The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

Book #56 of 2024:

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

A rollicking debut novel from Nigerian author Wole Talabi, spinning a daring heist of the titular magical artifact from the high-security British Museum. The genre is urban fantasy noir by way of American Gods, where pantheons of deities from all world religions coexist and gain relative power based on the beliefs and prayers of their respective adherents. In the modern age, that’s led to a hardscrabble existence for some of the older and more obscure spirits like our hero, one of the original Yoruba orishas, who finds himself scraping by in a capitalistic drudgery not so unlike our own. When he partners up with a friendly succubus for a chance to flee that life, the two beings swiftly wind up over their heads and in debt to a powerful god, tasked with carrying out the raid to regain his lost treasure.

The actual mission isn’t too complex, but the book is fleshed out by the narrative hopping around in time a bit to provide the relevant backstory of the various players involved. (When the couple realizes they need the help of a mortal magician, for instance, a flashback depicts her meeting the real-life occultist Aleister Crowley, whose fictionalized self apparently used the demon woman’s powers to live on into the 21st century. Back in the present, she and Shigidi then go cash in that favor and recruit him to join the team.) The plot tropes are familiar but excellently rendered — I laughed in delight when the shady benefactor tells the protagonists they have to strike that very night, and even more so at the inevitable betrayal later on — with all the ludicrous joy of an episode of Leverage, just in a rather different sort of heightened reality.

It all resolves well enough in the end, and although this volume has been marketed as a standalone adventure, I’d say there’s definitely potential for a longer series here. Personally, I’d be happy to return for a sequel with these folks.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, fatphobia, racism, and rape.]

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Movie #2 of 2024:

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

2018’s surprise animated hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was always going to be a tough act to follow, and sure enough, this sequel suffers a bit by comparison while still being an above-average film in its own right. It’s funny! Just not quite as hilarious as the last one, which handled its share of gloomy topics with a lighter touch. It’s visually inventive! But perhaps not as thrillingly / impressively so as its predecessor, whose established comics-inspired patterns it largely mimics. It’s mind-bending in its storytelling and worldbuilding! Yet in a way that doesn’t hold up as much under logical scrutiny, unfortunately.

(There’s a lot of talk in the back half of this movie about certain “canon events” being necessary components of every spider-themed hero’s journey, with the death of a friendly police captain the one that understandably most upsets our returning protagonist Miles Morales, son of such a cop. But that’s a weirdly esoteric detail that doesn’t line up with any previous audience understanding of Spider-Man lore, nor does it make sense that seemingly every superhero in the multiverse besides him would be okay with sacrificing innocent lives to keep an abstract story on track. If the one antagonistic figure at the top were making that cold-hearted calculus, it would be a fine character note that could be interrogated and pushed back against. And I do like the idea that Miles wasn’t originally supposed to get his powers, and so is inherently something of a dangerous aberration. But to have everyone else go placidly along with the agenda of his dad’s upcoming demise simply doesn’t present a plot that’s believable or worth investing in. To say nothing of how that whole extended interlude at spider headquarters cuts away from the main villain right as he’s gained transcendent superpowers and declared his intention to ruin the boy’s life, a thread we never even return to before the cliffhanger drops and the credits roll.)

More successful is the dynamic between the teen and his friend Gwen, each now a year older and more plainly positioned as star-crossed love interests for one another. Framing the beginning of the movie from her perspective is a smart choice, as is the amount of time we spend lingering quietly with the two of them once they finally reconnect. The busiest parts of the later action-fest practically demand a repeat viewing or a quick deployment of the pause button to catch all the various easter eggs — Peter Parkedcar, etc. — but those obscure references yield diminishing returns and aren’t nearly as fun as the smaller cast from the first adventure, whose quirks were generally fleshed out beyond mere punchlines. Luckily the lower-scale personal stakes at the start and end of this one are exactly how I want a hero to be challenged, and ultimately leave me pretty excited for the final installment of the trilogy.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins

Book #55 of 2024:

Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins

A remarkable inside look at a complicated political figure: the 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who as a senator during the Trump presidency then became one of the few members of that party willing to publicly stand against the president’s erratic, abusive, and outright illegal behavior. This book is a biography of his career, but it’s one built on a near-unprecedented level of access to its high-profile subject, with journalist McKay Coppins conducting around 50 one-on-one interviews with the man from 2021 to 2023 and being granted more than a decade’s worth of private journals, emails, and text messages to consult. What emerges are Romney’s candid — if often gossipy — critiques of specific fellow politicians, his frustrations over how the GOP has abandoned certain traditional conservative positions he still sees as important, and his personal commitment to always act according to his moral / religious values.

