The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance

Book #9 of 2026:

A Spell to Wake the Dead by Nicole Lesperance

This novel has a neat beginning that it then proceeds to squander, becoming one of those stories where I can viscerally feel my rating for it dropping as I continue to read along. The initial premise involves a trio of queer and witchy Cape Cod teens, one of whom is nurturing a new crush on another that she isn’t sure is mutual, stumbling across a corpse on the beach as they perform a spell under the moonlight ‘to uncover hidden things.’ To my mind, that introduces three basic plot elements of decreasing appeal: the interpersonal dynamic among the friends, the mystery behind the dead woman, and the potential reality of their magic. Unfortunately, those wind up of increasing prominence respectively throughout the text.

Still, I could handle a tale of witchcraft being real and high school goths getting in over their heads with it. What I can’t fathom is how blasé everyone is towards that revelation here. Skeptics have their worldviews rocked without batting an eye, which fits a broader pattern within the book of character motives and actions displaying no apparent justification upon reflection.

To pick but one example, the protagonists discover that a local secret society consists of members who fake their own deaths to sever ties with their former lives. Why is it important for them to do that? What are they aiming to achieve, beyond nebulous mystical power? What do they even do all day, living in the same general area with no more legal documentation? Unclear! The narrative is fundamentally uninterested in answering logistical questions like that, resulting in many, many plot holes by the end. One girl is messaging with an anonymous person online who seems to know a lot about her situation, and we just… never learn who that is besides someone in the cult. And so on.

“There are still so many pieces of this ritual—of this entire unhinged week—that make no sense,” reflects the narrator in one of the final chapters, and I am sadly forced to agree with her. With that steadfast refusal to ever provide clarity on such matters, what could have been a tender romance and coming-of-age saga in a distinctive setting with fun spooky vibes turns instead into a tedious exercise in trying the reader’s patience.

[Content warning for amputation.]

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, season 1

TV #2 of 2026:

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, season 1

The show The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles originally aired from 1992 to 1996, with Corey Carrier playing the future archaeologist from age 8–10 and Sean Patrick Flanery performing the role for ages 16–21. In 1999, these episodes were then combined with new bridge material and unused older clips and reissued as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, which consisted of 22 ninety-minute ‘movies,’ some more obviously cohesive than others. That’s the format that’s both easiest to access today and the most complete, albeit at the loss of the bookend scenes with George Hall as an elderly Jones reminiscing about his past. (I did briefly consider reviewing them all as separate films, but I think I would go insane. And in the final analysis, they do function more as a TV series than as a sequence of discrete pictures.)

I haven’t seen the original Chronicles, but from what I can tell, the re-edit was a good choice. Although the transition from the first half of a story to the second is sometimes a little awkward, the Adventures version reorganizes the narrative into a chronological one, rather than bouncing back and forth between Carrier and Flanery or around the latter’s own timeline from week to week. This has the effect of dispensing with the weaker childhood plots sooner, after just five episodes, as well as emphasizing the serialized elements that get a viewer more invested in the character’s ongoing journey.

It remains a bit of a strange series — one that I almost like more as the tale of a random young man of the era and not the junior iteration of the part originated by Harrison Ford (who does pop in for a brief appearance near the end, along with the only inclusion of the familiar John Williams soundtrack). This whole enterprise was clearly inspired by the prologue with River Phoenix as a 14-year-old Indy in The Last Crusade, and yet it rarely feels as though it’s setting up the adult hero as neatly as that short flashback did. Teenage Indiana has the iconic hat now, but he doesn’t use the whip or engage in much treasure-hunting. Instead he runs off to join the Belgian army — under the assumed name of Henri Defense for some reason — to fight in World War I, which ends up occupying the majority of the runtime. In consequence the Germans are often the de facto antagonists, and in my opinion that muddies the evil of the Nazis from the big-screen adventures. Our protagonist should oppose them for their ideology, not just because his country is at war with theirs! At least he’s still given the opportunity to stand up against bigotry at times, especially after finally returning stateside.

