The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #127 of 2024:

The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The bulk of this novel surrounds the production of a fictional Hollywood movie in the 1950s, centering on its insecure young starlet who’s been recently plucked from obscurity in Mexico and thrust unexpectedly into the glitzy limelight (not to mention its dark racist underbelly). There’s a definite Taylor Jenkins Reid vibe to this plot, especially given the inclusion of gossip columns and documentary interviews to help complement the main narrative, and I’ve generally enjoyed following the heroine as the shape of the personal tragedy around her comes into focus.

I’m less enamored of the secondary viewpoint character, a jealous rival whom Vera doesn’t even know exists. She’s both an extra on the film who delusionally believes the starring role was stolen from when the younger actress was discovered and — coincidentally — the spurned ex-lover of the protagonist’s new romantic interest. She’s also a domestic abuser, the most explicitly bigoted person in the book, an alcoholic, a divorcee, a former nude model, and a woman who cheats and sleeps around as our upright lead never would. (Not that all of these are things to actually judge her for, of course, but they are negatively-coded and collectively function to make her opposite seem more darling and special.) It’s a bit much to cram into a single antagonist, though her desperate feeling that she can’t break into the industry and can sense her window slipping away from her manages to be reasonably sympathetic despite all her flaws. But I do wish she were more centrally incorporated into her ignorant enemy’s life, in addition to being less of a catch-all villain for her.

The biggest problem, however, comes from the third and final POV, which is that of the biblical figure Salome herself, whose story is being told in the feature that the others are making. Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia mostly follows the Wilde play / Strauss opera in her interpretation of this girl and her infatuation with the priest Jokanaan (aka John the Baptist), which is not an element present in either the bible or the available historical record. Nor does it appear to be in the script for the sword-and-sandal flick later on in Moreno-Garcia’s tale, for whatever reason. But there’s no attempt to reconcile the diverging narratives or emphasize a thematic point about reliability or anything, and I don’t ultimately feel that Herodias’s daughter parallels the two twentieth-century women enough for her to occupy such a large portion of the text.

Three-out-of-five stars because the writing is fine and I like the core of this work, but those issues with the supporting cast are just too significant to rate the title any higher.

[Content warning for incest, sexual assault, gun violence, racial slurs, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Phoenix by Steven Brust

Book #126 of 2024:

Phoenix by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #5)

I’m perhaps a bit biased, as this was the first Vlad Taltos book that I ever picked up back in the day, but I do think it’s a big step forward from the previous volumes and possibly a series-best entry. In typical bouncing timeline fashion, we’ve returned to soon after #3 Teckla for the chronologically latest installment yet, dealing with the repercussions of that earlier story on our protagonist’s marriage and his estranged wife’s involvement with the growing protest / rebel movement. First, however, he’s summoned to the divine realm of a goddess, who calls upon him to assassinate the king of a small island nation just outside the borders of the familiar Dragaeran Empire.

Although Vlad is a hitman by trade, this is the clearest look we’ve gotten at him carrying out that particular profession; in previous adventures, he’s acted more in his capacity as crime boss or reactive brawler, so it’s an interesting change to see him actually plotting out and then executing — pun intended — his strike, especially on a plainly innocent victim. That presents him as more of an amoral antihero than ever before, but it also nicely sets up his character growth over the course of this tale, which finds him ultimately turning his back on the Jhereg organization when they go after Cawti to protect their nefarious business interests.

Along the way we get the usual sardonic wisecracking and witchcraft, a delightfully offbeat new sidekick in the form of a native musician who may or may not be more than he appears, and some welcome cleverness in navigating the ensuing political intrigues from both Baronet Taltos and his friends. The topic of his crumbling relationship is handled with more grace and nuance than before, and, like the mystical firebird of the novel’s title, he proves able to rise up from his apparent doom to embark on a fresh start of things by the end. I can only hope that that level of quality is maintained as I continue on with this series reread.

