The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 2

TV #51 of 2023:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 2

The cast still does a fine job emoting with the material they’re given in this second season of Star Trek: Discovery, but there aren’t enough smaller personal moments to convincingly sell the relationships before they wind up in crisis. It also doesn’t help that I like science-fiction primarily for the plot, and everything here is even more of a mess on that front. To some extent it emulates the giddy propulsion of the show’s first year, but that story burned through ideas in the service of its big twisty reveals, which were fun to see deployed even when predicted in advance. This time, we don’t get plot twists so much as a sequence of sudden developments that spring out of nowhere and are never adequately explained. Mysterious signals in space; visions of angels; hallucinations of a dead friend no one else can see — what is this, Battlestar Galactica?

We do learn the reasons behind all of those events after a while, but it generally boils down to a rogue A.I. and a time-travel predestination paradox, neither of which holds up well under logical scrutiny. The villain of the piece is the most frustrating, in both its motivations and the means of its eventual defeat, though that’s probably too spoilerish to describe in more detail in this review. Yet the build-up to that threat is absurd, too. The previous finale teased the arrival of the USS Enterprise, and it’s quickly confirmed here that this is the ship pre-Kirk, with his predecessor Christopher Pike beaming aboard Discovery and taking over as acting captain. So we don’t get the fan-service of a recast William Shatner / Chris Pine, but his loyal lieutenant Spock should still be present in this era. And he does eventually arrive in the form of new actor Ethan Peck, but there are no fewer than four fake-outs first, lifting audience expectations only to have someone else step off the transporter bay instead.

This is a series that just can’t commit to what it wants to be. The writers could choose to either fold existing major characters like Spock into the narrative organically — these are the adventures that the Vulcan had before TOS! — or else have those figures function as quick fun cameos — check out who else was around for this! — but this year tries to chart a middle course that really doesn’t work for me, perpetually delaying the foregone conclusion of the man’s appearance while talking up how important he is to the action unfolding in the meantime. It’s an approach that already had dubious success back in the 1984 movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and is even less effective for the franchise to repeat decades later.

Speaking of diminishing returns, Section 31 plays a rather large role too, less clandestine and thematically opposed to the nobility of Starfleet than ever. The concept of the dark underbelly to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian dreams once had real bite to it, but at this point, they just seem to be a faction like any other and are apparently known widely across the fleet. Maybe that’s the next item that Star Trek: Discovery will retcon, as there is a noticeable effort this season to try and address some of the things that made the previous run fit poorly as a prequel to established canon. (Personally, I like the idea that Pike is a bit of a luddite who insists that the shiny new technology on Discovery doesn’t have a place on Enterprise, which is a goofy but reasonable workaround to why we never saw all those bells and whistles in the 1960s program. But the ultimate declaration that it’s now become treason for anyone to mention certain topics like the spore drive is too silly by far.)

In the end, the Discovery narrowly escapes in a way that strands it somewhere unexpected, which I guess means we’re getting a Voyager sort of premise beginning in season 3. That’s a retooling that will require the creative team to start over largely from scratch, which can only be a good thing after all the misfires here.

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

★★☆☆☆

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Movie Review: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)

Movie #6 of 2023:

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)

After ten smash albums over the past seventeen years — roughly half her life to date — the country-turned-pop artist Taylor Swift has amassed a body of work well worthy of retrospective. That’s the motivation behind her recent Eras tour, and so too this concert film, which was recorded over several of those shows and faithfully channels the superstar’s charismatic act on-stage. It’s probably still a poor substitute for the energy of seeing the spectacle live in a sold-out stadium, but the movie version does a fine job at bringing its subject to life, particularly in capturing her facial expressions, choreography, and other details that wouldn’t have been nearly so easy to spot from the typical venue seating. The singer knows how to play to the cameras as well as the crowd, and there’s a resulting intimacy in her performance that’s as magnetic as the impressive string of showstopping numbers from across her career.

