processing his own grief and trying — largely, failing — to be a better boss than the ones in the business that he’s labored under in the past. Bearing the brunt of that is an even more idealistic Ayo Edebiri, another trained professional attracted to the position because of the main protagonist’s reputation but suffering for his impatience and other weaknesses.

The whole ensemble is similarly flawed, in interesting and human ways, which of course has them at each other’s throats as often as managing to pull together as a team. There’s not much of a larger story, nor is it clear how much of the friction could be sanded down via personal growth while still leaving enough to entertain us, but I know I’ll be happy to come back for seconds.

*I realize the series has competed on the awards circuit as a comedy, not a drama. That’s a bad call, in my opinion! Genre boundaries can be strange and arbitrary, but this one seems pretty straightforward to me. Humorous dialogue and a shorter episode length don’t make a project like this into a sitcom.

[Content warning for gun violence, alcoholism, and panic attacks.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel

Book #31 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel (Virgin New Adventures #1)

When Classic Doctor Who was canceled after its 26th season in 1989 — not that it was called Classic at the time — there was no expectation that the series would ever pick back up again on-screen. Virgin Publishing, running short on episodes left to novelize and sensing a desire in the fandom for further stories regardless, procured a new license from the BBC so that the franchise could continue on in some fashion. This particular title from 1991 was the first of those efforts in the period later deemed the Wilderness Years, and the first non-novelization Who novel ever produced. It’s also the opening volume to the Timewyrm arc, which would extend through the next three installments under different writers.

The mission brief appears to have been to carry on with the Seventh Doctor and Ace’s adventures via the same sort of complex sci-fi storytelling they had recently showcased on the television program, but without needing to remain as family-friendly. Lacking as strict an editorial filter / oversight, the book series was free to be more violent and mature in its themes as it grew out of that former mold and explored new frontiers. In certain ways, this was a clear boon — the characters often feel more like real adults than the safer versions audiences had seen on TV, and the series would ultimately feature greater representation of queer identities than likely could have aired at the time. But the effect in this debut release is considerably more mixed. Author John Peel, given that leeway to usher in a darker and more grownup Doctor Who, mostly takes the opportunity to include multiple scenes of underage nudity and sexual assault, along with spatterings of gratuitous violence.

The setting is ancient Mesopotamia, and other than the alien presence, I don’t know how much of it is historically accurate. In Peel’s version at least, there are temple prostitutes as young as thirteen years old walking around topless and offering to sleep with all the male visitors, while the legendary king Gilgamesh molests any woman or girl he can get his wandering hands on, our modern teenage companion Ace included. When she objects to his behavior and explicitly worries that he’ll rape her if she’s left alone with him, the Doctor chides her breezily about relativistic cultural norms and how she shouldn’t judge another people’s customs by her own. She’s also nude in two other scenes for no specific narrative purpose — waking up in the TARDIS at the beginning and then later taking a bath in the royal palace — which seems like yet another excuse for the writer to be salacious about actress Sophie Aldred’s imagined body. The Doctor, after all, isn’t subjected to any such treatment in turn.

That’s all basically indefensible in my opinion, as it doesn’t amount to anything but its own problematic inclusion. Meanwhile in the actual plot, the time-travelers are on the trail of a powerful enemy who’s crash-landed nearby and begun laying plans to conquer the world in the guise of the goddess Ishtar. There are a few fun nods to canon that might have been beyond the available TV budget to realize — memories of fallen companions like Sara Kingdom, a recorded message from the Fourth Doctor, Seven somehow channeling Three’s old personality from deep within himself in order to access his mechanical skills, and so on — which is nice for a readership presumably self-selected to recognize and appreciate such callbacks. (On the other hand, that also means readers are predisposed to catch continuity errors like Ace referencing Paradise Towers, a serial she wasn’t in. Whoops!)

In the end the Timewyrm escapes stronger than ever, and the heroes survive to fight another day. It works as a general proof-of-concept for the sequels to come, even if it hasn’t aged especially well in its own right.

★★★☆☆