[Content warning for sexism and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

Book #125 of 2024:

The Daughters’ War by Christopher Buehlman

An excellent and appreciably queer new prequel to 2021’s The Blacktongue Priest, although the two stories are so standalone that they could probably be read in either order. Approaching them by release date, as I have, merely underscores the tragic nature of the present title: we already know that the veteran knight Galva has a sad backstory from her army days, while a newcomer who picked up this volume first could theoretically be surprised by the degree of carnage and loss. But because she’s so closed-off and not a POV figure in the original tale, there are few details that are spoiled by meeting her later in life instead of here.

The two books are dissimilar in some ways, though alike in eschewing the traditional plot beats of epic fantasy. But where Priest carries the rollicking spirit of a picaresque adventure or a tabletop roleplaying campaign, this installment is a simple war story. Its heroines and their trained giant crows are soldiers preparing for and then engaging in bloody combat with their inhuman enemies, with long bouts of downtime in camp or on the march between skirmishes. (Those goblin foes threatening to overwhelm the allied kingdoms of humanity remain creepy alien things, drawn more from the horror genre than from the typical cartoonish representation of their species.) The tone avoids the bleak nihilism endemic to certain ‘grimdark’ works — one senses that author Christopher Buehlman cares deeply for the dignity of his characters and the heartbreak of their survivors, even when the former are literally being eaten alive on the battlefield or carved up for decoration after — with a focus on emotions and interpersonal dynamics that could almost be called cozy aside from all the surrounding gore.

It all ends in sorrow, as you might expect, with its 20-year-old protagonist barely escaping her extended ordeal and hardening into the jaded woman from the sequel. Nevertheless, it’s a journey well worth taking with her.

[Content warning for rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Stone Speaks to Stone by Victoria Goddard

Book #124 of 2024:

Stone Speaks to Stone by Victoria Goddard

A roughly-standalone prequel novella to author Victoria Goddard’s Greenwing & Dart series (which is itself just a smaller piece of her overarching Nine Worlds fantasy saga). I’ve chosen to read it after the first three G&D novels, which feels like the right choice, as a central question throughout those stories concerns the actions and fate of Jemis Greenwing’s father Jack during a recent military campaign, which doesn’t get fully resolved for his son until the end of book 3. Reading this title first, with its explicit depiction of one particularly important event that receives conflicting reports later on, would have punctured some of that tension, or at least replaced it with a certain dramatic irony.

But there’s not much meat on the bones of this installment, and I’m personally not a fan of how it depicts the Astandalan Empire. In other books from this setting, like The Hands of the Emperor, the gradual expansion of that ruling body has been seen as a neutral or positive result of natural cultural contact, with newly-annexed lands gaining from being brought into the fold of the wider civilization and its magics and largely retaining their original character and customs. Here we see it instead as an outright strategic conquest that’s being resisted brutally by the locals, and while that may be more realistic and add nice shading to our understanding of the realm, it’s hard to square with the cozy vibes of Kip and his liege in Hands. (It’s also not as though this story is anticolonial on the level of its surface text — the would-be colonizers are the good guys whose poor captured soldiers are being tortured by their barbaric enemies, after all. The subtext behind the conflict is ugly and not to the invaders’ favor, but it doesn’t exactly feel intentional on the writer’s part.)

But Goddard can still spin a yarn like the best of them, and the adventure plot here of a desperate rescue mission behind enemy lines is thrilling enough if you can ignore the above implications. It won’t go down as a favorite of mine, but it’s not a bad read overall.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

Book #123 of 2024:

You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

A heavy but hilarious dark comedy / noir mystery investigation / trenchant antihero character study, this tale of a suburban female serial killer has major early Dexter vibes in all the best ways (mixed with something like Where’d You Go, Bernadette, perhaps). Claire is having difficulty adjusting to her father’s recent death, which makes her sloppier than usual at killing the people who offend her personal sense of justice and decorum. This time someone has witnessed one of her murders and infiltrated her local bereavement support group to blackmail her, which kicks off a twisting plot as she tries to get to the bottom of who knows what and how hard it will be to silence them for good.

