The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Strong Female Character by Fern Brady

Book #24 of 2024:

Strong Female Character by Fern Brady

I’m not familiar with author Fern Brady’s comedy work, but she’s written a heartfelt and eye-opening memoir about her experiences as a woman on the autism spectrum: how getting that diagnosis as an adult in her thirties both helped her navigate her life going forward and explained elements from her younger years that had never made sense before. While hers is very much a personal narrative, including anecdotes about her working-class Scottish Catholic upbringing, troubles at university, and temporary career as an exotic dancer, she accompanies her account of how her condition has affected these events with facts she’s since learned about neurodivergence in general, such as how it’s under-recognized in women and girls, where it manifests differently than classical male-skewed textbook descriptions.

For Brady, being autistic has meant feeling overstimulated by loud environments and other sensory issues, finding comfort in routines and corresponding panic at unexpected interruptions, having difficulty interpreting social cues, white lies, and unspoken implications, and occasionally erupting into violence — at herself, at other people, and at her physical surroundings — when put under too much stress. Even today, she regularly has trouble asking for help or understanding things that seem to come intuitively to others. Throughout her childhood and early adulthood, these reactions were chalked up to her being an odd kid (true!) or just obstinate (false!), with the expectation that eventually, the writer would settle down and conform to the world around her. Instead, she has remained steadfastly herself, coming through some significant traumas to finally share her story with us here. It’s well worth a listen, whether you can directly relate to the mental and behavioral patterns she describes or not.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, homophobia, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harm, domestic abuse, pedophilia, and rape.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: In the Company of Gentlemen by Victoria Goddard

Book #23 of 2024:

In the Company of Gentlemen by Victoria Goddard

I’ve been bouncing around the timeline of author Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds cozy fantasy series, the volumes of which are interconnected but pretty forgiving of any specific reading order. This novella recounts one particular tale of the Red Company, her infamous band of outlaw folk heroes: the time that expert swordsman Damian Raskae defeated one-hundred-and-forty-nine enemy combatants in back-to-back duels, an incident that’s been referenced in some of the writer’s other works. We learn about it here from the mouth of his final opponent that day, who is telling the story long after the Fall of Astandalas, when the magical realms that made up that Empire became inaccessible to one another, time grew a bit fuzzy, and many such events passed into legend.

It’s fine, but relatively straightforward in plot — we know the outcome before it begins, and it’s easy to guess the twist that one of the onlookers hearing the recitation has their own relevant history to eventually share. The most interesting element is the minor arc that the protagonist gets in the backstory, explaining how he was an underhanded cynic back then but was encouraged to start believing in honor and beauty again in the wake of the encounter. That’s a lovely grace note, but it’s not enough to elevate this title into the class of its saga’s best.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Star Beast by Gary Russell

Book #22 of 2024:

Doctor Who: The Star Beast by Gary Russell

Novelizations are a bit of an odd genre in terms of their target audience, especially in this day and age when the original piece of media that’s being adapted is generally accessible to all. (Decades ago, buying or renting a movie / show could be either expensive or impossible, and so low-cost novelized versions of those stories filled more of a clear marketplace gap.) For the recent line of Doctor Who books based on specific TV episodes, I tend to assume a given title isn’t being read by anyone who hasn’t already seen the adventure on-screen, and so the question turns to why we’d seek out this alternate format. And the plausible answer to that, I think, is that there’s an implicit promise that the new iteration contains something extra that will deepen our enjoyment of the work when revisited in this fashion.

Doctor Who: The Star Beast, author Gary Russell’s adaptation of the first Fourteenth Doctor special from last year — script by Russell T. Davies, loosely based on a 1980 comic strip series by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons — isn’t an obvious success by that metric. There are a few bonus interludes, and more character interiority in the third-person omniscient narration, but ultimately I wouldn’t say that they add much to the overall experience of the tale. There’s also been no attempt to tweak any elements from the filmed version to retroactively improve them, as was the case in the novelization of 2005’s episode “Rose” or 2013’s “The Day of the Doctor,” both of which were published in 2018. Perhaps if this novel had likewise been written later, rather than rushed out the same week as the episode aired on television, it would have been able to factor in the critical reception and make minor adjustments — like not telling the Time Lord hero who was very recently played by Jodie Whittaker and has demonstrated a pretty nuanced grasp on gender fluidity that as a man he couldn’t possibly understand something, for example.

Plotwise, it’s as fun as ever, showing the Doctor getting used to the old David Tennant face again and reuniting him with his former companion Donna Noble, whose memory was wiped for science-fiction reasons at the end of their time together. This story functions to reverse that fate and send them off in the TARDIS once more, all while dealing with a crashed spaceship and an interstellar conflict arriving at earth’s doorstep. It’s better to watch than to read, though.