The background sets and stage effects are imaginatively stunning too, changing along with Taylor’s costume to mark her various ‘eras’ over the course of the affair. That organization and the accompanying song selection represent my only real critique of the project: while the picks from each individual album are generally grouped together, the records themselves don’t progress chronologically (or in any other logical way I could determine) as the concert goes on, which makes it harder to track her evolving musical style as I assumed was kind of the whole point here. There’s also a heavy recency bias, with for example six tracks each from her later albums Folklore and Midnights, while poor Speak Now gets only two if you include what plays over the credits, and her self-titled country debut is represented just once. That adds a certain unevenness to the evening, which might not have been so noticeable had not every section been given a dramatic announcement screen demarcating its arrival.

Nevertheless: if you’re any sort of fan of Swift’s music, this is an undeniable treat. It’s an immersive recreation of the concert experience, with no cuts to behind-the-scenes antics or interviews or anything, and while a few songs have apparently been dropped from the filmed setlist, the runtime still comes in at almost three hours of hit after hit. Catching the limited theatrical run is a fun experience in and of itself, with (in my showing at least) a clearly multi-generational audience often singing along or getting up out of their chairs to dance. Granted, three hours of back-to-back Taylor Swift songs presumably self-selects a specific type of viewer anyway, but if that sounds like you, I do recommend finding time for this.

Fun random bonus: perhaps to the chagrin of the middle-schooler chaperone sitting near me, this is the rare PG-13 movie to feature multiple uses of the f-word, as the relevant lyrics from “champagne problems,” “betty,” and “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” have not been censored in any way. The more you know!

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

Book #111 of 2023:

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #10)

I always find it somewhat absurd when one of author Agatha Christie’s detective characters simply happens to stumble over a murder, but this premise has to be in the running for among her most ludicrous. Whilst on vacation, Miss Marple talks to another traveler who mentions having a photograph someone gave him of a likely serial wife-killer: a man who twice, under two different names, had a spouse supposedly attempt suicide and then soon afterward die for real. The person who gifted him the snapshot suspected but could not prove foul play, and he’s just kept it in his wallet as a fun story to share ever since. Upon this particular telling, he goes pale right as he’s about to pull it out to show the old lady, with the implication being that he’s suddenly recognized the murderer nearby. But there are several other men in the vicinity, so even after the chatty fellow himself is shortly killed, she can’t be sure who silenced him — only that presumably, the killer is once again planning to strike down his current partner and didn’t want anyone around who could identify his pattern.

It’s all as convoluted as it sounds, even before getting into the various suspects and their marital relations, and the text is peppered with all sorts of racist characterizations about the local staff at the Caribbean resort. I still like Marple herself as a protagonist, and she’s joined in her sleuthing for part of this novel by an even more elderly gentleman who’s the undisputed cantankerous bright spot of the affair. But overall, I can’t say that it’s one of the writer’s finest mysteries.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Holly by Stephen King

Book #110 of 2023:

Holly by Stephen King

This is the sixth Stephen King story to feature private investigator Holly Gibney, following the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes; Finders Keepers; End of Watch), the novel The Outsider, and the novella If It Bleeds. The previous three entries all found that protagonist and her friends facing off against some sort of supernatural being, so it’s a bit surprising to see this volume return to the saga’s slightly more-grounded crime thriller roots. Granted, the macabre premise is still pretty unrealistic — a pair of elderly cannibalistic serial killers preying undetected on a small community — but it’s firmly wicked as opposed to spooky. There’s a shout-out at one point in the text to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, and this is the kind of plot you might expect to see in that type of series, just with a more sickening degree of psychological horror and gore.

Like many Bosch books — or the Bill Hodges ones, for that matter — there’s no mystery here for readers to solve alongside the detective. We’re instead given the names of the villains and treated to multiple scenes of their foul acts, so that the tension rests squarely on how they’ll be caught, whether their latest victim will survive, and what other damage they’ll cause in the meantime. And they are a creepy couple: two married college professors in their twilight years, outwardly respectable, who have somehow convinced themselves that a diet of human flesh will help keep them young. (In some Stephen King projects, that conjecture might turn out to be true, but here the evidence mostly suggests that they’re deluding themselves, which of course does little to mitigate the terror.) They get to know their targets socially, learn their schedules and waylay them on a dark street sometime, and then lock them in a cell in their basement until it’s time for the butcher’s knife to come out.