His contradictions and hypocrisies are apparent in this account as well, including his role in Donald Trump’s rise by accepting the tycoon’s endorsement along with his birtherism conspiracies. As he bemoans the MAGA base’s vindictive animosity and racist xenophobia, he’s forced to struggle with the question of how much of that strain was already dominant on the right during his own White House bids, just better hidden under the veneer of fiscal conservatism. And for all his complaints about modern Republicans abandoning those Reagan-era principles in their lurch towards authoritarianism, his biographer makes plain how Mitt himself has flip-flopped and shifted his stances on various issues over the years — perhaps a necessary step for anyone hoping to get elected in states as different as Massachusetts and Utah, but hardly a track record that supports his claim to be an idealistic maverick unswayed by public opinion.

I don’t agree with Mitt Romney on much politically (though I now know we share an unexpected love of Brandon Sanderson‘s fantasy novels), and I remain proud to have voted against him to reelect Barack Obama. The author quotes him saying of Hillary Clinton in 2016 that she “is wrong on every issue… but she’s wrong within the normal parameters,” and that’s more or less how I view the guy in turn myself. But I appreciate the work he’s done to oppose his colleagues who have strayed so far beyond those parameters, and I think this title does a fine job of capturing the ethos that’s driven him to speak out, no matter the consequences.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 11

TV #12 of 2024:

Classic Doctor Who, season 11

A true end of an era for this show, but unfortunately not one that finds it at its best. The current star Jon Pertwee makes his exit here, of course, but behind the scenes, the influential producer Barry Letts and his script editor Terrance Dicks (who had both been there for the Third Doctor’s whole tenure, which constituted a major reboot from the old black-and-white days) were also in the process of stepping down. Pertwee specifically was reportedly devastated by the recent death of actor Roger Delgado, who had played his character’s arch-nemesis the Master, and it’s hard to avoid wondering how that might have affected his performance in these final episodes. Even with a bright new costar in the form of Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith, the hero feels somewhat listless throughout this year. And although she’s pretty great herself, well, there’s a reason she’s primarily remembered as a Fourth Doctor companion instead.

This run also introduces the Sontarans, who would go on to be a popular recurring alien species for the franchise, and it offers a rare quasi-sequel when the Doctor and Sarah Jane visit the setting of Peladon from back in season 9. But its stories are rather convoluted — a certain betrayal among the UNIT staff comes entirely out of nowhere — and the effects for the dinosaurs and spiders are each distractingly bad even by this program’s typical low-budget standards. Luckily Tom Baker arrives in the closing moments, to shake things up in the precise nick of time.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
DEATH TO THE DALEKS (11×11 – 11×14)

★★★☆☆
INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS (11×5 – 11×10)
PLANET OF THE SPIDERS (11×21 – 11×26)
THE MONSTER OF PELADON 11×15 – 11×20)

★★★★☆
THE TIME WARRIOR (11×1 – 11×4)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Warrior of the Third Veil by Victoria Goddard

Book #54 of 2024:

The Warrior of the Third Veil by Victoria Goddard (The Sisters Avramapul #2)

This title has swiftly become one of my favorites in the constellation of supporting novellas that seem to make up the bulk of author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy saga. It’s a direct sequel to The Bride of the Blue Wind, which told a fairy tale journey of two daughters from a desert nomad tribe striving to save their younger sister from a Bluebeard-esque fate in her divine husband’s house. This volume relates the aftermath of that quest, with much richer characterization for its two protagonists, Pali the conquering warrior and Sardeet the new widow. (The eldest child Arzu, magician and heir to their mother’s crown, is here for a few scenes too, but it’s not really her story anymore. And unlike her siblings, she doesn’t have a future ahead of her as part of the legendary Red Company.)

For the first half of the book, the girls are mostly resting in their uncle’s home and coming to terms with their recent ordeal. As returning readers will know, that’s the type of quiet and cozy atmosphere that Goddard writes best, turning what could easily be an interminable interlude in someone else’s hands into a soft space for keenly-observed introspection and healing of trauma amid the reassuring familiarity of domestic routine. One heroine is trying to sort through her confusing emotions and figure out what the rest of her life will look like now that she’s been unexpectedly returned to the mortal realm, while the other is worried that by killing the abusive demigod, she’s broken the code of her order, which had sent her out to correct an injustice nonviolently.