So long as you can find the entertainment in such amorality, it’s a pretty fun read, with some genuine emotional breakthroughs for the protagonist amid the steadily-increasing body count. I don’t know if I’d say this has sequel potential, but it’s pitch-perfect as a standalone story and would be great to see adapted for film someday.

[Content warning for child abuse, elder abuse, sexual assault, gun violence, suicide, claustrophobia, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Prodigy, season 2

TV #37 of 2024:

Star Trek: Prodigy, season 2

A thoroughly excellent time-travel adventure, and probably the best season-over-season improvement in all of Star Trek. The debut year of this animated program was endearing but clunky, with an unclear intended audience and a disappointing incorporation of its Delta Quadrant setting. However, the show improved as it went along and its initial Farscape-esque premise of a group of misfits commandeering a ship together gave way to an actual coherent storyline and relevant character stakes. This followup, which finds the young heroes at the start of their new Starfleet careers before a sudden threat looms, benefits tremendously from that transformation: we’re no longer watching a gang of strangers with merely tenuous connections to the rest of the franchise, but rather a central component that registers as an earnest continuation for fans.

(In fact, with Wesley Crusher from TNG joining a cast that already includes Janeway, Chakotay, and the EMH from Voyager, this is now as fully-fledged a sequel series as Star Trek: Picard. I only wish Deep Space Nine was getting this much loving attention from contemporary Trek, beyond the occasional irreverent bit on Lower Decks.)

Asencia is a better villain with a more clearly-defined motivation than the Diviner ever was, but I also appreciate that the writers found a way to keep John Noble around as an actor past his natural exit, somewhat like The Flash did with Tom Cavanagh or Sleepy Hollow with Noble himself. Redeeming his character as an ally for the protagonists is a great move, as is the basic concept here of the cadets having to fix the broken timeline in an increasingly convoluted manner. We even get an appearance from the mirror universe and its hilariously evil whales, not to mention tribbles, hologram malfunctions, and powerful noncorporeal beings with a hidden dark side. If the first season could sometimes feel like a Star Wars cartoon with the serial numbers filed off, this is absolutely Star Trek through and through. I just hope the story is able to continue, though the odds of renewal don’t seem high at this point.

★★★★☆

Book Review: On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci, M.D.

Book #122 of 2024:

On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci, M.D.

Dr. Anthony Fauci may not have become a household name until the recent COVID-19 pandemic, but that experience capped off a long and distinguished career in patient care, scientific research, and public health policy. In this 2024 autobiography, the newly-retired author reflects back on that time and the seven presidents he’s had the honor to serve under, all of whom except Donald Trump seem to have been genuinely interested in listening to the science on infectious disease and committed to saving lives from it both domestically and abroad.

Which is not to say that this title is a political hit job, but it certainly joins a wide body of tell–all memoirs that confirm just how dysfunctional the Trump White House was, with warring factions of petty tyrants, an insistence on wishful thinking over expert advice, and the paranoid assessment of every dissenting voice as a partisan enemy. As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the increasingly public face of the government’s coronavirus response, Dr. Fauci pushed back against that environment as best as he could, always sharing the latest honest updates on the virus with the American people even when it meant publicly contradicting the president himself.

But most of this book isn’t about that presidential term at all, although there’s a common theme of the good doctor speaking truth to power. Instead, he walks us through his start as one of the first researchers to pay attention to the burgeoning HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, and how he came to listen to activists from the gay community and involve them in the decision process for future studies and outreach plans, even when they were hostile towards him in the press and shunned by his peers in the medical field. He lost several close friends to the disease, but was instrumental in ultimately deciphering a way to combat it, which he explains in clear terms for the lay reader. We then follow him and his team over the course of the 2001 anthrax scare and other relatively minor outbreaks across the next few decades, like swine flu, bird flu, Ebola, Zika, and SARS — incidents that were contained in large part due to the writer and his colleagues taking decisive actions with the federal support that was so lacking in early 2020.