By striking only once every few years — freezing the meat and parceling it out slowly as brain parfaits and other such stomach-churning concoctions — they’ve managed to avoid anyone linking those disappearances together, until Holly Gibney is hired to look into the current case by the missing woman’s mother. She’s as fun a character as ever in the ensuing investigation, though her obsessive-compulsive tics and hypochondriac nature are on full display in the era of COVID-19. I know King has gotten criticism from some quarters for his portrayal of the pandemic in this book, but in my opinion, it’s no different from how he’s always allowed the cultural issues of the day to inflect his fiction. The coronavirus was/is a heavily politicized event, in which people’s personal choices like wearing a mask or getting vaccinated represent powerful social signals to everyone around them. It seems fair game, in depicting the world of 2021, to include such touchstones and what they would mean to a person like Holly. Heck, you could even read this and think she’s a flawed antiheroine being unreasonable in her precautions and judgments of others, though my own perspective and what I know of the author’s politics wouldn’t agree.

No, I think King is more revealing in his treatment of the antagonists, sick as they are. They’re older than him by a good decade or so, but his sorrowful descriptions of dealing with an aging body and mind feel rooted in real-life experience and empathy, as does the anger and smug satisfaction at overcoming ageist underestimations. In his mid-seventies, King is still writing some of his very best material, while his invented killers succeed in their own craft by likewise defying expectations of what someone could do at their age. Even once Gibney has them in her sights, she wrongly assumes that they’re covering for, or at worst abetting, some unknown younger relation, rather than being the actual murderers she’s hunting.

Overall the novel is quite sharp, and it picks up steam as it goes along. I think the title is a bit odd — there’s nothing about this particular adventure that makes it strike me as the definitive tale of its heroine or anything, and it seems like it would be a bad place for a fresh reader to start — but that’s not a fault against the work itself. If you can handle the inherent ghoulishness of the subject matter, the cat-and-mouse game between the cannibals and their quirky new adversary is simply superb.

[Content warning for gun violence, rape, suicide, homophobia including slurs, and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson

Book #109 of 2023:

The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

This is the fourth and final ‘Secret Project’ release from author Brandon Sanderson, representing the novels he wrote in his spare time during the early COVID-19 pandemic and later dramatically unveiled via a record-setting Kickstarter for their publication. As perhaps expected, it is much closer in feel (and I would say quality) to its fellow Cosmere adventures Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter than the unrelated offbeat comedy The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. It’s also well-placed at the end of that loose sequence, sending off the entire experiment quite nicely.

The story is set in the cosmere, that interconnected universe that contains many of the writer’s other works, on a spinning world too close to its sun where humanity clings to survival on flying cities that perpetually flee into the night to escape the ravages of the intense solar rays. There a character we’ve met before in The Stormlight Archives appears, on the run from his own dangerous foes, and reluctantly gets caught up in local affairs whilst continuing to look over his shoulder for the much deadlier threat that’s after him. In other words, it’s the timeworn trope of the drifter who comes to town not looking for trouble yet ultimately becoming an unlikely champion for the community, which Sanderson executes with his usual aplomb.

The broader appeal for returning readers is that all of this is set sometime in the future, substantially after the contemporary events unfolding in places like Scadrial and Roshar. (That’s why I won’t spoil the former name of our protagonist, who goes by Nomad here, even though his identity is clear fairly early in the text and the eventual confirmation isn’t played as any kind of twist.) It’s our first official glimpse at this later era, and while the details are largely just intriguing footnotes for now, those are the exact sort of breadcrumbs that have long powered the cottage industry of fans scouring Sanderson’s writing for clues about the larger ongoing narrative and updating the Coppermind wiki accordingly. It’s not my own favorite way of engaging with his fiction — I much prefer the smaller personal scope than the big implied crossovers, at least so far — but it’s still a thrill to see certain pieces clicking into place. If you’ve ever wondered how the shades from the novella Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell fit into the bigger plan for the franchise, this book will help you draw those connections.

