The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Second Sight by Chris Archer

Book #106 of 2024:

Second Sight by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #4)

This fourth Mindwarp novel follows the same general structure as the first three: another kid in this fictional Wisconsin town turns thirteen, discovers they have special powers, and then quickly has to use them to avoid falling into the clutches of a shapeshifting alien hunter. For our latest protagonist, her new superhuman skillset involves a variety of psychic phenomena, from premonitions of impending danger / pop quizzes to astral projection and the ability to telepathically speak her thoughts.

The problem is, it’s a bit unfocused as a story for the majority of the text. Characters pop up for a scene or two and then disappear again, introducing conflicts with Elena’s mother and a few school bullies that never get resolved. Instead she mostly just has a vision and is shocked to see it come true, repeated several times. Finally about two-thirds of the way through she meets up with the teens from the previous books, who fill her in on the stakes of the threat against them just in time.

It’s a familiar enough schtick by now, and at this point in the series, I really need more forward momentum on whatever the larger narrative is supposed to be instead of these roughly identical plot beats and vague X-Files conspiracy chatter. The ending at least strikes a different tone that I hope the remaining sequels continue to explore, but overall this feels pretty weak even by the standards of other 90s middle-grade sci-fi.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Book #105 of 2024:

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

While not quite as strong as author Gabrielle Zevin’s recent bestseller Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, this 2014 title is the first of the three books I’ve now read from her backlist that clearly demonstrates her creative talents growing in that direction. Plotwise, it’s A Man Called Ove by way of Silas Marner, wherein a misanthropic widow learns to open himself up to life and joy again after he adopts a young child someone has left abandoned in his bookshop. That story unfolds over the next couple decades, tracing his new daughter’s unusual childhood living above the store with the protagonist, along with his own slow reengagement with their fictional New England island community.

There are some occasional missteps here and there. The start of the bookseller’s romance with a friendly publishing agent feels a bit abrupt, one of several elements that get shortchanged by the reliance on steady time-skips by the advancing narrative. And when two-year-old Maya first arrives, the characters all hilariously refer to her as a baby and worry about things like teething that a toddler of that age would almost certainly be well past. (I wonder if maybe Zevin and her editors hadn’t had much experience with kids before, although the later discrepancies that caught my eye as a parent can largely be explained away by the girl’s general precociousness.)

But the novel overall is charming without ever tipping over into cloying, at least for me personally as a reader, and I’ll admit to enjoying the cast of book-lovers despite objectively recognizing that as a fairly obvious piece of pandering to the literary crowd. A few small mysteries are easy to guess but not really the point of the work, and even the tearjerker ending hasn’t made my eyes roll too much. Ultimately I suspect this is a volume that most people will either love or hate, and though I’d like to be more cynical about it, I can’t help that I’m closer to the former camp in my own reaction. I give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for racism and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Teckla by Steven Brust

Book #104 of 2024:

Teckla by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #3)

Another crisis with antihero Vladimir Taltos, sorcerer-assassin and crime boss of his local fantasy city. This third adventure takes place soon after book one (the second volume being a prequel), and offers probably the most straightforward plot yet: the protagonist’s wife has gotten involved with a circle of protesters agitating for better conditions for their minority group and other marginalized peoples in the empire, and since one of their members was just killed by a rival in Vlad’s criminal organization, he’d like to shut the whole thing down or at least extract Cawti from the middle of it. But when his meddling serves only to make everyone mad at him, he has to scramble to find a way to both save his crumbling marriage and get the new target off his back.