[Content warning for gun violence and transphobia including deadnaming.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Book of Magic by John Peel

Book #21 of 2024:

Book of Magic by John Peel (Diadem #3)

Somewhat surprisingly, this third Diadem novel wraps up the major plot arc that’s been driving the action thus far, and from what I can recall, things are pretty episodic from here on out. One wonders if the series was originally planned as a simple trilogy, though author John Peel would ultimately go on to write another nine sequels after this.

Like the first entry, this title feels overly busy, as if it could have benefited from stretching its story out over additional pages or even multiple volumes. We initially find our heroes on a new planet, Dondar, where they befriend a trio of unicorns and face a repetitive and easily-vanquished string of elemental constructs (a flaming being that they rob of air, a watery giant that they turn into mud and then bake with their own fireballs, and so on). At this point, the magical threats don’t register as particularly challenging, and even the wizard who’s been sending out these avatars falls without much of a fight once they reach his stronghold.

The back half of the book is significantly better, and would have earned four stars from me if I were rating it independently. At the central nexus of the universe, the teenagers finally meet the gloating arch-villain who’s been drawing them onwards this whole time, getting answers to some of the mysteries that have accompanied their strange interdimensional journey. He proves a much worthier foe for them, and even after he’s defeated, a further twist pulls the rug out from under us again with revelations about the children’s connection to the tyrannical previous rulers of the Diadem. It sets up some great hero moments for the young magic-users, and also works to rehabilitate their guide Oracle, who turns out to be a rather fun character once he’s been freed from the curse that kept him speaking in unhelpful rhyming couplets until now.

That final sequence clarifies and dismisses the bizarre riddles the protagonists have been encountering all along too, which have never really worked for me as a reader. For some reason we’ll continue to see similar codes and rebuses for a while yet after this — either Peel or his publishers erroneously thought they were fun, I suppose — but they thankfully do become less frequent before dropping off entirely.

The tale concludes with the three friends returning to Dondar, but only for a sudden cliffhanger that the elder unicorn is in unspecified danger. It’s kind of a silly way to end the present adventure… which is yet another reason I wouldn’t rate the novel as a whole too highly, despite rather enjoying its dramatic climax.

[Content warning for fatphobia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Book #20 of 2024:

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

Author Jesmyn Ward’s usual lyrical prose is on fine display in this latest novel, and it wouldn’t surprise me if other readers enjoy the surrounding work more than I have. It’s certainly a brutal read, depicting a young enslaved woman in the antebellum south who experiences the horrors of her home plantation, her mother’s sale / disappearance from her life, the sexual interest of the slaveholder who is also her father, a tortuous cross-country march to be put up at a slave market herself, an invasive medical examination, and more. She responds to all this by sinking into her memories of old family stories and invoking the guardian spirit that is said to have protected her foremothers, as well as interpreting her ordeals as parallel to Dante’s Inferno (a quote from which gives the book its title). This adds a certain element of magical realism to the text, although as the supernatural force is seen by no one else and does little but speak to the protagonist, I suppose the question of its reality is left as an open ambiguity.

Individual passages are striking and skillfully expose the anguish and raw cruelty that slavery in this nation empowered, and I know that Ward worked on this project in the aftermath of her husband’s death in early 2020, which also coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. So there were definitely some weighty emotions that she was processing here, but as a reader, I haven’t connected fully with the resulting plot as a whole. I felt similarly lukewarm towards the writer’s ghost story Sing, Unburied, Sing, but loved her more grounded tale Salvage the Bones and her memoir Men We Reaped, so perhaps the lesson here for me is to seek out only Ward’s more realistic premises going forward. Nevertheless, her talent is obvious and I imagine this particular creation will find a passionate audience in time.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 10

TV #6 of 2024:

Classic Doctor Who, season 10

Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor still has another year to go before he regenerates into Tom Baker, but this penultimate run feels like a farewell tour for his era in so many ways. The final story, The Green Death, culminates in the exit of costar Katy Manning as Jo Grant following three full seasons on the show, in what I would easily call Classic Who’s best-written companion departure yet. Roger Delgado’s original incarnation of the Master also takes an unplanned early bow here, as the actor died in a tragic accident shortly after filming his scenes for Frontier in Space. (The series would eventually recast the role, but not for several more years.) And the delightful opening serial The Three Doctors, besides celebrating the program’s history and forming a model for all multi-Doctor reunion specials to come, officially concludes the hero’s exile on earth, giving him free reign over the TARDIS controls and restoring him to the vagabond status he enjoyed in his previous lives. The Brigadier’s UNIT headquarters will continue to be a home base of sorts for a while longer, but that element phases out as an integral part of the show’s DNA from this point forward.