But personally, I’m more here for the immediate tale of a weary stranger who forges his own unexpected connections and finds new reasons to keep on fighting another day. The hero and the friends he makes are well-drawn, and their struggles against a tyrant in the inhospitable environment are exciting even outside of any grand serialized implications. An authorial afterword cites the Mad Max films as among the title’s influences, and I can definitely see how elements of Fury Road could have inspired particular scenes and plot developments. Overall a fine read, though probably one requiring a heavy grounding in the relevant cosmere background in order to fully understand and appreciate.

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

★★★★☆

TV Review: Ahsoka, season 1

TV #50 of 2023:

Ahsoka, season 1

This latest Star Wars property is solidly mid-tier for the franchise. I don’t want to downplay that: it’s still really cool that we’re getting big-budget live-action Star Wars shows at all, and this one is better than, say, the latest season of The Mandalorian in terms of providing a logical story arc with meaningful stakes for its characters. The lightsaber fights and other special effects are nice. The worldbuilding breaks some interesting new ground in the New Republic era leading up to the sequel film trilogy. The series just rarely sets its grasp to exceed that level of baseline competence, which is particularly apparent in the wake of the thematic brilliance and pulse-pounding suspense that we got throughout the first year of Andor.

I think this program probably works best for fans of the old Star Wars Rebels cartoon, which ran from 2014 to 2018 on Disney XD. In addition to the title character (who had already appeared in live-action on Mando and its Boba Fett spinoff), the show gives us much of the surviving cast of Rebels as well: Hera, Sabine, and eventually Ezra among the protagonists, and Grand Admiral Thrawn as the big bad villain. (Zeb is meanwhile curiously absent from this reunion, despite his earlier cameo appearance on The Mandalorian proving that he outlived the Empire.) It’s a definite thrill to see them rendered as actual actors, alongside a few other returning touches like purrgil and Loth-cats, and the casting mostly works, though I doubt I’ll ever warm to Rosario Dawson’s more stoic approach to the adult Ahsoka. It’s hard to watch this version of the character and not wish that the original voice actor for the role Ashley Eckstein had gotten to portray her instead, especially given how the show does hand David Tennant and Lars Mikkelsen the parts that they respectively originated themselves.

But I was never more than lukewarm on Rebels overall, which presumably dampens my appreciation for this unofficial sequel project. The animated finale stranded Ezra Bridger and his opponent Thrawn in another galaxy, and so it makes sense that this plot would be all about people finding and rescuing them. But in practice there’s not much meat on that premise, nor any effort to generate Kim Wexler-style tension from the fact that these characters’ fates are all unknown, since none of them appear in the big-screen stories set after this. (It’s plausible Thrawn is right off-camera in the First Order during the movies with Rey, of course, but hardly likely.) The main storyline asks whether the good and/or bad guys will be able to find their friends, which seems a forgone conclusion if you either followed the casting announcements or just have a basic understanding of typical narrative convention. Yet it takes the majority of these eight episodes simply to reach that point, leaving little room for the antagonist to live up to his ruthless genius reputation, particularly for viewers who haven’t met him before.

Similar over-promising and under-delivering can be found all throughout this title. Fans excitedly speculated about seeming mysteries like the identity of one masked figure or another, or the strange power calling out to mercenary Baylan Skoll, only for those elements to be summarily dropped in subsequent weeks as nothing but a tease that might be relevant to some later tale. There are gestures at pieces of mysticism lore like Abeloth or the Mortis gods that might be exciting for a certain sort of audience, but don’t contribute much on-screen. Our first look at another galaxy in this setting, the specifics of which had fueled further fandom theorizing for years, turns out to be a Star Wars-y planet like any other one out there, with nothing especially distinct except for its general inaccessibility. And Ezra and Thrawn, despite being stuck there for a decade now, have minimal new history either together or apart. What have they been doing all this time? Ahsoka the person isn’t interested in asking that question, and Ahsoka the series isn’t interested in answering it.

There are long-standing rumors that a new feature film starring the Disney+ Star Wars characters might be somewhere in the franchise’s future, and it’s easy to see how a program like this could be part of the groundwork for such a venture, setting up an epic showdown against Thrawn’s Imperial remnants as a prequel to The Force Awakens. But the result is a miniseries that doesn’t have much of an identity for itself, most egregiously when it comes to its nominal heroine.