After her sister chooses a new path forward, Paliammë-ivanar Avramapul approaches the domain of her reclusive teachers to present herself for their judgment. As we learn more about the meaning of the hierarchy of the veils that they wear, she describes not only the events of the rescue we’ve already read, but also how she subsequently took the time to travel to far-off lands, carrying the remains of the first six wives her opponent slew to respectfully return them to their peoples. The name of the work pretty much gives away the verdict, but I suppose it’s not surprising that for this writer, kind choices are ultimately rewarded instead of punished.

A third installment of this sub-series about the young sisters, tentatively to be called The Weaver of the Middle Desert, is mentioned in an afterword as forthcoming in 2018. Six years later, it has yet to materialize, though Goddard has gone on to write more about the characters’ adult exploits in works like The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul. Luckily this one ends in such a way that the plot feels relatively complete, for the moment.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros

Book #53 of 2024:

Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros

[Disclaimer: I am Twitter mutuals with this author.]

Another powerful #ownvoices Jewish historical fantasy novel from author Aden Polydoros, this one centering on a female golem in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Forged from the corpse of a slain teenage freedom-fighter — the original daughter of her grieving maker — along with the traditional clay, the protagonist must find where the man’s captors have taken him and his notes on her creation that they hope to replicate, all while trying to sift through her inherited memories and determine how her new sense of identity does and doesn’t line up with that of the dead girl. She also, of course, has feelings for her predecessor’s surviving partner, the rare case of a YA love triangle where one party is deceased and another one isn’t even certain she qualifies as a person. What she knows for sure is that she’s been built for a mission of vengeance, an Inglourious Basterds-meets-Frankenstein plot of Jews turning the tables on their tormentors in scenes of righteous slaughter. But is that all she’s good for, and does she ultimately get any say in the matter?

The queer themes here aren’t as overt as in this writer’s debut title The City Beautiful, but I’d say there’s a definite trans reading in the heroine’s mind/body disconnect and the way she chafes under the gendered assumptions people derive from her outward appearance. Mostly, though, the story finds its various characters struggling with how to move forward in the face of insurmountable loss, in a time of ongoing trauma where the wreckage of their previous lives seems perpetually around them. It’s a type of fiction that’s Holocaust-adjacent, with the horrors of the Shoah adding a distinctive atmospheric background dread without ever materializing to dominate the narrative. Although I would have preferred Vera to be a little more agentive and less defined by the men in her life, I appreciate how her perspective manages to feel grounded in both actual history and Judaic folklore alike, presenting a tale richly steeped in the most poignant sort of wish-fulfillment.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Nemesis by Agatha Christie

Book #52 of 2024:

Nemesis by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #12)

This 1971 title was the last Miss Marple novel that author Agatha Christie ever wrote, although Sleeping Murder, published posthumously in 1976, was the final entry in the series to be released. It functions as a fairly direct sequel to #9 A Caribbean Mystery, featuring the quasi-return of its major supporting character Jason Rafiel. That qualifier is because he’s dead at the start of this one — but remembering how he and Jane Marple previously collaborated as amateur detectives, he has left behind a request in his will for her to now turn her investigative attentions to a certain delicate issue. You don’t necessarily have to have read the earlier volume, as there are no relevant clues to be found there, but the extra background context and impression of light continuity are both nice if you have.

The worst thing about this story is that the exact nature and specifics of the immediate case remain vague for far too long. The old spinster eventually puzzles out what her deceased associate wanted her to look into, but the text never really justifies why he couldn’t spell it out for her or discuss it while he was still alive (or even whether he already had a suspect in mind). He’s certainly made all sorts of other arrangements to help her on her way: letters sent, tickets purchased, lodging reserved, assistants recruited, and so on. But for some reason, his instructions don’t just come out and tell her about the crime(s) she’s supposed to investigate, and the book is a little tedious before she’s solved that initial mystery and can focus in on the real one.