The season dips in quality a little midway through, but it starts and ends rather strongly, and is overall a fitting last showcase for the spunky Jo and her warm relationship with her friend the Time Lord. Bring on Sarah Jane and Three’s final days, next.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
PLANET OF THE DALEKS (10×15 – 10×20)

★★★☆☆
FRONTIER IN SPACE (10×9 – 10×14)

★★★★☆
CARNIVAL OF MONSTERS (10×5 – 10×8)
THE THREE DOCTORS (10×1 – 10×4)

★★★★★
THE GREEN DEATH (10×21 – 10×26)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★★☆

Book Review: By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie

Book #19 of 2024:

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie (Tommy and Tuppence #4)

The year is 1968, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are no longer the “young adventurers” that they were originally dubbed in their 1922 debut. While not quite old enough to land in Ms. Marple‘s cohort — Tommy even has an elderly aunt that they visit in this title — the couple have reached the point where they share with that more famous Agatha Christie creation a tendency to be overlooked and underestimated by the criminals of the world. Thankfully, they retain their playful Nick and Nora banter, and it’s interesting that they’ve been allowed to age and change at all, given how Marple and Poirot remain so static throughout their own two series. (Of course, that effect would presumably be more impressive had it developed gradually across time, in a more extensive sequence of Beresford stories. Instead, over a quarter-century has passed between their last adventure and this one.)

It is fun to check in on the protagonists again, and to see them apply their respective investigation styles against a puzzling set of circumstances involving a disappearing resident at the aunt’s nursing home. Tuppence makes intuitive leaps and rushes into danger as quickly as she did in their younger days, whilst Tommy gathers the facts more slowly and jumps in to save her just in time. Unfortunately, the plot at hand is rather coincidence-heavy, from the characters’ initial involvement in the case, to the heroine recognizing in a painting the house she saw once from a passing train, to a certain doll that falls out of the chimney right when she happens to be visiting, to her husband spotting an intelligence agent he knows trailing a suspect, and so on. It’s also closer to a crime thriller than a proper mystery, which rarely showcases this author at her best. Still, it’s entertaining and likely endearing for any readers of the earlier tales.

[Content warning for child murder.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Prodigy, season 1

TV #5 of 2024:

Star Trek: Prodigy, season 1

This animated program gets better as its first year goes on, but I remain confused about who exactly the target audience is supposed to be. On the one hand: the tone is fairly YA, the majority of the main characters are young teens (or the alien equivalent), and they’re introduced as residing in the Delta Quadrant, having never heard of Starfleet, which gives an excuse for the scripts to explain things like replicators and holodecks whenever they arise. It feels like those elements are pitched to be maximum-friendly to kids and other franchise newcomers, but that’s hard to square with the show’s status as a de-facto sequel to Star Trek: Voyager, featuring the first TV appearances for Janeway and Chakotay — each played by their original actor — since that series ended over two decades earlier. There’s also an episode this season that’s built around the gimmicky fan-service of bringing back hologram versions of Spock, Uhura, Scotty, Odo, and Beverly Crusher — a bizarre assortment that’s inelegantly achieved via repurposed dialogue from old episodes and movies for the first four. It’s clunky and weird even for someone like me who actually knows those characters, and I can’t imagine it playing well for anyone who doesn’t, at any age.

Another holographic difficulty for fans: the final addition to the core cast is a digital version of Kathryn Janeway, who has supposedly inherited all of her human self’s memories. But she never mentions any specifics of her extensive travels while lost in the Delta Quadrant, or addresses how it feels to find herself there again. Nor do we see any Delta-specific species she’d have met before like the Kazon or the Ocampa, which strikes me as a sad waste of the setting. Voyager as a series also took seriously the existential angst of its own hologram crew member the EMH Doctor, whom the real Captain Janeway got to know rather well over the course of their adventures together. That’s the sort of detail that should really inform how holo-Janeway feels about her existence, but it likewise never comes up. I think I’d feel a lot more warmly towards this show overall if it had remained the blank slate that it originally seems, and left out all of the half-baked continuity ties.

Setting all that aside, the basic story here is that a motley group of child outcasts find a crashed starship and use it to escape their asteroid slave camp, initially planning to return the Protostar to the Federation and enroll as proper cadets before discovering that they’re carrying a malicious weapon on-board that will destroy other vessels if they even so much as open a communications channel. Misunderstanding inevitably ensues, and there’s some fun scrambling when they become wanted criminals but can’t risk speaking up to set the record straight and clear their names. The whole thing very much feels like Star Trek’s spin on recent Star Wars cartoons like Rebels or The Bad Batch, which isn’t a bad effect to aim for at all.