On the other hand: I will grant that it is hard to argue against the sheer coolness factor of — spoiler alert — those zombie stormtroopers in the final episode, not to mention a certain cameo in the previous hour. Three stars for that and for the little nomad alien people, if nothing else.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel

Book #108 of 2023:

Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel

A short but scathing call-out of author David Baddiel’s fellow progressive-leaning individuals for too often ignoring the problem of antisemitism: either not noticing it at all or downplaying its impact and the importance of challenging it compared to other bigotries. If you are a non-Jewish person who isn’t familiar with this phenomenon, the writer has supplied plenty of illuminating examples that I hope would challenge you to confront your own potential biases on that front — times when dehumanizing stereotypes, blatant falsehoods, and overt calls for violence against our people gather minimal notice even amongst a movement of social-justice advocates who regularly critique the same rhetoric targeted at other demographics. Personally, I can report that the account echoes much of my own Jewish lived experience in such activist spaces.

Baddiel cuts right to the heart of the matter when he observes that for many in his target audience, Jews seem to register as too high-status to be harmed by this negativity. We are rich and powerful, or just a variety of white folks with all the privilege that implies, or somehow bringing the treatment on ourselves, or blowing things out of proportion and rabble-rousing when we dare to complain about any of it — justifications, whether conscious or not, that are themselves pretty deeply antisemitic! In the process, hook-nosed bankers get depicted as secretly running the world, because the patently anti-Jewish tropes involved there are either unnoticed or else seen as an acceptable cost for the noble anticapitalist message that they’ve been employed to illustrate.

‘Whataboutism’ can be a harmful derailing tactic when used to deflect a conversation about one group by bringing up supposedly parallel points about another, but the author’s contention throughout is that Jews deserve to be treated like other marginalized populations by the very people who purport to care about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. There should be no rankings of oppression that dismiss antisemitism as a lesser concern in the attitude conveyed by this book’s provocative title, nor is he necessarily insisting that, say, ‘Jewface’ in Hollywood — casting non-Jews to play Jewish roles, often by exaggerating perceived stereotypical behaviors — is as bad or worse than the practices of whitewashing parts written for POC or casting cis actors as trans folk that likewise persist in the entertainment industry. But why does something like the former rarely seem to make waves outside of Jewish circles?

I do worry whether Baddiel as a writer and I as a reader are coming at this discussion with our own share of misconceptions. (Surely, anyone experiencing any axis of threat against their particular marginalized identity feels that the rest of the world isn’t paying enough attention, right?) He is also quite clearly situated in the specific context of his life as a British Jew, which differs in some ways large and small from my own experiences in America and should not be taken as representative of monolithic Jewishness. And while I appreciate his blunt insistence that antisemitism is a form of racism simply because racists see Jews as a race (and specifically a race of their inferiors), it does tend to sidestep the fact that many Jews are themselves non-white-passing people of color who are subjected to further racism/colorism in both Jewish and gentile domains. The overall piece could stand to be a lot more intersectional throughout, considering for instance how gay Jews or disabled Jews (subcategories which of course contain overlaps too!) might experience antisemitism differently from the author rather than merely comparing antisemitism writ large to the theoretically separate ills of homophobia, ableism, and so on.

Those critiques temper my wholesale endorsement of Jews Don’t Count, which I haven’t found to be quite as solid an argument as Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, despite the two publications from 2021 occupying a somewhat similar rhetorical ground. Baddiel’s default position seems to be in objecting that certain conversations need to be more widespread among non-Jewish leftists, whilst proclaiming an odd agnosticism towards the actual outcome of those debates. (I also think the book’s focus on scolding generally well-meaning agents on the left is a fairly narrow niche that downplays how much more dangerous the sort of antisemitism fostered among paranoid rightwingers can be.) But I do consider the text to be an important pushback against a real and underappreciated problem, and thus overall worth the read.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

Book #107 of 2023:

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

I didn’t know that I particularly needed a YA version of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” but this novel was a delightful (if often viscerally unpleasant) read. Its genre flutters between wilderness survival and straight-up horror, telling the story of a teenage boy who winds up swallowed by a massive sperm whale during an ill-considered scuba trip to locate his father’s mortal remains. Flashbacks establish how abusive of a parent the man was, as well as how he threw himself off of a friend’s boat following a cancer diagnosis, and why the protagonist has now come seeking some sort of closure to help process all his lingering trauma. Instead he finds himself in an incredible deadly situation, where he must apply all of his meager resources and half-forgotten ocean knowledge against a dwindling oxygen supply and the inevitable moment when the creature will dive to a deeper pressure. Meanwhile, he’s begun hallucinating further conversations with his dead dad, in a sign of growing delirium and reminder that he can’t necessarily trust his senses.