The writers also have the character meet a staggering number of real historical figures, from Teddy Roosevelt to Ho Chi Minh, with several like T. E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway recurring throughout the program and Edith Wharton and Mata Hari each serving as a passing love interest (the adolescent Jones being apparently quite the inveterate womanizer). This is again a pretty significant change from the films, in which the adventurer only ever momentarily brushed up against Hitler! And in yet another divergence, the supernatural is limited to an eerie encounter with a gentleman who might be an immortal Vlad the Impaler, whereas Ford dealt with such mystical powers on every single occasion.

In short, there’s simply not a lot here that directly speaks to its own source material, although the hero’s frosty relationship with his academic father translates well, with Lloyd Owen doing a capable rendition of a young Sean Connery. The last few installments after the war help to narrow the gap too, even functioning as backstory for the gem from the beginning of Temple of Doom. (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would later link back to the show in turn, mentioning a connection to Pancho Villa that we see firsthand here.) On the other hand, characters that would logically fit into a prequel are utterly missing — there’s no Sallah, or Belloq, or Marion, or anyone else that the title figure canonically knows before the start of his movie experiences.

And yet, taken on its own terms, I can’t deny that this series is a lot of fun. I like seeing the wartime espionage scrapes that ‘Defense’ gets himself into, and I enjoy the educational aspect surrounding the various celebrities and their settings. The history isn’t always entirely accurate, particularly where it has to bend to accommodate the fictional Jones, but it’s all roughly true, and it reminds me of the pure historical serials that classic Doctor Who used to produce, with nary an alien invader in sight. (We even have a couple Doctors here: Colin Baker and Jon Pertwee both show up, among other notables and early-career actors that are neat to spot.) The serialization is more of a factor than was common in a production of this time too, and the scripts don’t shy away from heavy subjects like Paul Robeson facing racial slurs or Indy’s Irish republican friends getting gunned down in front of him by the British.

I assumed as I watched that I would ultimately give this program a 3-star rating, but the closing stories up through Indy entering college to study archaeology improve to a degree that I’m left feeling charitable towards it overall (ignoring the two subsequent summer excursions into showbusiness, which are more farcical and again not especially Indiana Jones). It’s deeply uneven and not at all what we’d expect from a modern franchise project, but it has enough charms for me to land on a 3.5, rounded up.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

Book #8 of 2026:

The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

This 2025 novel has been promoted as author Louis Sachar’s first story for grown-ups, but I feel as though it only earns that designation via the adult narrator and the slightly higher page count. The tone isn’t noticeably different from his previous offerings, and the fifteen- and seventeen-year-old characters who are supposed to be in love read more like his usual young adolescents. While the plot touches on a few mature themes like marital rape or drug addiction, I wouldn’t say it’s any darker in its depictions of such matters than something like Holes.

My bigger issue is with the protagonist himself, however. He’s introduced to us as an ancient alchemist reflecting back on the sixteenth century, but he doesn’t gain that immortality until the very end of the tale, at which point he has to quickly summarize the next five hundred years of his life. He also apparently doesn’t have any friends in the flashback timeline besides the aforementioned teens, which is a bit strange for a man in his forties, and although he’s nominally trying to help them escape their awful fates — the princess ordered to marry someone horrid and the apprentice scribe sentenced to death for loving her — his method for the first half of the book is to simply try perfecting a potion to make them permanently forget one another. That’s an incredibly bizarre goal for a hero to focus on, and it definitely keeps me from investing in the situation as fully as I otherwise might have.

They do all eventually flee the castle together, but by then the targeted amnesia elixir has worked, so the boy and girl don’t remember any of their personal history with one another. In theory I guess the idea here is that they fall for each other all over again, but they’re promptly rushed off the page as soon as that really starts happening, so who knows? To repeat: odd writing choice!

