The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan

Book #144 of 2024:

The Pomegranate Gate by Ariel Kaplan (The Mirror Realm Cycle #1)

A lovely fantasy debut, with major vibes of other tales I’ve adored from that genre like Strange the Dreamer or Spinning Silver. Like the latter, this is an #ownvoices Jewish novel, peppered with mentions of ketubahs and genizahs and more (all unexplained but generally clear enough by context, I’d say). It’s set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition — or technically not Spain, but the analogue is fairly direct– under which the kingdom’s Jews were ordered en masse to either convert to Christianity or else abandon all property and flee the land. Two such departing refugees discover they have a magical heritage and a connection with another world, whose politics and intrigues loosely parallel those of their own.

What follows is a slow-paced coming-of-age plot for the two core protagonists, each of whom gets the beginning of a sweet romantic arc (one of them queer, with no sign of textual homophobia) as they more fully step into their respective destinies. As with several larger matters, events there don’t wrap up especially neatly at the end, underscoring how this is merely the first volume of a planned series, but I’m riveted by the characters and eager to return for more of their story in the sequel that’s releasing later this month. I hope that next installment delves more deeply into the worldbuilding details, which besides the lack of resolution is the only big element keeping me back from awarding this one a full five stars. But if it matches the present title’s delivery of endearing heroes poring over ancient texts and baring their souls in a shared dreamscape, I’ll be plenty happy regardless.

On a personal note, I was also delighted to read in Ariel Kaplan’s author bio that she was a Monroe Scholar at the College of William and Mary, as I was myself in my own undergraduate days. She graduated eleven years before me, so our paths never would have crossed on-campus, but like our common Judaism, it’s a fun point of intersection for me as a reader of this book.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

Book #143 of 2024:

Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White

YA horror / thriller author Andrew Joseph White’s third novel is unfortunately the first one that doesn’t wholly work for me, although I appreciate the continued #ownvoices trans and autistic representation. The strongest thing about this story, in fact, is the confidence in its characterization, with the assigned-female-at-birth protagonist standing as both a valuable mirror for readers who can recognize their own experiences in his and an equally-helpful window into that life for others. (The autism traits are also well-incorporated, but unnoticed by the hero until fairly late in the text, at which point he has a bizarre moral panic over them. Like, you’ve just seen two classmates die violently in front of you, dude. You’ve been misgendered and beaten up pretty badly yourself. Why are you freaking out about potentially being on the spectrum? Both that and the brief mention that the teen is demiromantic feel like artificial didactic inserts, in a sharp contrast to how naturalistically the gender matters are handled throughout.)

The plot is a further letdown. The basic idea here has promise — a poor Appalachian town with a corrupt sheriff in a generations-long blood feud with the main character’s family — but the villains are so over-the-top evil as to be almost unbelievable, and the plan to get back at them is poorly devised and yet never once called out. The characters bring their cell phones to intended murder scenes, search online for how to dispose of bodies, borrow a relative’s gun and leave bullets behind in a corpse, and so on, but those missteps somehow aren’t flagged and don’t end up mattering in the slightest.

There’s also the ghost of the boy’s murdered ancestor hanging around, which doesn’t ultimately amount to much either. It’s definitely the lightest supernatural element in one of White’s books yet, and is so disconnected from anything else that it could have been easily excised from the project completely.

Despite all those issues, I do enjoy Miles and his West Virginia hometown a lot. The sense of place and of character alike are terrific, which is why it’s such a shame that the rest of the title struggles to adequately showcase and live up to them.