Once we get to the heart of the matter, it’s classic Christie for better and worse. The social commentary complaining about young people is dreadful. There’s rape apologia, homophobia, and an implausible homicide-by-falling-boulder, but also a few genuinely clever twists and a fun confrontation with the ultimate villain of the piece. The protagonist and her writer are each sharp as ever, despite their respective advanced ages (Dame Agatha being 81 at this point and Marple having somehow remained perpetually elderly across the four decades since her first appearance). It’s definitely not a high watermark or meaningful sendoff for the character, but it’s not the clunker that it could have been, either.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Book of Oceans by John Peel

Book #51 of 2024:

Book of Oceans by John Peel (Diadem: Worlds of Magic #8)

Unfortunately the weakest Diadem title yet. This next sequel finds Pixel’s new girlfriend Jenna still squabbling with Helaine, despite six months having passed since they left their homeworld’s rigid class system behind them at the end of the previous volume. Oracle recommends a vacation to Brine, a world largely covered with water, but neglects to tell the teen wizards about the rash of recent pirate attacks its residents have been experiencing. Later he admits to their other adult friend Shanara that he’s terrified the kids are going to grow up to be as cruel as the Triad whose powers they inherited, and so has set them a challenge that will confront them with true wickedness: “Their discovery of further evil in the Diadem will cement their determination to fight it, not to succumb to it. If they fight evil in others, they will not allow it in themselves.”

It’s a bit too abstract of a concept to land well, although we learn in the same scene that Shanara has an intriguing secret history with the Three Who Rule(d) that she doesn’t want the heroes to discover. Mostly, though, the premise is just an excuse for some swashbuckling adventure that ultimately does bring the girls closer together. Helaine and Score’s own budding relationship is a relatively strong factor, as it has been for the past few stories, but it’s disappointing how author John Peel twice has them blithely torture a captive prisoner for information. (These books are on the younger side of YA in tone, so the pirates each give up and start talking after the first cut to their neck/face. But still! I feel rather firmly that good guys shouldn’t be doing / threatening that at all, or at least not without considerably more nuance than this. If their actions somehow tied back to Oracle’s fears that the protagonists have the capacity for darkness in them, that could be an interesting plot point and character note, I suppose. But as written, it doesn’t seem like Peel thinks the torturing is over the line — or is aware that it could result in false confessions, as it’s known to do in real life. This novel was published in 2005 during the height of the George W. Bush administration and the popularity of the show 24, and it’s hard not to wonder how much of that atmosphere was subconsciously sinking into his writing.)

There’s an unfortunate vein of misogyny running through the text too, in the form of Score regularly wishing that the girls would wear bikinis for him and Pixel. The topic of different modesty norms between Earth and Ordin was handled pretty well in books 5 and 7, but here, he just comes off as skeevy. The worst part is that the ending basically validates his lechery, with Helaine agreeing to do it because, “Score has behaved exceptionally, and I think I owe him some enjoyment.” It feels gross and wildly out-of-character for her, even given her steady softening towards the boy.

The fantasy worldbuilding for the new setting is fine, but nothing special. I don’t know that the villains ever appear as monstrous as their reputation — though there’s an as-yet-unrevealed magic-user behind their scheme — but they do take slaves, beat them with lashes, and work them to death, so their eventual downfall registers as a proper victory. Overall, however, this is definitely a bit of a filler installment for the series, mainly notable simply for the frustrating elements I described above.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

Book #50 of 2024:

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

This 2024 thriller reads like vintage Stephen King — I’m thinking specifically of books like Cujo or Misery or Gerald’s Game — for placing a protagonist in a simple untenable situation and watching them frantically scramble for a way to escape. In such a work, the space is confined and the action internal for the most part, but the terror is no less real for those constraints upon the story. Here, a single mother is heading back to bed after settling her five-year-old from a nightmare when she hears a creaky floorboard from across the house. Realizing that someone must have broken in, she has just enough time to wake the little boy and his sister and lead them into a secret crawlspace to hide. The glimpses they see of the intruder through the vent are terrifying: the manager at a local restaurant who had made the woman uncomfortable for how he touched and looked at her eight-year-old daughter, now prowling their home wearing gloves but no mask (implying that he doesn’t want to be caught but isn’t afraid of their recognizing him, which doesn’t bode well for their chances of surviving the encounter).

And of course, he’s stolen her cell phone from its charger, the nearest neighbors are a half-mile away, and he’s planned his arrival for the night before a long holiday break. No one is expecting to hear from the family for days, and none of them are dressed for the blizzard conditions outside, further hampering an easy exit beyond the inherent logistics of sneaking away unnoticed with two small kids in tow.

