The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Artifact Space by Miles Cameron

Book #174 of 2024:

Artifact Space by Miles Cameron (Arcana Imperii #1)

This 2021 space opera debut exhibits one of my favorite sort of plot structures, which is to drill down into the minutiae of daily life in a strange environment while major storylines play out slowly in the background, surfacing occasionally but only really growing in importance when the climax of the tale finally approaches. Think Harry Potter, or Ender’s Game — the latter of which feels like a particularly apt comparison given the militaristic sci-fi atmosphere of this title, although the heroine is an older teen navigating her junior officer position on a merchant spaceship, rather than a child genius in tactical school.

For Marca Nbaro, there are actually multiple serious crises brewing around her. First, she’s forged the credentials that got her posted to the Athens to begin with, and lives in fear that the shipboard AI or one of her new peers will uncover and discredit her. She was driven to lie in order to escape from a powerful enemy she made back in her hardscrabble youth orphanage, who remains intent on revenge. And as she seeks to put all that behind her, a more immediate threat emerges in the form of a shadowy faction sabotaging and destroying the city-sized greatships like hers, presumably for rival commercial reasons. Although our protagonist isn’t initially on the villains’ radar, she’s plucky and capable enough that she soon finds herself the target of several personal assassination attempts as well.

Mostly, though, we are following this young woman from shift to shift and over many combat exercises as she gradually makes friends and becomes more comfortable in her own skin, which is always a thrilling arc to experience. The narrative doesn’t linger on the character’s trauma from the backstory, but her learned responses to it are well-developed and make her an interesting figure to behold: rash and brave one moment, yet skittish of emotional intimacy the next. It’s been a joy to watch her prove herself against the ever more dire circumstances facing her, and I look forward to seeing how that element continues to progress in the sequel(s) ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, sexual slavery, and revenge porn.]

★★★★☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

Book #173 of 2024:

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

I feel as though this 2014 volume has given me immense insight into the people I know (or even suspect) have suffered traumatic experiences as either children or adults, as well as made me more mindful of how I approach my own life and parenting style. It’s a thorough overview of how the human body reacts physically to mental or emotional stress in regular measurable ways, and should put to bed the idea that any such problem can ever be dismissed as being solely an artifact of someone’s mind. Even destructive behaviors like self-harm, eating disorders, or anger and violence against others can be understood as quasi-rational reactions to stimuli that the subconscious brain doesn’t know how to process in any other way.

Author Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. is a career clinician who has researched these matters extensively, and he explains plainly both how trauma functions differently from typical memory formation and recall and how various psychiatric treatments can manage to bring the suffering under control. He also walks a fine line between describing the chemistry of why antidepressant drugs are effective and making a case that they merely suppress symptoms whose root causes should properly be mitigated and resolved through therapy.

It’s a heavy read, necessarily full of documented instances of domestic abuse, incest, pedophilia, rape, gun violence, loss of children, wartime atrocities, and beyond. Although most of these examples eventually result in a degree of healing for the doctor’s patients, the details can be excruciating to hear — which admittedly emphasizes their power to trigger panic in those affected individuals when future occurrences resemble them somehow.

The text is occasionally repetitive, as though the writer intended the chapters to be read independently rather than straight through, and I’m not totally convinced by his discussion of recovered memories, which I believe to be a more debated if not outright discredited topic in the field than he suggests here. Nevertheless, it’s overall a remarkably clarifying title.

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Umbrella Academy, season 3

TV #47 of 2024:

The Umbrella Academy, season 3

As a series, The Umbrella Academy has benefited from the time it’s had to develop its main characters, who are interestingly dysfunctional and comfortably grown into their respective superpowers at this point. But the plot around them is a mess, simultaneously dragging on and seeming to reinvent itself every few episodes or so. This year features so many slow scenes of people sitting around talking in an otherwise empty hotel — due to Covid filming restrictions, presumably — which on the one hand gets to show off the aforementioned personal interactions rather nicely. But on the other hand, it’s never clear what motivations are driving a certain key figure in the storyline, nothing ever feels especially urgent or actionable, and the whole situation gets increasingly untethered from any sort of logical reality, even without mentioning the ludicrously quick romance and wedding near the end.

The basic premise kicking off this run: the siblings have returned from their trip to the 1960s only to discover that something they did while preventing an apocalypse in the past created an alternate timeline, Back to the Future Part II style. In this version of the present, their dad adopted seven different children instead, while the Umbrellas (save Ben) were apparently never born at all. The precise mechanics of that are eventually more or less explained, but there are plenty of questions that aren’t, from the lingering issues behind the kids’ creation and the death of their original brother Ben to new implications of recent developments, like whether the Sparrows existed in the initial course of events and why Reginald didn’t adopt them or Lila to begin with.