A lot of this novel is pretty preachy, even for a reader whose politics are broadly aligned with those of the Teckla (and presumably author Steven Brust), and it’s early enough in the series that the specifics fall a little flat outside the context of any real-world analogues. I suppose it’s interesting to position the lead character as fairly ambivalent to the social movement happening around him and to not really shift that stance by the story’s end, but it’s a creative choice that tends to flatten him on the page. I also rolled my eyes at the scene where he finally has his enemy at his mercy and is begged by an onlooker not to slay the man… despite having just fatally torn through his bodyguards without similar complaint and still being fundamentally, you know, a hired murderer. We’ve seen Vlad kill before and we’ll see him kill again, no matter his grandfather’s ongoing sad objections to that profession. It feels strange to have him spare this particular victim without any obvious change of heart, although it does set up a fun cynical ending wherein the assassin buys out his competitor’s stake in the slums so that he can improve matters marginally enough to stem the riots before the imperial forces need to step in.

Nothing about this is particularly exceptional, but it’s a solid slice of genre entertainment, overall.

[Content warning for torture, domestic abuse, sexism, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

Book #103 of 2024:

The Way of Kings Prime: A Sanderson Curiosity by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

This is not The Way of Kings, the debut novel in the series The Stormlight Archive that author Brandon Sanderson published in 2010. It’s rather his initial attempt at telling a story in that world, originally written back in 2002 and later released independently for interested fans. Knowing that but little else, I put off this read for a long while and ultimately went into it expecting to find a basic rough draft of the finished version. Yet this is instead a totally separate beast, with a few similar elements of setting and characters in entirely different circumstances and plot. It’s like an alternate universe in a way — not canonical to the official books, and seemingly disconnected from anything in the writer’s broader Cosmere continuity, which wasn’t really a fleshed-out concept yet at the time of writing.

I feel like there are a few potential ways to approach and assess this title. By the standards of the eventual ‘real’ Way of Kings, it’s understandably a bit of a letdown and the product of a less-honed creative talent. The worldbuilding in particular feels noticeably unfinished by comparison: there are highstorms but no spren, an order like the Knights Radiant but no required oaths to join it, and so on. We don’t get as many fun cultural flourishes either, resulting in the whole exercise seeming more like a generic fantasy construct than anything quintessentially Sandersonian. The protagonists suffer when measured against their ultimate polished analogues too — especially the women, and especially Jasnah’s romance with the Herald Taln, which doesn’t quite ring true for either figure.

On the other hand, this is actually a pretty good story by the standards of the genre at large, and it’s less reliant on certain overused tropes than the author’s similarly unpublished early work Dragonsteel Prime. Divorced from the expectations of its superior future iteration, it’s a solid tale of political intrigues and military campaigning, with compelling heroes and a despicable villain or two. My biggest critique of the volume on its own terms is that although some matters do come to a satisfying conclusion, the ending is rather abrupt and leaves a lot of issues unresolved. It reads like the intended opening arc of a grand unfolding narrative, with clear setup for sequels that will now never come to pass, which is a little frustrating after spending 800 pages with the thing (or 37 hours on audiobook at regular speed, if you prefer).

The most incredible aspect here is probably that Sanderson finished penning such a massive tome, realized it wasn’t working out as well as it could, and then started all over again from scratch, eventually producing something both stronger and somehow even longer as the first of a planned ten-book series that is itself just a subsection of the larger Cosmere saga. The amount of work behind such a project is fairly staggering to think about, and The Way of Kings Prime is an important step on the way there. It’s worth checking out, despite not living up to the real deal.

[Content warning for ableism, torture, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard

Book #102 of 2024:

Bee Sting Cake by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #2)

I’m still not loving the Greenwing & Dart sub-series nearly as much as the other books I’ve read in author Victoria Goddard’s broader Nine Worlds saga, but this second volume is a marked improvement over the first. Taking place only a few days later, it feels far more settled in its tone and its particular corner of this fictional universe, and it benefits tremendously by not having to rehash those details for the audience (who in consequence would unfortunately be lost if they skipped the weaker novel and started here, I’m afraid). It also introduces a fun new addition to the cast in the form of the protagonist’s visiting school friend Hal, although the fact that he’s actually an incognito duke, in the same adventure where Jemis learns that he’s inherited a noble title of his own through his reclusive grandmother, is perhaps a bit much. Generally I prefer to read about people triumphing over difficult straits by means of their wits and their inner resolve rather than simple birthright and others’ fawning reaction to it, and this piece sometimes blurs that line more than I would like.