Despite those flaws, I do think the title is more forgivable if approached as another middle-grade volume instead of how the publisher has been marketing it. But I can’t honestly say that I’ve enjoyed the reading experience myself.

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Movie #2 of 2026:

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

As a movie, The Matrix (1999) is perfectly standalone. As a box office hit and a genuine cultural phenomenon, however, it was probably always going to launch a franchise, and this first sequel is a pretty solid follow-up. It’s messy and overstuffed by comparison, even ignoring the cliffhanger ending, but it makes some smart writing choices and is overall a lot of fun. Let’s dive in!

The first thing I appreciate about this chapter of the saga is that it starts in media res, after a time jump from the last one. We haven’t skipped far ahead, but it’s enough that we don’t need to see Neo’s wide-eyed introduction to the city of Zion or the evolution of his relationship with Trinity or anything. Instead we’re simply put down in the new status quo, with the plot picking up from there. That pair’s dynamic is also a major improvement; my biggest critique of the previous film is that her declaration of love comes out of nowhere and reads like the trope of the guy getting the girl basically by default. Now a few months later, they’re opening up emotionally and can’t keep their hands off of each other in private — a much more believable love story that raises the personal stakes considerably.

That degree of sensuality marks another welcome change, as The Matrix, for all its strengths, is a largely sexless movie. Cypher looms in an aggressive manner over Trinity’s helpless body, and the men of the Nebuchadnezzar crew talk crudely about women in general, but there’s no real sense of physical intimacy anywhere. This time, our heroes get to tenderly embrace, looking almost identically androgynous in how the camera frames their entwined limbs. As if to emphasize this fluidity of form, the scene cuts back and forth between the couple’s love-making and images of people writhing together in an indiscriminately-gendered crowd at the nearby underground rave. If that’s not a queer statement of purpose (and an early indicator of the Wachowskis’ interests on their show Sense8), it’s at least as near as one could imagine in a 2003 blockbuster. The characters subsequently meet the married programs of the Merovingian and Persephone, who are likewise obsessed with human sexuality and touch, while the rogue Smith seems overwhelmed by the senses of his stolen host outside. In short, it’s a work that grounds its embodied feelings, especially as a shorthand for what divides us from the machines.

But back to the plot. This entry significantly widens the worldbuilding, beginning with showing us other ships and a hierarchy of power in Zion that Morpheus must nominally report to. The detail that not everyone believes in the prophecy of the One like he does is a neat development, particularly as background for the emerging threat: humanity’s enemies are burrowing down to destroy the free city, with a projected arrival mere hours away. There’s thus an instant conflict between those who want every ally to stay and fight the incoming force of sentinel drones, no matter how outnumbered, and those who think Neo and his team can somehow save the day inside the Matrix.

From there, the story gets a little complicated. Our savior protagonist is trying to find the Oracle, who tells him he needs to rescue the Keymaker from the Merovingian in order to be able to fulfill his destiny by accessing the Source, and that’s just a lot of important-sounding titles disguising an elaborate fetch quest. We’re drowning in competing factions here, and it’s not always clear who’s working together or why. (Do the agents know that Neo has to reach the Architect for the Matrix to survive? Is Smith’s deviation an anticipated part of the plan or an independent element changing the calculus? Etc.) There’s also an impression sometimes that we’re missing key elements, perhaps because sections of the script were indeed siphoned off to supplemental media like the video game Enter the Matrix or the cartoon compilation The Animatrix, which both came out around this time. I’m a fan of extended universes of continuity in general, but the cardinal rule should be that the primary piece stands fine on its own, and I’m not sure that’s entirely achieved here. Yet even with those omissions, the narrative feels overly busy, leaving certain reveals like the existence of werewolves or the idea that the Matrix has been secretly reset (and Zion destroyed) five times already without the necessary room to breathe.