There’s also a bizarre coincidence at the heart of everything, in that the hotel that Klaus randomly suggests they crash at — with what money I don’t know; these weirdos and their bank accounts literally don’t exist anymore — happens to be the one designed by their father and housing a portal to another dimension with a maguffin button that can reset the universe, which turns out to be necessary as there’s a steadily expanding black hole thing eating away at the world outside the building. It’s yet another doomsday scenario that isn’t fleshed out nearly enough to make sense or register as meaningful for the protagonists, and the dwindling cast results in a feeling of squandered potential as so many individuals take their abrupt exits as the season goes on.

On the acting side, Justin H. Min gets to stretch his performance muscles more to play the Sparrow iteration of Ben, and Elliot Page’s transition gets mirrored on the screen, with his character likewise coming out as trans and changing his name to Viktor. The latter isn’t anything I’ve ever seen done before on TV, so kudos to the writers for that, and I guess it’s fitting that with so much else going on in their lives, the other members of the Hargreeves family are instantly accepting and understanding of the name and pronoun change. It may not be the most plausible coming out story, but in a setting with aliens and talking chimps and time travel and the rest, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (And we’ll pretend that a haircut alone explains Page’s new look, just like we suspend our disbelief that Number Five’s actor Aidan Gallagher has supposedly only aged a month since the show began.)

Where does the program go from here, for its final truncated batch of six remaining episodes? I have no idea. This one ends on a cliffhanger teeing up the next status quo, but I’m not really sure what resolution for any of these malcontents would even look like. I hope we the audience finally get some definitive answers, though.

[Content warning for body horror, incest, sexual assault, ableism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Meltdown by Chris Archer

Book #172 of 2024:

Meltdown by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #10)

A weird end to a chaotic series, and probably the first one that really earns the “Mindwarp” title. These books have always been like a middle-grade sci-fi sampler project, and so it’s only fitting that the final volume introduces its younger readers to another few classic genre tropes on the way out. First, the story starts with its heroine Toni waking up in a hospital, where she’s told that she’s just confused, her powers aren’t real, and none of the adventures she’s been on with her friends truly happened. It’s gaslighting, as that ploy always is, but before she sees through the illusion she’s introduced to a man calling himself Chris Archer, who says that her memories are a fiction she’s read in the Mindwarp novels he’s written.

The meta twist is fun, but it falls apart the longer you think about it and doesn’t ultimately add much to the plot. (Same goes for a surprise appearance of a choose-your-own-adventure choice late in the text, where both branches turn out to be a dream and lead to the same place after all.) The bigger issue is that by the time the protagonist has figured out it’s all a lie and escaped from her capture, the book is already two-thirds of the way done. That’s the bulk of the finale spent with just one character, and the remainder with everyone else comes across as a perfunctory rush to tack on a conclusion that only vaguely resolves the wider narrative. There aren’t really any satisfying callbacks to earlier installments, farewells to previously recurring characters, or payoff to arcs like Toni and Jack’s flirtatiously squabbling banter. The other kids don’t even get one last heroic use of their special abilities, although Toni’s electricity-manipulation and time travel at least get a solid workout.

It’s better as a story about her than as an ending, and I suppose I might be grading on a curve for the intended audience when I award it a passing grade of three-out-of-five stars. This is a series that’s alternated between good and great for me, even coming back to finish it as an adult reader, but it’s sadly unable to stick the landing in the ultimate analysis.

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 6 > 3 > 5 > 9 > 7 > 2 > 1 > 8 > 10 > 4

Book Review: The Overstory by Richard Powers

Book #171 of 2024:

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The language in this 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner is undeniably lovely at times, but as a whole, I’m afraid it’s rather bounced off of me. The structure and length is one issue: this is a very long book, and it spends almost its entire first third — seven hours of the audiobook at regular speed — on a succession of vignettes that don’t have any connections whatsoever beyond the focal characters all feeling some loose affinity for trees. These eight chapters read like discrete short stories, and while the novel eventually brings certain protagonists together, it’s a pretty slow and pointless-seeming start. (There’s no universal predicament they’re all responding to, either, like how the pandemic in Stephen King’s The Stand makes a similarly disjointed approach come across as generally unified. These folks are all dealing with their own localized concerns.) Even once the main plot arrives, some of the strands from the beginning never are more than tangentially connected to the rest.