The plot remains fairly low-stakes and cozy; while there are death cults and hired thugs and a riddle-asking dragon flitting around on the periphery of the tale, the heroes largely shrug them off to process lingering hurts from their respective backstories and discuss plans for the upcoming community fair and its associated baking contest. It’s all Regency-pastiche fantasy of manners, and it’s neat as always to spot references and connections to the writer’s work across this shared continuity. But I do hope this specific branch continues to improve throughout the remaining volumes ahead. For now, it’s landing fine as a pleasant diversion with some charming extensions to the underlying series worldbuilding, but is rarely delivering anything wholly compelling on either a character or a story level.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia

Book #101 of 2024:

Jewish Noir edited by Kenneth Wishnia

A quintessential mixed-bag anthology. There are some legitimately great short stories in here, and if I assigned a rating to each of the 33 entries and took their average, I suspect I would wind up at a mean value of three-out-of-five-stars or so. At their best, the tales in this 2015 collection hit the vibe of something like Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, telling dark and complex hardboiled plots in a richly #ownvoices Jewish social world and/or with recognizably Jewish characters relying on elements of their ethnoreligious background to navigate difficult circumstances. “Nakhshon” by Robert Lopresti, “Your Judaism” by Tasha Kaminsky, and “Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die” by Charles Ardai are to be particularly praised on that front, and I think editor Kenneth Wishnia makes a strong point in his introduction when he notes how traditional noir genre themes of alienation and fatalism are issues that are often wrestled with in modern (post-Holocaust) Jewish thought as well. So there’s a bit of a natural overlap between those two traditions, which proves to be a productive storytelling font for many of the authors featured herein.

My problem as a reader is that the book is not merely uneven, with a mix of better offerings and worse ones throughout. It’s also disastrously lopsided, with most of the worst offenders stacked near the start: stories that are so poorly-written, disjointed, mean-spirited, and frankly racist that I almost quit the venture less than a dozen titles into it. Luckily I instead flipped ahead, whereupon a few randomly-selected pieces of higher quality reassured me that I should probably go back and read the rest of the way through. But that experience shades my general feelings on this volume, especially when I consider how I’m rather directly in its target audience as both a lover of crime thrillers and a Jew. If I had such a hard time getting into this collection regardless, I imagine others will struggle with it even more. I’m likewise unconvinced that every story in these pages necessarily deserves to be categorized as both noir and more than passingly Jewish, which again dampens my appreciation for the enterprise as a whole.

Still, I’m glad that I did push on and finish everything. It’s introduced me to a lot of new contemporary writers I might choose to read more from, alongside some cool older stuff like an obscure Harlan Ellison reprint (“Final Shtick”) and a hundred-year-old feature from a Yiddish newspaper that had never been translated into English before (“A Simkhe” by Yente Serdatsky). But overall, I’d have to say that it’s a pretty flawed endeavor.

[Content warning for antisemitism, sexism, homophobia, racial slurs, drug abuse / overdose, gun violence, domestic abuse, violence against animals, bullying, lynching, Nazi medical experimentation and concentration camps, torture, pedophilia, suicide, rape, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Acolyte, season 1

TV #32 of 2024:

The Acolyte, season 1

Despite a few unfortunate structural flaws, this is easily in the top tier of live-action Star Wars shows — which is to say, a step below Andor but about on par with the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, while far more confident and engaging than The Book of Boba Fett, Mando season 3, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Ahsoka. Set roughly a hundred years before The Phantom Menace in the time of the so-called High Republic (an era that’s been explored in licensed canonical novels but never before on-screen), it tells the story of a group of Jedi who get targeted by a Dark Side assassin, with the gradual reveal that the situation is more complicated and ethically murky than it initially appears.