Author Daniel Kraus has done his homework to construct as plausible a scenario as possible, but the result is still obviously pretty far-fetched, and I confess I’ve found it harder to suspend my disbelief here than over other similar plots like The Martian. Both the setup necessary to strand the hero in his predicament and many of the desperate steps he takes once in there seem a bit overly-convenient, like a video game where every random item has an eventual important use, but the book is ultimately too much of an enjoyable thrill-ride to complain about that aspect at length. If you can stomach — pun very much intended — all the claustrophobia and gore, Whalefall is a real wild time.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

Book #106 of 2023:

Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #4)

At its best, this fantasy series offers powerful meditations on stories: why we share and find meaning in them, how they don’t necessarily match an objective historical record even when purporting to, the reasons they might shift over time or from speaker to speaker, and so on. Via the perspective of wandering protagonist Cleric Chih, we’ve heard many such tales around this East Asian-inspired setting, with #ownvoices author Nghi Vo generally threading a needle to convey a sense of the possible different truth behind someone’s spoken words while allowing each of the conflicting accounts to resonate.

And there’s still an element of that storytelling focus in this latest volume, but it comes rather late in the text, which as a novella doesn’t have too much room to begin with. This book finds Chih finally returning to their home, the Singing Hills monastery, which we’ve never before gotten to see firsthand. There they discover that their mentor has recently passed away, and two granddaughters have arrived (on mammoth-back) to demand the body for their homeland’s funeral rites, which the clerics’ custom will not allow.

The plot involves hashing out those cultural differences, but also the difficulty of reconciling how people and places change when you’re away from them, as particularly exhibited in one of Chih’s old friends and their former traveling companion, the talking bird Almost Brilliant. It’s a fine quick comfort read for fans of this loose saga, but I’m sadly not finding the same depth that drew me in initially.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #105 of 2023:

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

A feel-good comeback story from the master of other such recent historical fiction celebrity novels as Daisy Jones & The Six or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (all of which apparently share a loose continuity). In this one, our heroine Carrie Soto retired from professional tennis after setting the world record for the most women’s Grand Slam titles, but is lured out of retirement years later when another player threatens to surpass her. Now in her late thirties, she finds that no one expects her to be able to compete at her old level, but with her father as her coach, she sets about aiming to prove them all wrong.

Like many sports narratives, the book loses a bit of dramatic tension from the necessary structure of the competition it’s built around. The character announces she’ll be playing the four eligible events in the 1994 pro season to try and squeeze out another win, so… obviously she’s not just going to clinch the first one and walk away, you know? But the individual matches manage to be exciting nonetheless, as do her endless practice sessions as we can gradually see her skills and confidence increasing. I’m sure the upcoming film adaptation is going to generate some nice montage scenes from this material.

Carrie’s also a great flawed protagonist: she doesn’t make friends easily and is painfully focused on her athletic career, to the clear detriment of anything else in her life. She doesn’t smile or appear grateful enough for the patriarchal standards of the media, who long ago dubbed her “the Battleaxe,” and has alienated so many competitors over the years that none of them will agree to train with her following her announced return. The true heart of this plot isn’t a former champion striving to convince everyone she’s still a contender — it’s a lonely woman rediscovering the things she loved about the game in the first place, deepening her connections with the few people who are meaningful to her, and learning to accept the limitations of an aging body. Regardless of her performance on the court (which I won’t spoil!), she’s so much happier at the end of the story than the beginning, and it’s a real joy as a reader to get to go on that journey with her.

[Content warning for disordered eating and death of a parent.]

★★★★☆