This is also a title that asks a lot from its audience, and not just for the time commitment and degree of patient trust involved in initially waiting for the project to get to the point. Over the course of the tale we’re invited to sympathize with suicide attempts, artificial intelligence, and acts of eco-terrorism, and to find it reasonable that activists would chain themselves to trees or live up in them for months to stymie the logging industry. Even for a reader concerned about climate change and naturally predisposed towards environmentalism, it’s a bit of a stretch, to say nothing of a few goofier elements like the character who claims to be able to hear the secret voices of forests after receiving a near-fatal electrical shock or the one whose professional therapy involves silently staring into her clients’ eyes. There’s a subtle air of nihilism throughout the enterprise too, as people repeatedly suffer from accidents and other turns of misfortune for no greater apparent narrative purpose. Meanwhile, multiple men become romantically infatuated with younger women who are either less interested or uninterested in them at all.

Despite everything, I kept reading, which I suppose must be a testament to author Richard Powers in some fashion. I did feel invested enough to continue following these various lives and want to see if/how matters would resolve for them. But ultimately, the aggregate effect was too compromised to make a major impact on me.

[Content warning for ableism, racism, sexism, gun violence, police brutality, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 15

TV #46 of 2024:

Classic Doctor Who, season 15

This is the halfway mark of Tom Baker’s record seven seasons as the Fourth Doctor, and despite his ongoing popularity in that role, it’s also unfortunately where the shine starts to come off. Behind the scenes, Graham Williams replaced Philip Hinchcliffe as producer, and the series shifted away from the gothic horror that had marked the former’s era towards more of a lighter comic tone. Nowhere is that more representative than in the Time Lord’s latest companion, debuting in the second serial of this year: the robotic dog K-9, who seems pitched specifically to appeal to younger audiences and presumably sell them some toys.

In truth, I don’t mind K-9 as a character. I always appreciate when Doctor Who varies up the typical companion dynamics, and both he and the futuristic ‘savage’ Leela (returning from last season and departing at the end of this one) help bring a distinctive energy to the screen. But the humor around the tin dog can be pretty broad at times, and Baker responds by dialing up his own comedic performance to match it. It’s no wonder that we’d soon see Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame come and write for the show, although no one of his caliber is penning the jokes just yet.

The stories are mostly adequate, with one standout as a holdover from the Hinchcliffe regime and a couple weaker efforts. The franchise history gets plumbed a little bit, bringing back Sontarans for the first time in three years and revisiting Gallifrey for a semi-sequel to last season’s adventure there, but overall the Doctor is facing forgettable humanoid threats on a noticeably lower budget. It’s not exactly the program’s finest hour.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL (15×9 – 15×12)
UNDERWORLD (15×17 – 15×20)

★★★☆☆
THE INVASION OF TIME (15×21 – 15×26)
THE INVISIBLE ENEMY (15×5 – 15×8)
THE SUN MAKERS (15×13 – 15×16)

★★★★☆
THE HORROR OF FANG ROCK (15×1 – 15×4)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

Book Review: Issola by Steven Brust

Book #170 of 2024:

Issola by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #9)

The back half of this novel is rather good, representing an important step forward for former assassin and current fugitive Vlad Taltos, who’s come out of hiding to help a few friends who’ve been kidnapped by some sort of demigods. It also hinges on a new relationship — platonic but deeply intimate — between that protagonist and Lady Teldra, the courteous steward of Castle Black who has previously only been a very minor character in the series. Her quiet politeness blossoms in conversation with the Easterner, yielding the kind of respectful yet puzzled culture clashes of something like Shōgun.

It’s fun to read before it all turns tragic, but it emerges from some of the most tedious exposition that author Steven Brust has yet devised, justifying the mysticism behind these latest worldbuilding details and the precise logistics of the enemies and their plans for Vlad’s world. With such a flimsy beginning compromising the far stronger concluding arc, I suppose I’ll toss my rating for this title straight down the middle. Still, it’s nice to see the franchise pushing forward into the future and finally delivering on the Spellbreaker mystery that’s lingered in the background for several books now.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

Book #169 of 2024:

Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon

I saw this book pitched as the Gilmore girls investigating a murder, and that’s honestly a pretty decent shorthand for the character dynamics at play: a small-town fifteen-year-old who discovers the body and is initially considered a suspect, the single mom who had her as a teen, and her own estranged mother, long-divorced and now living with them temporarily while undergoing cancer treatments. Besides the genre, it does feel somewhat similar to that TV show, although the main focus here is on the Diet Coke-guzzling* grandmother who decides to do some Marple-esque sleuthing to clear her granddaughter’s name, with the teenager herself registering as a definite afterthought.