That’s one of the primary strengths of the series for me, painting the Jedi Knights in as unflattering a light as we’ve ever seen them. The Jedi of the prequels / Clone Wars era were complacent and ineffectual, but they were still broadly the force for justice that we’d expect from how Obi-Wan and Yoda represent their fallen Order in the original film trilogy. Here, they are more like space cops operating as an iron hand in a velvet glove, and we get to see them from an outside perspective as they go about recruiting a young girl by spying on her, breaking into her home, and separating her from her family to lay on the sales pressure. It’s in some ways a logical extension of what we’ve been told about Jedi recruitment practices in the past, but it’s so much more damning when it’s not the noble Qui-Gon rescuing Jake Lloyd from child slavery.

Yet even that encounter gets revisited Rashomon-like to explore from a different angle, adding up to a more rounded impression for the audience as the season unfolds and certain figures who first seem either wholly good or evil gradually come to reverse those positions and meet somewhere in the middle. By the end, there are no clear-cut villains or heroes here. Instead it’s almost a classic tragedy, where well-meaning people on both sides of a divide make understandable choices that nonetheless manage to destroy a tenuous peace. If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you probably know that I absolutely eat that thematic stuff up.

Sadly, the plot mechanics to get to that point are occasionally pretty strained. Several characters act without legible motivations, especially looking backward in the light of subsequent reveals. The overall narrative feels like it was constructed with an eye towards the impact of those twists in the moment, and so isn’t totally satisfying once the bigger picture is available in hindsight. There are also a few questions that are left oddly open, like the issue of why Osha abandoned her initial padawan training, and the general storyline is hampered by the decision to spend two full episodes — of only eight total! — in extended flashback. That sort of indulgence wouldn’t be such a problem with a greater ultimate runtime, but it’s too ambitious to entirely succeed in the limited space provided here. The finale likewise offers a reasonable enough conclusion to most of the immediate problems, but it’s far too ambiguous given how the program has yet to be greenlit for any additional seasons that might pick up the thread.

On the bright side: the acting is incredible and from a notably diverse cast, the stakes loom deadlier for the protagonists than they have in this franchise since perhaps Rogue One, and there’s a Dark Side seduction arc that, although shortchanged as everything else, nevertheless registers as a more effective redo of the Kylo-Rey enemies-to-lovers dynamic. Plus the show is populated with all sorts of charming nods to the wider canon, from the existence of the lightsaber-blocking cortosis metal to the Trade Federation already chafing against Jedi interference in their affairs. And of course, the fight scenes are top-notch — arguably the finest we’ve ever had in Star Wars, with an obvious Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon influence that helps distinguish this period setting from the familiar later ones. All in all it’s a remarkable relaunch for the science-fantasy saga, and I’ll be irritated if the chances for renewal are scratched over the review-bombing from reactionaries who think white men alone should get to save that galaxy far, far away.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Murdle: Volume 1 by G. T. Karber

Book #100 of 2024:

Murdle: Volume 1 by G. T. Karber

I wouldn’t ordinarily rate and review a puzzle book like this, but this one is special enough that it seems worthwhile to highlight its unexpected strengths. It’s not just a collection of those logic puzzles that are solved with the conventional square grids — there’s also a loose ongoing storyline linking all 100 murder mysteries together, with recurring characters and plot twists and everything. The text is riddled with loving Agatha Christie riffs and punny names like Earl Grey or Sir Rulean, not to mention impressively queer-normative throughout: a same-sex romantic interest for the hero, plenty of women in traditionally male roles like bishop, and multiple non-binary suspects with they/them pronouns. The result is far richer than an ephemeral one-time-use product like this could have been, so major kudos are due to author G. T. Karber there.

It’s a gorgeous production too, elegantly arranged with symbols for every suspect, location, weapon, and (in the more challenging entries) motive that must be deduced via the available clues. The tasks get harder as the work goes on, such as the eventual inclusion of witness statements that aren’t necessarily the truth, as the unknown murderer in each whodunnit is always a liar. That element adds a neat extra layer of logic to the affair that I don’t recall ever encountering elsewhere.