[Content warning for gore, sexual assault of children, underage revenge porn, gun violence, and animal cruelty.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Space Babies by Alison Rumfitt

Book #142 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Space Babies by Alison Rumfitt

An okay novelization of an okay episode of Doctor Who. Unlike certain previous efforts in the same vein, this book doesn’t really provide many details or character insights beyond what’s already present on the screen, although it does amusingly add back in the early appearance of the song “Push the Button” that got left on the cutting room floor and made subsequent references in the TV dialogue a bit confusing. Between that and the fact that the talking babies and bogeyman effects are likely more realistic in readers’ minds than they were in transmission, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some folks prefer this iteration of the story over the original. On the other hand, Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s performances definitely helped elevate the material, and are thus sorely lacking here. It’s a bit of a wash, in my opinion.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Book #141 of 2024:

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

As a genre, Arthuriana tends to be at its finest — with Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King remaining the absolute gold standard for me — when pitched as a tragedy, inviting us to invest in the glimmering dream of Camelot so that its eventual dissolution under petty human flaws carries a real weight of loss to it. We should feel the sorrow of King Arthur’s passing, much as we should feel the anxious flutter earlier on in his reign, recognizing the shape of the familiar plot ahead and reading on regardless, almost despite ourselves.

That’s an element that author Lev Grossman proves he knows well in this new iteration of the Arthurian legend, just as he understands the tension of dubious historicity in the tradition — how authentic details can help ground Arthur in a specific moment of post-Roman Britain, and yet our classic touchstones of castles and armor and tournaments and such are anachronisms from later medieval texts that can’t be easily reconciled. His Camelot embraces all that, like the inherent everyday magic that the knights regularly encounter around them, and while it may not be historical, it breathes as a fully realized construct within the boundaries of its own terms.

Grossman’s keenest authorial instinct, however, is to set this story primarily in the wake of Arthur himself, via a new young protagonist arriving at the Round Table soon after the climactic final battle between the king and his bastard son Mordred. It’s a part of the narrative that’s usually an afterthought for writers, but here it’s the main attraction, asking how the kingdom and its few bloodied survivors can possibly go on after the dream has been extinguished for them. It’s the sort of extended sequel that more tragedies should receive, refusing to let the curtain drop on a tidy ending after all, and it’s absolutely riveting to watch unfold.

“When Icarus flew too near the sun, he lost his wings and fell and died,” Grossman writes in his typically lovely prose. “That’s what happened to heroes who played heavenly games. But Death didn’t bother with the ordinary folk, the extras. They had it tougher; they had to keep on living, crawling forward in the dark with no moon or even any stars to light their way.” In a sense, the approach links this take on the legend with fantasy works that have been inspired by it over the years, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever, which are likewise built around fallible individuals living among the ruins and faded grandeur of some epic golden age and daunted by the pressure of living up to their heroic forebears. Grossman’s surviving knights are similarly left alone now, and forced to chart their own destinies in the absence of their beloved liege.

Meanwhile, that thread is complemented by periodic flashbacks from a variety of perspectives fleshing out how those characters experienced the more halcyon days beforehand, which gives the work the greater texture, albeit piecemeal, of the traditional saga. It’s a book that’s very much in conversation with previous versions of the tale (though you don’t have to bring that familiarity to the reading experience yourself), but is nevertheless unafraid to invent bold new additions to the myth as well. Sir Bedivere is gay in this telling, with an unrequited romantic attraction to his king, while Sir Dinadan is a trans man who fled an arranged marriage to become a knight. These are not one-off tokens for diversity’s sake, but rather facets of their respective characterizations that are deeply explored and woven into the wider fabric of events.

As a novel, The Bright Sword can occasionally seem episodic, although that’s equally true of the classical accounts from the likes of Chrétien de Troyes or Thomas Malory, and the larger plot gradually picks up momentum as it nears its end and draws everything back together again. The ultimate result is a triumph, well deserving of a spot in that same hallowed pantheon, and I can only hope that Grossman’s own contributions to the ever-evolving mythology of King Arthur will in turn appear in some future retellings, somewhere down the line.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, antisemitism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, rape, incest, and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

Book #140 of 2024:

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake (Anna #1)

I suspect I would have liked this horror tale better when I was younger, like if I had read it when it first came out back in 2011. (To be fair, it is marketed as YA, while I haven’t been a young adult myself in quite some time now. On the other hand, there are still plenty of titles in that category that I manage to enjoy just fine.) Reading it now, though, I’m too bored by the hyper-competent teenage protagonist, who rolls into a new town and gets to work putting its ghosts to rest using the magical dagger left to him by his dead dad. Cas isn’t a completely flawless lead, but he’s close enough that he seldom feels effectively challenged by any particular setbacks in the narrative. For much of the plot, his biggest personal obstacle seems to be the unwanted romantic attention of the prettiest and most popular girl in the school, because he’s supposedly too focused on the mission — and being ostentatiously moody and dramatic about it — to care for such petty human entanglements.