As new author Tracy Sierra spins out that plot, we also learn more about the heroine’s backstory — much of which isn’t immediately relevant to the crisis at hand, but at least helps to strengthen her characterization and explain why she’s so paralyzed with the conviction that she’s powerless. (When this novel gets its inevitable film treatment, that’s the element I expect will rightfully get dropped in adaptation. I don’t feel like we benefit from keeping her husband’s absence in the present as a mystery for so long, for instance.)

Mostly, though, we are right there in the moment with the nameless woman, experiencing the same nervous suspense as she tries to both keep the children quiet and rack her brains for a solution to the threat before them. Even after they narrowly escape about halfway through the book, she finds she is unable to convince the police that the danger was real. The man left no evidence behind — he doesn’t appear to have even worked at the place where she met him — and her injuries leave her confused and apparently misremembering key details, though certain he’s going to return to finish the job. Was the whole event all in her mind? She’s had previous mental health issues, so did she hurt the kids herself during a psychotic break? Or do the strange inconsistencies in her story mean that the assailant was stalking the house well in advance of that evening, moving things around to gaslight her for his own amusement while everyone slept?

Given the genre, I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to confirm that she’s right and the villain really does exist. What emerges is a thrillingly vindicating tale of female empowerment for a character who’s had her complaints of unease brushed aside by various patronizing men all her life, along with the troubling implication that she herself has dismissed her children’s valid worries and observations in turn. It’s altogether a great read, although one wonders if the true-crime addicts out there will take it as justification for their own statistically-unlikely fears of victimization from such a predator. Regardless, as a work of fiction divorced from any broader societal implications, it’s a strong debut that already has me eagerly awaiting the writer’s next release.

[Content warning for gun violence, ableism, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Picard, season 2

TV #11 of 2024:

Star Trek: Picard, season 2

Not great, but a noticeable step up from the blandly underwritten chaos of this modern Star Trek show’s first season. Picard’s old superpowered tormentor Q is as maddeningly inscrutable as ever, but bringing him into play as the new big bad for the year is a solid choice, as is the plot that strands the protagonist and his friends in 2024 after some initial shaky setup to get there. (The whole first episode is spent basically just reminding us who these people are and throwing them up against the latest Borg queen, after which Q arrives to shunt them into a dystopian parallel timeline for no clear reason. They and the alien enemy then find a way to travel back in time to the point where this reality diverged from the correct one and set about trying to fix it.)

Visiting the past to preserve the proper flow of history is a premise that this franchise has gone to before, but generally in the span of a single movie or an episode or two, not an entire season of television. The storyline drags a bit when stretched out that far, although a conflict with contemporary ICE and an appearance from young Guinan are standout developments. Rather less successful, unfortunately, are the arcs of Jurati’s infestation by the Borg, another Soong’s mad science ventures, and another Soji lookalike’s discovery of her secret origins.

As that last sentence might indicate, the biggest problem here is the cast. Although this title feels pitched to be a direct sequel to Jean-Luc’s original show The Next Generation, the only fellow established characters in his ragtag crew last season were Seven of Nine — who came from an entirely different series and had never before met Picard on-screen — and Data, along with cameo appearances from Riker and Troi. I didn’t mind the newcomers for the most part, but their journey together reached a logical endpoint in that first finale, which is why this follow-up season has to struggle so hard to reunite them. Even those characters that the writers fail to justify bringing back inevitably appear again anyway, with their actors playing distant ancestors, holograms, hallucinations, and the like. It’s a poor creative impulse that indicates how the production team probably never even stopped to consider which elements worked well and which ones didn’t when breaking the new story.

(Seven is surprisingly strong on this program, despite her lack of any prior relationship with Picard! A version of this season that kept the two of them and jettisoned the rest of the returning cast could have been a lot more fruitful. There’s no reason that the Picard show has to automatically be the Agnes and Elnor show as well, you know?)

The other big new idea that this string of episodes raises is that the Starfleet admiral is haunted by something from his childhood, which initially seems like domestic abuse but turns out to be his mother’s mental health struggles and eventual suicide. It’s the kind of backstory addition that’s a little odd to introduce on the character’s ninth season of television, and I wish it wasn’t framed as such a mystery / gotcha, but it’s overall a reasonable approach for a series that’s ostensibly built around its elderly lead figure looking back on the legacy of his life. It’s just sort of an odd match for the whiz-bang Q/Borg/time-travel action that otherwise dominates the plot.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