It’s a pretty lightweight read — no gore, despite all the death — and my five-year-old had a lot of fun acting as my assistant, reading out the clues and flipping back to the character descriptions to remind me who was left-handed, or brown-haired, or a Capricorn, or whatever. I don’t think I’ll be diving straight into Murdle: Volume 2 myself, but I’ll probably get to it at some point and I’ve already preordered the forthcoming Murdle Jr. as a holiday gift for her.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Book #99 of 2024:

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Interesting yet somewhat rambling, though short enough overall that that discursiveness doesn’t bother me too much. I’ve never read any Salman Rushdie before, but I was attracted to this title by the story behind it, which I saw the author describe on The Daily Show earlier this year. After being famously targeted with an extremist fatwā execution order for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, he lived with that target on his back for decades before a young man stormed the stage at a lecture he was giving in 2022 and stabbed him repeatedly in the face, neck, and chest. While the initial prognosis was dire, the writer did ultimately pull through in surgery, albeit with a loss of vision in one eye and other medical difficulties that continue to afflict him.

Rushdie discusses all of that here, alongside a digression into how he met his latest wife and a few similarly off-topic matters. He chose not to ever confront his attacker, or to even name him in this work, but in one extended section of the text, he relates an imaginary conversation that the two men might have had if he did decide to meet with him in prison after the assault. (The would-be assassin was apprehended at the scene, although he later pled not-guilty and is currently awaiting trial.) It’s more than a little smugly self-indulgent, but understandably so, given the circumstances.

I wouldn’t say that this volume has made me any more or less likely to seek out the author’s fiction, but it’s at least a distinctive mini-memoir of an experience that few people could share. He mentions several times that it’s not the book he wanted to write next, but that he felt like he had to in order to clear his mind and move past the trauma — which is totally fair from his own perspective, yet doesn’t exactly translate to an overwhelming case for readership on our end.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Ruby Red by Georgia Cook

Book #98 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Ruby Red by Georgia Cook

A fine but ultimately forgettable Doctor Who adventure. I had high hopes for this project as the first novel to feature Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, but there really isn’t much here that feels distinctive to his particular incarnation of that regenerating alien hero (like his queerness or his Blackness, for example). The title, which seems to suggest we’ll at least be getting a personal angle for the Time Lord’s current companion, is likewise instead a misnomer that actually stems from the glowing red eyes of anyone possessed by the one-off villain. There are a few minor references to plot arcs from the recent season of the television show, like the TARDIS groaning unnaturally and snow appearing near Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday, but overall it’s a pretty generic outing for the franchise.

That’s a bit of a letdown, but since the book came out before the final two episodes, I’d imagine that the BBC editorial team had strict limitations for what early readers could potentially glean from its pages. Hopefully future releases get to have a little more fun with how they play around in the TV continuity, as I know author Georgia Cook has been able to do with some of her work for the licensed Big Finish audio dramas. This one doesn’t even establish roughly when it takes place for its pair of time-traveling protagonists.

As for the immediate premise, the Doctor and Ruby answer a distress call that leads them to 13th-century Estonia a few days before the historical ‘Battle on the Ice’ near Lake Peipus. There the teenage daughter of an interstellar mercenary clan has been left to prove her worth in combat, even though she’d personally rather tinker with her inventions and leave off fighting altogether. That’s a neat concept that could have fueled a compelling quiet character study, but that hope’s dashed by the reveal that her family’s ancient enemy has tracked her to Earth and is now sending out parasites to infest and conquer the world, which of course the Doctor must help the reluctant young warrior to foil. Yawn.

I mean, look — this isn’t a bad science-fiction story by any means (although Gibson narrating the audiobook delivers a fairly atrocious impression of her costar). But it’s very Doctor Who by-the-numbers, when I’m always more interested in titles for this series that manage to flex and push the boundaries of what it can do.

★★★☆☆