The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★☆☆

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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.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Tower at the Edge of the World by Victoria Goddard

Book #17 of 2024:

The Tower at the Edge of the World by Victoria Goddard

This 2014 story was one of the first titles published in author Victoria Goddard’s massive Nine Worlds fantasy setting, and is also one of its earliest to take place chronologically. It’s relatively short at 62 pages in paperback — it apparently began as a prologue for the effort that eventually became last year’s Derring-Do for Beginners — but since it’s only available as a standalone volume, I figured I would go ahead and review it as such. (It all evens out, as most people’s entry into this loose saga is probably The Hands of The Emperor, which weighs in at over 900 pages in hardback itself.)

If you’ve read Hands and recall a certain character’s backstory, you will likely soon recognize the protagonist of this tale, although we find him here as a young man without any sort of name. He lives alone in the titular desolate structure, going about a strange daily routine that appears to function Omelas-like to keep the magic of the Empire functioning even while he is kept apart from its wonders. This carries shades of The Slow Regard of Silent Things to me, and is pleasant to simply observe a person’s quiet existence in all its peculiar minutiae. As we watch, the hero drifts around his library and meager living quarters dreaming of adventure, too sheltered to even identify his patent loneliness.

One day, of course, something happens to jolt our Rapunzel from that complacency, but the plot as such maintains its cozy and low-stakes appeal while he undergoes a subtle transformation and grows belatedly curious about the lands and peoples beyond his horizons. By the end, the lad has left his familiar tower and struck out for parts unknown… or partially known to returning readers, I suppose.

These peripheral Nine Worlds books are sometimes hard to review without spoilers, and this one ends with the revelation of a particular piece of continuity that may or may not surprise you, depending on which other volumes you’ve tackled first. On the other hand, any folks who start their journey here will be able to enjoy a certain element of dramatic irony in Goddard’s other works that’s only accessible to the rest of us in hindsight or on an eventual reread. Like Discworld, there’s really no wrong angle of approach, in my opinion.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

Book #16 of 2024:

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

This collection of short stories (originally published in 1995, then revised in 2005 with two additional entries) was the last work of author Octavia E. Butler’s fiction that I hadn’t yet read, so it’s been a bittersweet experience for me this week to finally check it off my list. But that’s Butler’s writing in a nutshell anyway: an intoxicating blend of the acrid and the wonderful, using the speculative toolkit of science-fiction to raise challenging questions about consent and other power dynamics for marginalized peoples under occupation of a stronger force. Across these titles, there are clear echoes of such themes that she explored at greater length in her novels, but none of them feel exactly like a repeat or a false start. In fact, the horror elements often work better for me here, where the pessimistic nihilism inherent to the dystopian genre seems presented as a purposeful thesis statement and we do not have to share the headspace of any sympathetic rapists for too long.

The book also contains two nonfiction essays, one a miniature autobiography and the other a short advice piece on honing one’s authorial craft / career. These understandably aren’t quite as gripping as the narrative contents, but they still represent an interesting look into the late writer’s mind, as do the brief afterwords she’s included to accompany each tale. Of those stories themselves, I like some more than others, but at worst I am merely lukewarm on the closing installment “The Book of Martha.” Overall I think this would be a good introduction to Butler’s style for newcomers, and a definite treat for any readers who are already fans.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, eugenics, body horror, self-harm, torture, rape, incest, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Book of Signs by John Peel

Book #15 of 2024:

Book of Signs by John Peel (Diadem #2)

This sequel retains the juvenile feel befitting its middle-grade audience, but it’s enough of an improvement over the previous volume that I’ll bump my rating up from three stars to four. The story is more straightforward, with a minimum degree of recap for readers who skipped the series debut: young teenagers Score, Helaine, and Pixel have been drawn from their respective worlds deeper into the cosmological Diadem, to a succession of new realms where their nascent magical powers grow ever stronger. They spend the entirety of this second adventure on the planet Rawn, facing a variety of classic fantasy creatures like goblins, centaurs, and trolls, all of whom they struggle to defeat without killing. That commitment to preserving intelligent life is a theme that wasn’t really explicit in the first novel, but it fits the heroes well and winds up earning them some valuable unexpected allies.

The children are also functioning as more of a cohesive team now, while still receiving plenty of individual moments to shine according to their particular archetypal strengths — tomboy Helaine fighting bravely with her sword, street kid Score using sneaky tactics to outflank their enemies, and blue-skinned VR adept Pixel intuiting greater strategic matters. I like how none of this is exactly a repeat of what we’ve seen before, especially when it comes to the shapeshifting wizard in charge of this latest domain, whose castle they’re attempting to reach. She’s mentioned but unseen in her true form for most of the plot, leading to some justified paranoia of her having infiltrated the group, which the protagonists consciously choose to set aside in favor of trusting their friends. Again, it’s a great take-home message that author John Peel has crafted here, coupled with a rejection of bigotry against someone over an identity feature like their species that they cannot control.