Luckily the action sequences are spectacular enough to help mitigate such concerns. Everything is bigger now: the martial arts fights are more complex, the car chase setpiece on the highway is a true standout, and there are several brawls against an absurd number of Smiths, who’s survived his apparent death and learned how to replicate himself. (He’ll have more to do in the next film, but recognizing that the energy Hugo Weaving brought to the antagonist role was a vital contribution to the first movie’s success and finding a way for the series to retain him reflects another great instinct from the creators). If I have a complaint here, it’s that the new ‘virtual camera’ technology is not as seamlessly integrated as I would like; there are multiple shots throughout that look distractingly like smoothly rendered gaming graphics, which wasn’t really ever the case before.

In the end it’s not as coherent a production as its predecessor, and I don’t love the unresolved arcs that stem from filming this title and the next one back-to-back as a two-part story. But it’s still an entertaining installment that expands the Matrix mythos nicely, and for that I give it four-out-of-five stars.

[Content warning for gun violence, self-harm, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Book #7 of 2026:

A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

A darkly-ironic case, not always written about very well in this particular book. The town in question is Grafton, NH (population 1,385 in the latest census), which we’re told was already somewhat libertarian-leaning even before an organized movement from out-of-state convinced people to move there in 2004 and steer the politics further in that direction. Several hundred newcomers, predominantly men, came to the area and began voting for immediate reductions in pretty much every government service in pursuit of their Ayn Rand-style utopia. They talked a big game about freedom as they dismantled the social safety net and other matters of the public good, insisting that private enterprise would soon step in with more efficient alternatives.

Needless to say, it did not. It turns out that slashing the fire department’s budget, for example, does not actually lead to fewer incidents or better outcomes in that domain, particularly when accompanied by an increase in the attitude that laws regulating outdoor burns are an unconscionable infringement on a person’s liberty. Potholes likewise went unfilled, schools and libraries were given fewer resources, crime reports rose, and the number of violent run-ins with the local black bear population surged.

You see, certain townspeople were exercising their claimed sovereignty over their personal property lines by refusing to abide by the regulations to use bear-resistant food and garbage containers. Others were blithely putting out meals for the animals specifically, which for some reason the busybodies in the state Fish and Game Department didn’t want to allow. In consequence the wild beasts encroached further and further into areas of human settlement, to predictably disastrous result. It would be funny, if not for how many innocent victims among both species ended up hurt or killed before the ‘Free Town Project’ was eventually disbanded in 2016.

It’s a fascinating story, but author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is not the best messenger for it, despite his valuable on-the-ground reporting. He can tell us how he was repeatedly threatened by gun-toting residents for asking too many questions, but his writing struggles to remain on point and he sometimes speculates wildly, like when he proposes without evidence that locals might have parasites driving their reckless behaviors. He also starts each of his short chapters with a random quote about bears, most of which have no connection to anything else about his subject. (“He is an atrocity that carries its own punishment along with it–a bear that gnaws himself” from a Charles Dickens novel, for instance). One or two of these would have served fine as cute epigraphs for the entire work, but placing them every few pages is just too much. Thus, while I’ve enjoyed the righteous skewering of the libertarian ethos here, I can’t help thinking that someone with a stronger command of nonfiction narrative could have done a lot more with the material.

[Content warning for suicide and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Rise of Neptune by Scott Reintgen

Book #6 of 2026:

The Rise of Neptune by Scott Reintgen (The Dragonships #2)

The first volume in this middle-grade sci-fi series about dragons in outer space didn’t blow me away, but it was promising enough that I decided to check out this sequel to see how the cliffhanger resolved. And I guess I’m reasonably satisfied on that front, although overall this entry is heavier on the action and lighter on the character dynamics than I would ideally prefer. Unlike in the last book, the plot never seems to seriously challenge the teenage hero beyond his having to figure out military campaign tactics, which isn’t the most interesting way to spend a novel. I also miss how the friendship bonds and a sense of the daily struggle for life on Mars provided some nice background texture to the story before.