All of which brings us back to Trump, for whom Fauci does not hold back his criticisms as a man whose decisions swung wildly based on which advisor happened to talk to him last and who regularly put the perception of a strong economy (and his subsequent reelection odds) over the health of his fellow citizens. And while none of that is exactly news, it hits hard after reading the author’s effusive praise for other conservative figures like George Bush, George W. Bush, or even Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence. As a civil servant who happily aided previous Republicans and Democrats alike, he chafed against Trump’s leadership not over politics, but over all the chaos and dangerous willful abandonment of the truth.

This memoir also addresses the hatred and lies that have been directed at Tony Fauci himself over the past few years, with the explicit encouragement of Trump and his cohort of MAGA Republicans. From death threats against his family to bizarre claims blaming him for all manner of outlandish conspiracy plots, it speaks to a troubling trend in the right-wing disinformation chamber to drag down anyone and everyone seen as aligning themselves with the left. I’m reminded of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s own recent memoir on that subject, and how, like Fauci, she wasn’t aiming to be political at all. But for the thoughtcrime of openly opposing a particular conservative, both individuals were reviled as liberal liars by the supposed patriots under Trump.

Luckily, Anthony hasn’t let the attacks bother him too much, and writing now in his 80s after finally stepping down from his various responsibilities, he seems content to enjoy his well-earned retirement with his wife, his three daughters, and his grandchildren. While he’s somewhat bemused by his new status as a recognizable celebrity, he’s still eager to share his hard-won insights into the spread of contagion with the same natural communication style that’s served him so well over the years. On behalf of a grateful nation — or the non-Trumpy parts of it, at least — I thank him for his service and for this excellent read.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

Book #121 of 2024:

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

One of Stephen King’s regular preoccupations as a horror author seems to be the idea of a person getting stuck in confined circumstances just off the track from their ordinary life. This 1999 novel, in which a nine-year-old girl winds up separated from her family on a hike through the woods of New England, joins some of his other titles like Cujo, Misery, or Gerald’s Game in positing such a premise, where safety is narrowly out of reach and the protagonist is rather bewildered at how simple it was to slip away from there. One poor choice, bit of bad luck, or inattentive moment, and they’ve fallen into that peril, perhaps never to recover.

This is a wilderness survival tale. The lost child has to fend for herself against all manner of natural threats as she searches to make her way back to civilization, from stinging insects and hunger to injuries that can’t be treated and her own worries and emotional regulation. These matters escalate as the story progresses, with a primary plot arc of the young heroine’s increasing desperation, terror, and exhaustion. I was a lot younger when I read it last, already sympathizing with her dire plight, but it definitely hits even harder now that I’m a parent and can more easily see myself in that frantic and helpless position in the narrative as well.

Trisha has a portable radio that she uses to listen to baseball games to help distract her and lend her courage, which leads to her imagining that her favorite Red Sox player is there with her to offer advice. As she grows feverish and delirious, she finds it more and more difficult to separate the fantasy from reality in her mind, whilst also becoming convinced that there’s some supernatural presence stalking after her. And really, who’s to say that there isn’t, out there alone in the dark?

The book doesn’t commit one way or another to the truth of what she senses, which strikes me as the correct note here. You could read it as a real primordial force that she’s stirred to waking, or as a metaphor like Tom Gordon himself that her tired subconscious is throwing out to interpret and guide her through the more earthly danger. She’s easy to cheer for under either interpretation — soberly mature about her situation while still acting her age, and resourceful without ever crossing over into cloyingly plucky. Having such an engaging main character is of critical importance, since we spend so many pages in her head without anyone else to bounce off of. But King handles that with aplomb, keeping us rooted to the fourth-grader’s side all throughout her long ordeal.

[Content warning for racism, ableism, gun violence, mention of child sexual abuse, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Caged by Una McCormack

Book #120 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Caged by Una McCormack

A solid Doctor Who adventure, mostly notable for the entirely non-humanoid cast outside of the Fifteenth Doctor and his companion Ruby Sunday. That’s the sort of approach I love to see from the wider canon of this franchise, taking advantage of the freedom from visual budget constraints to go wild with the creator’s imagination. Why shouldn’t our Time Lord hero encounter hulking many-limbed intelligent beings and smaller furry ones that look like guinea pigs? It’s also nice to see an alien abduction story without a human element in the relevant power dynamic: one species covertly studying another and ultimately getting called out for it and forced to recognize their research subjects as people too.