I do like that his character arc involves opening up and accepting that he can have friendships and still be an effective ghostbuster, and that the eventual love story isn’t with the preppy prom queen cheerleader after all. But I’m not sold on the romance that surfaces in its place, which sees him fall instantaneously for the titular murderous specter who’s literally dismembered a classmate in front of him. It’s a weird writing choice! Not one that’s necessarily insurmountable, but the novel never manages to sell me on how this connection between hero and ostensible villain would work, either emotionally or, uh, logistically. A more fiendish antagonist emerges from the shadows by around this part of the book, but his own characterization is hampered by the reductive ‘voodoo is evil’ framing that a decent sensitivity reader should probably have flagged and cautioned debut author Kendare Blake against.

Overall, I don’t hate this. I’m interested enough to see if I have library access to the sequel, at least. But I think the genre and I have both largely outgrown a lot of the weaker sides to this volume.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, sexual assault of a minor, gun violence, animal cruelty, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Flash Forward by Chris Archer

Book #139 of 2024:

Flash Forward by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #7)

Another propulsive installment of this 90s middle-grade science-fiction series, finally now firmly past its original formula of kid after kid turning thirteen, unlocking special powers, and facing off against a shapeshifting alien assassin. At this point, the core team of Ethan, Ashley, Jack, and Toni has been well established, and for the first time, they trade off narrating chapter by chapter Diadem-style in lieu of each individually covering an entire book like the Animorphs.

The plot picks up right where the last volume left off, with the four teens stranded in the wreckage of future earth, eventually revealed to be a century beyond their own era. It’s a Mad Max dystopia populated by crazed mutant cannibal slavers on the surface, more normal-seeming people trying to lead a resistance movement in the tunnels below, and the technologically-advanced Omegas — those same gray-skinned black-eyed beings that had been going after the protagonists back in the present — as the true rulers of the world. We also learn that they’re not extraterrestrials at all, but actually genetically-enhanced humans who overthrew their government creators rather than submitting to be super-soldiers as designed. The children’s parents, the Alphas, were of an earlier batch who retained more of their humanity in both appearance and conscience, although it remains unclear why they fled to the planet’s past, had babies, and vanished.

The adventure here is fun and a neat change of pace from the X-Files conspiracy stuff we’d been getting before, and while the immediate storyline wraps up nicely, it ends with the heroes still in the future instead of returning to the old status quo, which feels like a promising sign for the remaining sequels ahead.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 14

TV #40 of 2024:

Classic Doctor Who, season 14

Another strong year in the show’s Tom Baker era, notable for the exit of the Doctor’s companion Sarah Jane Smith (who’d been introduced during his predecessor’s tenure way back in season 11) and the debut of her replacement, the “savage” “primitive” Leela of the Sevateem. The worst thing about this period of Doctor Who is unquestionably the racism, which is somewhat implicit in the characterization of this new ally for the Time Lord and disgustingly explicit in the form of yellowface, stereotypes, and anti-Chinese attitudes all throughout the last serial, THE TALONS OF WENG-CHIANG.

I don’t fault anyone who writes off that story entirely, but if you can look past the offensive elements, the remaining plot and character work is admittedly rather fine. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that two major Big Finish audio drama series are spun off from characters and concepts introduced this season: Jago & Litefoot from WENG-CHIANG and more recently The Robots from THE ROBOTS OF DEATH. Not to mention how influential THE DEADLY ASSASSIN has been on all subsequent portrayals of Gallifrey, though I personally don’t rate that one as highly as an actual episodic storyline in and of itself.