Unfortunately, the plot isn’t as engaging as the interactions among the family, and the mystery element is straightforwardly predictable despite how long certain reveals are dragged out. The investigation also hinges on a few providential strokes of luck, like the protagonist happening to wake up in the middle of the night and look out her window or attending a funeral for someone she didn’t even know who turns out to be relevant to the case. (As a general principle, I stand by the writing advice that your heroes should stumble over bad fortune more often than good and be largely responsible for earning their victories through active choices and struggles.) And while it’s a minor issue, I’m disappointed by the paltry Jewish representation on display, which is mostly limited to surface mentions of holidays like Chanukah gifts or Passover visits with no further detail or exploration of what the identity means to any of these women. (If you can find-and-replace in your manuscript to easily swap out one culture’s attributes for another, you haven’t really done the work to ground that characteristic in anything meaningful.) At least author Nina Simon does a better job addressing the racism in the community, and how a brown kid like Jack — she has an absentee Filipino father — faces obstacles that her more privileged elders do not.

The vibes are strong enough for a passing three-out-of-five stars from me, but on a story level, I’m afraid I’m rather underwhelmed.

*Seriously, her drink of choice is mentioned no fewer than 15 times in this novel. What a strange character quirk to emphasize that way!

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Clary Sage by Victoria Goddard

Book #168 of 2024:

Clary Sage by Victoria Goddard

Morrowlea University is an important part of the backstory of author Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart series, which begins soon after its protagonist Jemis Greenwing graduates and returns home from there. As we learn as those stories unfold, the institution is alone among its peers in this particular fantasy world for anonymizing the student body, with everyone in attendance keeping their surname and any potentially associated noble rank a secret from one another. Jemis has since learned that his friend and roommate Hal is an Imperial Duke, but neither of them knew anything about their fellow’s family or connections during their time at school together.

This prequel novella centers on the other lad himself, and while I’m generally predisposed these days to be less interested in heroes drawn from the nobility, Hal’s whole arc here involves working through his quiet loneliness and feelings of discontent within his station and eventually making the agentive choice to attend Morrowlea and the botany curriculum he privately finds fascinating instead of the expected path of comfort before him. It probably helps to have already met his more carefree older self, but he’s endearing and sweet in his teenage insecurities, with echoes of the sadness of the ruling class in The Goblin Emperor (or, at more of a distance, Goddard’s own The Hands of the Emperor). It’s a tricky balancing act for a writer to keep a character compelling while still emphasizing the privilege they hold over others, but the task is carried off well in this volume, which works whether you’ve read the later books or not. I would give Hal a hug if I could, and I’m glad the little plant-lover ends this tale on his way towards the happiness he deserves.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop

Book #167 of 2024:

The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop

I knew vaguely that actress Kelly Bishop — most iconic to my generation as the matriarch Emily on the show Gilmore Girls — had been one of the original cast members of the Broadway musical A Chorus Line when she was younger. What I hadn’t realized until reading this memoir is that the play itself was based on the actual experiences of Bishop and the rest of the company as dancers struggling to break into acting, and that some of her character Sheila’s poignant lines about her unhappy home life were taken directly from what she had shared during the initial workshops that produced the script.

This title starts there, with the production that won the author a Tony Award and really launched her career, before backtracking to cover her childhood and early dance roles and then progressing to the success on television that followed. It’s a fascinating story that captures the era and the showbusiness industry well, and while Gilmore Girls is far from the only topic, the chapters devoted to that program make plain just how much the writer loved it and everyone who worked there with her. She demonstrates sharp insight into her own character — whose relationship with Lauren Graham’s Lorelai she says was similar to that between her grandmother and mother — and the greater series at large, which she watched religiously even in those weeks when she didn’t appear. (She’s Team Logan, of course, as indeed all discerning fans should be.)

Amid the fond memories, she also discusses the pain of losing her longtime scene partner Edward Herrmann to cancer, along with her own husband and mother. Here and elsewhere in the text, she is frank and unapologetic about her emotions and her perspectives, addressing her sex life, her failed first marriage, health scares, an abortion, and her lifelong commitment to avoid having children all in the same matter-of-fact tone with which she reflects on old auditions or anything else. It’s a refreshing honesty from someone who at 80 has lived a long and satisfying life, and although I may have rolled my eyes at the occasional intrusion of woo-woo mysticism about the universe opening up a path for her and messages from beyond the grave, it’s hard to argue that she hasn’t earned the right to her little eccentricities.

[Content warning for drug abuse and domestic abuse.]

★★★★☆