Two-and-a-half stars rounded up, in recognition that I am not the target audience here, but I don’t intend to read any further in the saga at this point.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Powersat by Ben Bova

Book #5 of 2026:

Powersat by Ben Bova

From 1985 through his death in 2020, author Ben Bova wrote around 30 interconnected novels in a loose sci-fi series he eventually called his Grand Tour. (It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an exact count there, since this was seldom used as a marketing term and there are some entries with a more tangential connection to the continuity than others. His estate has also continued to publish volumes posthumously from his notes.) I read several of these stories when I was a teen, although I don’t think I ever got to this one, which came out in 2005 but is chronologically the earliest in the setting.

It’s a political thriller of the near-future, roughly analogous to the works of an airport / dad-lit writer like Michael Crichton. Our protagonist is a brilliant tech CEO named Dan Randolph, who has created a geostationary satellite that can collect power directly from the sun and beam it back to Earth at low cost. That would obviously revolutionize the energy industry, which is why a shadowy group of his competitors is trying to sabotage the project by any means necessary. In addition to navigating the resulting corporate espionage and terrorist attacks staged to look like equipment malfunctions, this character is also pining for his beautiful ex-girlfriend, who happens to be a United States senator.

Hopefully you already know from that description alone whether this is your flavor of pulp or not, but just to answer the obvious questions: yes, this is the sort of book where seemingly every woman is young, attractive, and interested in sleeping with the hero, and no, the Middle Eastern villains are not handled with particular nuance. I mean, the main antagonist risks his big scheme of turning the powersat into a weapon of mass destruction and targeting DC with a killer heat wave in order to drug and kidnap the executive’s secretary with the intent of later raping her, which is all really hard to justify under any kind of coherent motivation. I wouldn’t say it’s the worst product of its era, but it certainly hasn’t aged well in the decades since.

Still, this is a propulsive page-turner that sets the stage nicely for the tales of exploration and expansion ahead, as humanity builds off the technologies here to start visiting the rest of our solar system. I’m sure I’ll find some of those installments better and some worse as I progress through them, but this title successfully manages to launch it all with a bang.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Lux by James Goss

Book #4 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Lux by James Goss

Novelizations are obviously set up for success on the strength of the source material that they inherit, and so one of Ncuti Gatwa’s best outings as the Fifteenth Doctor on Doctor Who unsurprisingly makes for a pretty fun read. And yet that characterization risks shortchanging the great work that author James Goss has done here, not only capturing the entertaining spirit of the piece but also finding ways to present it in an interesting new light — pun intended — or otherwise deepen its themes. It’s a real testament to his abilities that such a visual adventure, in which a living cartoon terrorizes a movie theater and at one point traps the protagonists within a film strip, still feels so engaging on the page. Although not quite as creatively daring as his previous stint adapting The Giggle, this volume shares a playful approach that’s unafraid to put a different spin on an original Russell T. Davies script.

That attitude comes out the clearest in the scenes featuring the three Doctor Who fans, who get to meet their heroes when the Doctor and his companion Belinda Chandra seemingly break the fourth wall to climb out of their television set. It’s a mindbending metafictional gambit in either medium, but the writer opts to use it as an overall framing device, rather than a midway plot twist. If you’re reading this book ahead of watching the episode, you’ll discover the story more like those characters themselves do, right down to their discussing before the program starts how it’ll be novelized by the guy who did The Giggle.