Leela is a lot of fun to watch as a proactive warrior who doesn’t understand modern technology, sees things very differently from the Doctor, and often chooses to ignore his advice completely. It’s a combination that could be grating on paper, but it works like a charm when delivered with Louise Jameson’s eager energy paired opposite Baker’s eccentric aloofness. She’s a breath of fresh air after spending so long with a sequence of Third and Fourth Doctor companions all drawn from contemporary Britain, and a return to a character type not really seen since Jamie left the series at the end of season 6. It’s the start of a new run of inventive costars for the show, as Leela would subsequently be followed by the robot dog K-9, the Time Lady Romana, the math whiz from another universe Adric, and the refugee from a destroyed world Nyssa. Not until Tegan arrives alongside the incoming Fifth Doctor at the end of season 18 will we get another plucky earth girl of the Sarah Jane variety joining the TARDIS crew.

This season also brings back the Master for the first time since the death of his original actor four years previously, providing the on-screen justification (to the extent one was needed) for his recasting. It’s not my favorite serial of this run, but it’s at least better than Sarah’s penultimate adventure THE MASQUE OF MANDRAGORA, which stumbles around as an overstuffed historical romp and never quite finds anything interesting to offer. Luckily that’s by far the weakest of the lot, and the other installments are generally exceptional.

Behind the scenes, this was the last hurrah for producer Philip Hinchcliffe, who had overseen all of the Fourth Doctor productions to date and helped revitalize the program with more of an overt horror tone. His guiding influence will be missed.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
THE MASQUE OF MANDRAGORA (14×1 -14×4)

★★★☆☆
THE DEADLY ASSASSIN (14×9 – 14×12)

★★★★☆
THE FACE OF EVIL (14×13 – 14×16)
THE TALONS OF WENG-CHIANG (14×21 – 14×26)

★★★★★
THE HAND OF FEAR (14×5 – 14×8)
THE ROBOTS OF DEATH (14×17 – 14×20)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★★☆

Book Review: Blitz by Daniel O’Malley

Book #138 of 2024:

Blitz by Daniel O’Malley (The Checquy Files #3)

I have a lingering fondness for the Checquy, author Daniel O’Malley’s fictional and exceedingly dysfunctional British intelligence agency tasked with containing all threats of a magical nature, and I’m glad that this novel stands so apart from its predecessors, as it’s been over eight years since I read those and I was able to pick up this third volume without missing a beat. I think a new reader could start here and pretty rapidly get the gist. Nevertheless, it’s not the finest hour for the series, and it marks a rather slow-paced return to what should be a dangerously fraught supernatural world.

The vibes are great, as usual — stodgy bureaucracy meets inventive powers with a heaping dose of frequent body horror. I’ve always appreciated how, like the X-Men, every person’s special abilities in this universe are different, with a comically wide range of potential combat applications. Someone impenetrable to bullets or who can alter the direction of localized gravity fields, for instance, can be relied upon for discrete fieldwork, while someone who involuntarily causes all milk within a certain radius to curdle will likely just get assigned to a comfortable desk job instead.

Such details offer a fun background texture to the setting, and put me in mind of similar offhand worldbuilding comments offered on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Unfortunately, however, they don’t automatically support an engaging plot, and this is where the project stumbles for me.

The actual storyline here plays out over two distinct timelines and casts of characters, although they don’t really affect one another and only ever loosely connect. The one giving the work its title takes place during the Second World War, while the other is set in the present day (and represents a loose sequel to the first two books). Both involve a character who can generate electricity from their bare skin, but they are broadly unrelated — which feels like a strange writing choice, given that we know there are folks in the Checquy who don’t age at normal mortal rates and could plausibly have been around for all of these events.

The bigger issue is that the two parallel tracks are each fairly unfocused, with no clear urgency driving the action. A trio of junior agents in the past are attempting to find and eliminate a German airman whose plane they brought down over London against orders, and while there’s nominal tension in whether their superiors will learn of their insubordination, the stakes never seem especially personal, and there’s a seemingly endless stream of side matters that pop up to otherwise occupy their attention. Meanwhile, the remainder of the narrative follows a modern recruit to the agency as she moves from wide-eyed newbie to deadly trained professional, but her own story doesn’t kick into gear until midway through, when she realizes she’ll be falsely accused of a string of murders that matches the MO of her powers and has to go on the run. That section of the book where she’s a fugitive striving to clear her name and stay one step ahead of her coworkers-turned-hunters is legitimately fantastic, but since it’s only about a quarter of the overall text — and since the rest involves a frustrating degree of coincidence and an uncomfortable equivocation over Nazi politics — I don’t feel like I can rate the whole thing terribly highly.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Athyra by Steven Brust