On the downside, we continue to get a sequence of tiresome riddles and codes for the magic-users to crack, in addition to the introduction of sorcerous gems that interrupt the way the characters speak, rendering their dialogue written backwards, or without vowels, and so on — more of a boring exercise for the reader to decipher than an actual difficulty within the scene. That silliness remains my least-favorite aspect of these books, and I’m looking forward to the point when it finally drops away. But luckily, it isn’t enough to detract much from the quality of the rest of this tale.

★★★★☆

Book Review: What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher

Book #14 of 2024:

What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator by Barbara Butcher

A morbidly fascinating look at an unusual job, but a bit too bogged down in unrelated asides on author Barbara Butcher’s personal life, especially near the end. (A little bit of memoir in such a work is fine, and it’s certainly relevant to hear how her alcoholism and mental health struggles originally led her to the coroner profession. But the politics surrounding her eventual departure and her new intended career path as a television actress are a bizarre note to close on, even if I hadn’t gotten curious and learned on IMDb that her only credit was in the failed pilot she mentions here. Springing the fact that she was on the scene to process the devastation of September 11th in the last quarter of the text is also an odd choice, as that topic could easily have received an entire book-length treatment in and of itself.)

Still, the information on the cases that the writer investigated is interesting, if pretty gruesome. Homicides, suicides, accidents, and natural causes: Butcher — that name! — saw it all in stomach-churning detail as she was tasked with assigning each death in her New York City precinct into one of those categories. She has insights to share on the nature of violent crimes and what can happen to a corpse biologically over time, but she also captures the human element of what it was like for her to face that bleakness regularly for a living (no pun intended). She reminds us how close we all are each day to a twist of fate that could kill us with our affairs out of order, and she rages against the despair brought on by murders she’s seen go unsolved or without enough evidence to prosecute and convict the apparently-guilty party.

There’s something quietly moving and dignified in the lives she encounters only at their terminus, but this title as a whole could have used another pass of editing to truly shine. Although it succeeds at conveying its true-crime subject matter, it’s repetitive and chaotically-organized throughout and ultimately doesn’t build to much of a grand statement or theme. I liked it, but didn’t love it.

[Content warning for pedophilia, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

Book #13 of 2024:

The Woman in Me by Britney Spears

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. The personal story that Britney Spears has to tell is a moving one, centering the pain she felt over decades of mistreatment in the music industry and the public eye. Between releasing a succession of chart-topping hits, she was emotionally abused by the men in her life, including romantic partners like Justin Timberlake and Kevin Federline, and ultimately trapped in a restrictive conservatorship managed by her dishonest father, who profited tremendously off her talent while giving her a pittance of income and barring her from seeing her children. The news media was likewise horrible, publicly sexualizing her from a young age, gleefully speculating about her love life and mental health issues, and chasing her with cameras every time she left the house.

Much of that information had already trickled out before the author published this book last year — I think the only piece that surprised me was the bombshell that Timberlake pressured her into having a dangerous at-home abortion in 2000, when they were both still teenagers — but it’s valuable to hear it straight from the person most affected and understand why our paparazzi-fueled celebrity gossip culture is vastly overdue for a reckoning, even if things have likely improved somewhat since the experiences that Britney relates.

The writing itself isn’t particularly exceptional or insightful, and it’s hard not to compare this title to Jennette McCurdy’s searing work I’m Glad My Mom Died, a far sharper show-business memoir that came out around the same time. But Spears has been a household name for most of my life, and reading about the dark side of that fame in her own words (give or take a probable ghostwriter) does carry a certain undeniable power.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Through the Groves by Anne Hull

Book #12 of 2024:

Through the Groves by Anne Hull

In this memoir, author Anne Hull paints an evocative picture of her childhood in central Florida — one I found poignantly familiar to my own, despite growing up three decades later and about 100 miles east of her. The orange groves already giving way to new construction, the ever-present mosquitoes and heavy humidity, the surprise encounters with alligators who thankfully weren’t feeling hungry enough to lunge right then… It’s all rendered tangible again for me upon reading these pages, even though I haven’t lived in the state for many years now myself. I’m even a bit nostalgic for the Publix chain of regional supermarkets and the faded highway signs she describes for Yeehaw Junction, a name none of my non-Floridian friends ever seem to believe is real.

Less successful for me is the larger thrust of the work. Is it specifically trying to recapture a bygone halcyon day, either for the writer or her setting? There’s not much here to suggest how things have changed after the events described, and while the book concludes with the deaths of Hull’s parents in her early adulthood, that isn’t framed as particularly reorienting for her life. A minor theme throughout concerns her status as a rural tomboy, but she doesn’t explicitly address her sexuality as a queer woman until the last 10% of this pretty slim title. And although we get a filtered child’s view of adult mental health troubles (including both a neighborhood flasher and a terrifying sequence when her father takes out a loaded gun in front of her), that’s not a topic that’s brought into focus and explored at much length.

In the end, while I see much to connect with in the author’s local experiences, I would not classify this as an exceptionally great example of its particular genre.

[Content warning for homophobia, racism, and alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