Our heroine likewise gets rendered well here, so early in her travels through time. She’s still learning the ropes and somewhat skeptical of her new alien friend, and she’s particularly affronted by his apparent acceptance of the racism they encounter upon their arrival in 1950s Miami. As on TV, the Doctor explains, “I have toppled worlds. Sometimes I wait for people to topple their world,” which is a reasonable enough answer to a question the franchise has historically had to dance around. But in this version, he goes further to mention, “I have seen this come and I see it go. And then I see it come back again. Don’t think you’re better than history, babes. Your world is burning, so all those old hatreds are waking up. Everything that happens, happens again.” It’s a timely warning that jolts both her and us, and is exactly the sort of addition we wouldn’t get if Goss were penning a more straightforward adaptation.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig

Book #3 of 2026:

Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig (The Shepherd King #2)

I liked the first volume of this fantasy series enough to pick up this sequel, and I do think it concludes the overarching story reasonably well. Unfortunately it does this in sort of a weird way, jettisoning the parts I enjoyed both most and least about its predecessor! That novel centered around a young woman with an ancient evil secretly sharing space in her head, granting her advice and a share of his power in exchange for following his obscure instructions. She also had a bland love-at-first-sight romance with a member of the oppressive upper-class who would kill her for her hidden magical abilities, although it turns out he’s one of the good ones trying to bring down the system from the inside. I found the heroine’s Venom-like repartee with the Nightmare to be fun, while not caring as much for the rest of the plot outside them.

In this book, that being has taken over her body completely, relegating our former protagonist to a largely passive role witnessing his old memories. The creature instead gets to walk around and have interactions with the love interest, who mostly pines and complains as a result, while they continue to track down the various mystical maguffins. I’ve seen some readers praising the two men’s banter, but it doesn’t carry the same spark as when he was only a whisper in the mind, in my opinion.

Where this installment shines for me is in its unexpected development of a few side characters, who step up to fill the void left by our original lead. Their own love story is one I haven’t encountered before in the genre — she overused an artifact that enhanced her beauty at the cost of her ability to feel deep emotions, and though they’re attracted to each other, he doesn’t want to act on it until they can manage to break the curse and undo its effects, which she knows might end his attraction altogether. That’s an interesting conundrum that plays out nicely, and if this were a standalone piece focusing on just those tragic figures alone, I probably would give it a four-star rating. As is, it dovetails back with the other thread in order to resolve everything, which works out alright, I suppose. But on the whole, it’s another uneven effort.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, sexual assault, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1

Book Review: World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau

Book #2 of 2026:

World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau

The 1985 World Fantasy Convention, held that year in Tucson, AZ with a theme of “Writers of the Southwest,” produced this souvenir book to resemble an issue of the old pulp magazine Weird Tales. (Seriously, look it up; designer Donald D. Markstein did an amazing job imitating the classic appearance, with a new cover illustration and two full-page inserts provided by special guest artist Victoria Poyser.) It was a limited print run of just 1200 copies, but you can find them online today for a pretty reasonable price.

The guest of honor for the weekend was author Stephen R. Donaldson, who contributed one of three original stories to this volume. His effort, the Arabian Nights-inspired fable “The Djinn Who Watches Over the Accursed,” is by far the most confident and stylistically impressive, although it’s still not a favorite of mine — I rated it as three-out-of-five stars when I reviewed it as part of his later collection Reave the Just and Other Tales. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Such Nice Neighbors” is meanwhile fine but forgettable, while Evangeline Walton’s “The Forest That Would Not Be Cut Down” feels incomplete, as though excerpted from a larger work that would have better contextualized its characters and plot dilemmas.

Joining these pieces are a few nonfiction tributes, mostly for Donaldson himself. I would say those offer a nice treat for fans, but are obviously far from essential. And of course, the entire production stands as a time capsule of sorts, full of advertisements for recent and upcoming genre titles, most but not all of which have fallen entirely by the wayside over the following decades. I’ve personally read only Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman and Douglas Adams’s So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, though I recognize a few others like George R. R. Martin’s Night-Flyers and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood as well.

Overall it’s a neat find that I’m happy to have on my shelves, but I doubt I’ll ever open it again unless I need to look something up for whatever reason.

[Content warning for rape and gore.]

★★★☆☆