Book #137 of 2024:

Athyra by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #6)

Given how the last volume in this series sort of blew up the overall premise, and how author Steven Brust has bounced around in the timeline before now, it would have been unsurprising for this sixth novel to be another flashback entry, taking place in the days when antihero Vlad Taltos was still an assassin and neighborhood crime boss for the Jhereg organization. Instead, it’s a welcome sequel to #5 Phoenix, which ended — spoiler alert — with the protagonist on the run from his former superiors, having acquired both some newly-developed scruples and a massive price on his head.

This one isn’t a direct follow-up, since several years (and one of Vlad’s fingers) have gone by in the meantime, a gap that Brust would later return to in #11 Jhegaala. But it’s great to see him resisting the safe choice here and telling a story about a mafiosa absent the mafia — a hired killer without anyone to kill — well beyond the familiar Adrilankha setting and its regular cast of supporting characters. While subsequent installments like #8 Dragon and #16 Tsalmoth would indeed go back to that earlier era, Athyra positions its central criminal as a wandering ronin figure, a drifter who passes through a small town in the wilderness and gets drawn into the local troubles there (which admittedly do turn out to be more personal in nature for the reformed hitman, due to the presence of a returning villain from #4 Taltos).

The presentation of the plot marks a refreshing change, too. For the first time we’re outside the assassin’s immediate first-person narration, seeing him from the third-person limited perspective of a village boy unfamiliar with his secrets and his past (or even his short-lived species, as the human/Easterner is the only one the eighty-year-old Dragaeran youth has ever met). Although I do miss getting to hear the sarcastic psychic commentary from Vlad’s jhereg familiar Loiosh, the shift in focus is an interesting stylistic difference, as is the new look at the wider worldbuilding details that come to us through the healer’s apprentice. Savn is even a reasonably compelling protagonist in his own right, though his new friend rightfully remains the primary attraction.

This is not a book that moves the broader storyline too much, but as a distinctive episodic adventure, it easily stands out against its predecessors.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Book #136 of 2024:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

The first third or so of this novel is frustratingly disjointed, with flashbacks nested inside flashbacks as though the storyteller isn’t confident of the best way to approach and present the material at hand. It’s a particularly strange decision given how after that point, the narrative straightens out and becomes basically all linear for the remainder of the text. The beginning is also difficult for the darkness on display: sexist slurs and a graphic rape against the protagonist, a revelation that her brother committed suicide as a teen due to homophobic abuse from their parents, and the grisly death of another main character with similar tragedy in his past. It’s frankly a lot for the reader to take in, and it cuts against the quirky tone that debut author Bonnie Garmus seems to be aiming for at other moments — a 50s cooking show presented by a no-nonsense lady scientist who insists on calling commonplace kitchen items like salt and water by their chemical compounds, a child prodigy who’s reading Nabokov before she enters kindergarten, multiple scenes narrated from the anthropomorphic perspective of the equally-genius family dog, and so on.

I pushed on because this book came so highly recommended, but I left that early section expecting I would likely award the title a two-star rating in the end. It’s a testament to the strength of what follows that I’ve ultimately landed in the next higher tier instead, but I still wouldn’t call myself a fan of the work as a whole.

The core of the story, once it settles down from that initial roughness, concerns the unusual TV host and how she navigates that career whilst quietly mourning both her lost love and the research path she was forced to abandon due to sexism. We also follow her precocious daughter and a handful of supporting characters who likewise run up against mid-century misogyny and other such narrow views, which they of course push back on to the extent that they can. There’s a triumph of sorts in the eventual ending, but still a lot of ugly bigotry (and annoying canine opinions and tragically farcical miscommunications) to get through along the way. Despite all the presumably-intentional parallels to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, in my opinion that series did a much better job depicting the realistic challenges faced by professional women of the past without ever seeming like the plot was fashioned to be cruel to them for cruelty’s sake alone.

★★★☆☆