The heroes are amusing, give or take how you feel about this latest Jason Mantzoukas role to have him say his own name in third-person a lot. The supporting voice cast is kind of squandered, though, especially John Noble and Daveed Diggs, and even after finishing this entire first run, I don’t really understand why it’s called Prodigy… a particularly odd detail given how the villain keeps addressing his daughter as the similar-sounding word “progeny” throughout! So although the project has grown on me across these 20 episodes and I’m glad it eventually got picked up for a second season on Netflix (after some behind-the-scenes troubles with Paramount+), I can’t say that this debut year has been a resounding success.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Eternal Return of Clara Hart by Louise Finch

Book #18 of 2024:

The Eternal Return of Clara Hart by Louise Finch

This isn’t my first time-loop story — or even the first YA book I’ve read where a teenager keeps reliving the same party where a classmate gets killed, and in the process gradually realizes that their clique of popular friends are actually pretty awful. (That would be Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, a vastly inferior spin on the same general premise.) But within that space, debut author Louise Finch has crafted a taut psychological horror piece, digging deeply into the protagonist’s raw anguish and despair over his seeming inability to ever alter fate.

See, Spence is still reeling from the death of his mother one year ago today, when he first witnesses Clara’s own tragic accident. But in the morning, she’s back alive and it’s the beginning of the same day all over again, with everyone repeating their old behaviors just as we’d expect from the genre. Only not quite, since like in the Netflix show Russian Doll, the cycle appears to be somehow degrading over time. The same injuries start causing more damage, people develop sudden nosebleeds they didn’t have before, a new thunderstorm rolls in, and certain electric lights flicker and then go out entirely. It’s a really creepy addition to the familiar plot beats, and one that neatly mirrors the narrator’s increasingly frantic mental state.

As he repeatedly tries and fails to save the girl, we learn a little bit more about the characters’ history together. The reader probably figures out that she likes him before the boy does, but that’s to Finch’s credit for her sharp characterization skills, which totally nail the tentative teenage banter. Nevertheless, I should be clear that this isn’t a love story. Instead, it’s a bleak look at the potential for accountability in toxic lad / bro culture, centered on the hero’s dawning realization that one of his rugby mates has been drugging and raping their fellow students. Even when he manages to rescue the one from the title whom he’s developing mutual feelings for, someone else just winds up hurt in her place, and the whole thing resets anyway.

I’m guessing the conclusion to this novel might prove divisive for a number of reasons, but personally, I think it nimbly splits the difference between an unearned happy ending and a hopeless declaration that growth and redemption are inherently impossible. It’s a complicated topic, but that’s only fitting a project that name-checks the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so extensively. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for this writer’s work going forward.

[Content warning for underage drug and alcohol abuse.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 4

TV #4 of 2024:

Seinfeld, season 4

I’ve been fairly lukewarm on this sitcom up till now, so I’m happy to find that this 1992-1993 season is much more my speed. The previous year gets the ball rolling with a little bit of light continuity from week to week, but this run leans fully into that element with several significantly serialized plots. The biggest of these, of course, is the development of a fictional NBC series called Jerry, based on the life and standup routines of the character Jerry Seinfeld. That premise allows for a lot of great meta-humor, with everyone’s confusion over “a show about nothing” and terrible suggestions for how to improve it functioning to both poke fun at Seinfeld itself and simultaneously thumb a nose at all the critics.

The callbacks are getting funnier too, rewarding a close viewing rather than adopting the then-dominant approach for network television of assuming that the audience isn’t necessarily going to tune in to catch every episode. You won’t be totally lost here if you miss an installment or are watching the whole program out-of-order in syndication, but at this point it feels like the writers are crafting some of their best material for the crowd that’s loyal enough to appreciate it. For the first time, I can see how the DNA of this series might have inspired later comedies like Arrested Development that I love.

The scripts are also starting to lean into the idea that the central group who make up our main cast would be particularly awful people in the eyes of any sane outsider, which is a route I’ve seen plenty of subsequent sitcoms like Community take as they age as well. As recently as season 3, the comedian and his friends were mostly lying to make themselves look better to their respective employers or romantic partners. This time out, they’re forgetting to file the paperwork to stop an acquaintance from getting deported and arguing that it’s fine to park in a handicapped space if they’re only going into the store for a few minutes. (Such beats, which tend to place marginalized individuals as victims and punchlines to the humor, also speak to how the show itself has aged somewhat problematically and often lacks the nuance of its more modern successors.)

As far as individual episodes go, “The Contest” is a stone-cold classic, although I personally prefer the orchestrated chaos of half-hours like “The Airport” or “The Movie” that shuffle the players around in a sequence of ironic close misses. Overall, though, it’s probably the larger arcs that I’ll remember most fondly from this stretch.

★★★★☆