But all that aside, this novel never rises past the general level of competence to something special for me. The protagonists feel like a generic TARDIS team rather than anything informed by the season 1 writing or Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s performances therein, to the point where I’m honestly not sure whether author Una McCormack was able to watch those episodes before filing this book with the BBC. There aren’t any significant additions to the series continuity or insights into the major characters here, nor any particularly dire straits or brilliant solutions executed by the Doctor. No clever plotting or distinctive narrative voice. It’s just straightforward Doctor Who — which isn’t the worst way to spend a few hours, especially with Bonnie Langford narrating the audiobook, but isn’t really much worth highlighting in the end.

Oh… and this is a truly minor detail, but I don’t understand what exactly the title is supposed to refer to, either.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Orphan Black: Echoes, season 1

TV #36 of 2024:

Orphan Black: Echoes, season 1

So far a pretty underwhelming sequel series. In fact, I’d say there are two wholly separate strands of criticism that can be launched at this new show: it is both a generic dull techno-conspiracy thriller with plot holes aplenty, and it is a poor fit for the particular franchise that it finds itself attached to.

Plotwise, the original Orphan Black was rarely anything special either, but it was enlivened tremendously by Tatiana Maslany’s chameleonic performance playing all the different clones, especially once the writers started leaning into those scenes of her acting opposite herself and/or impersonating her other roles (Cosima pretending to be Alison, Sarah pretending to be Rachel, etc). But the story around the characters was never very strong, and Echoes is sunk without a similar talent to anchor it. Reportedly Maslany was going to appear in a single episode this season before scheduling conflicts prevented even that, but I’m baffled at the idea of returning to this IP without any set of clone ‘sestras’ at its heart.

Instead our star Krysten Ritter plays only two people, one of whom is limited to a few flashbacks, and neither the acting nor the directing renders the pair too distinctive from one another (or from previous Ritter roles like Jessica Jones, for that matter). While her Lucy is part of a new line of clones, they’re staggered in age and so are performed by separate actresses throughout. Ritter and Amanda Fix, the younger actress playing a teen variant of her, are fine together, but they don’t offer nearly that same frisson of seeing one skilled actor embody totally different individuals from scene to scene. They’re never tasked with impersonating each other either, which removes another key element of enjoyment from the Orphan Black repertoire.

So presenting this as a follow-up to the old 2013-2017 program is a strange decision. Technically, yes: one of the main characters in Echoes is a now-adult Kira Manning, navigating life and scientific ethics 50 years after all the drama with her off-screen mom and aunts. Felix and Delphine each make cameo appearances (in some unintentionally hilarious old-age makeup) to further link the two series. But why would anyone feel this was an interesting continuation without any Maslany-like wizardry to distract us from the threadbare scripts?

And the plot here is dire. The villain’s plan is nebulous, the conspiracy aspect is nonsensical, the feminist themes aren’t developed in much depth, and no one’s motivations are particularly well-grounded beyond the protagonists trying to learn the truth behind their origins (which we know from the start anyway because, again, this is Orphan Black). One person fakes their own death midway through the year in order to be a hidden asset later on, and then just… isn’t seen or mentioned again for the remaining episodes. Lucy’s boyfriend gets stuck in the unenviable position of being a perpetual wet blanket, which is both a reasonable reaction to his partner having to take him and his kid on the run to avoid hired killers and not one that’s especially fun to watch on repeat. At least Kira’s arc with her wife provides a complex queer romance akin to Cosima/Delphine, which is meaningfully rare on the TV landscape but not enough on its own to salvage the rest of the narrative.

Nothing really gets resolved, and the whole thing ends on a frustrating violent murder and a sudden cliffhanger, presumably to help gin up interest in the network renewing the enterprise. At this point, though, I think they should just cut their losses and cancel it.

[Content warning for gaslighting, drug abuse, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