The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale

Book #101 of 2023:

Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale

The neurodivergent heroine of this #ownvoices novel (published as The Cassandra Complex in author Holly Smale’s native UK) reminds me a lot of the titular character in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine — a comparison which, not to spoil that book, had me dreading a potential twist that the fun time-travel element of this one would turn out to be nothing but a delusion response to trauma. I am happy to report that that’s not the case: Cassandra actually does gain the ability to rewind her life and make different choices in difficult social situations, like a gamer restoring from an earlier save state. There’s never any real explanation for where that power comes from, but since the story isn’t aiming to be hard science-fiction, that’s not a problem for me.

I also love that while the protagonist’s initial impetus for all these redos is to preserve her floundering romance, that focus gradually gives way to a plot of her opening up with the other people around her, like a flatmate or a coworker she’s previously dismissed as distracting acquaintances at best. Honestly, I still would have enjoyed this read if it had stayed entirely within the romcom genre, because Cassie is such an entertainingly straightforward voice as she navigates a world so incomprehensible to her. She can’t always parse things like sarcasm, so of course she takes advantage of her newfound technique to try again whenever she gets something wrong! But the fact that this is ultimately a tale of her growing more comfortable in her own skin, and not just getting/keeping a guy, is what really makes it special.

It helps as well that she’s not too underhanded in her repeated dealings with everyone, although there’s admittedly a fair bit of deception and manipulation inherent in the premise. Cassandra is lying to her boyfriend to ensure that their second attempt at dating goes smoother than the first one he doesn’t know about, but she isn’t tricking him like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day learning facts about an attractive stranger to bypass gaining her trust and woo her into bed on a later go-round. Indeed, since our traveler isn’t sure whether she’s creating branching realities that will continue on without her after she jumps back in her personal timeline, she’s meticulous about never behaving too inappropriately (a solid metaphor for the comfort and security of familiar autistic routines, which Cassie also has in abundance). She’ll blow off work to wander a museum for the afternoon, knowing she can then undo that choice and satisfy her professional responsibilities after all, but she isn’t acting out violently for the no-stakes thrill as some people in her circumstances might.

It’s not a flawless narrative. A couple beats that seem obvious to me, like the heroine’s diagnosis or the identity of a certain mysterious stalker, are for some reason drawn out and played as grand reveals, when they could have been simply presented and addressed head-on. And while I personally appreciate Cassandra’s infodumping about her Trojan namesake and other trivia of Greco-Roman mythology throughout, I’ve seen enough reviews complaining about that component to acknowledge that it probably could have been scaled back a degree. Nevertheless, this is a novel that charmed me right from the start and only grew more endearing as it went along, and for that it merits my highest critical rating.

[Content warning for parental death, ableism, and alcohol abuse.]

★★★★★

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TV Review: Good Omens, season 2

TV #42 of 2023:

Good Omens, season 2

This unexpected follow-up just about squeaks by on a character level, but it’s a far cry from either the previous season or the increasingly-distant source text of the hilarious original novel. To recap: that 1990 book by future showrunner Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett was adapted roughly in its entirety for the first year of this Amazon production, and no one expected that there would be anything further in the pipeline. Then Gaiman announced a surprise second season (and his hopes for a third), apparently drawing from conversations he and his co-author had once had about where they might someday take a sequel.

The result here is decidedly mixed, and in my opinion rarely actually feels like classic Good Omens. Perhaps it’s the missing element of Sir Terry’s typical madcap contributions, or perhaps just the fact that most of the bumbling mortal ensemble hasn’t been brought back for this next go-round: no Adam and his cohort and family and dog, no Newton and Anathema and Shadwell, and so on (although a few cast members do return, somewhat confusingly, in separate new roles). Instead the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley take up even more of the plot than before, even though their central storyline of the archangel Gabriel showing up on earth with amnesia is pretty threadbare.

As if in recognition of the fact that there isn’t quite enough action there to stretch out over six episodes, most installments include lengthy flashback interludes to the supernatural beings’ long history together on earth. Some of these sequences are fun — I quite like the Job one, and not just for the stunt-casting of David Tennant’s famous father-in-law and fellow Doctor Who alum Peter Davison in that part — but mostly they drag on well past their entertainment value and don’t contribute much to the larger narrative.

I do still enjoy the main protagonists and the dry humor of this particular interpretation of Heaven and Hell — not to mention the increasing levels of queer representation — so sure, I’ll keep watching if there’s any more of this show to come. (At six hours a season, it’s not like it’s a major time commitment, anyway.) But this new material seems more like a Gaiman vanity project than a story that urgently needed to be told, and I can’t say that I’d especially recommend it. Or to put that differently, if a sequel anything like this actually had been written and published, I don’t think it would have sold nearly as well as the cult classic that spawned it.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Clocks by Agatha Christie

Book #100 of 2023:

The Clocks by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #39)

This novel is a bit all over the place, and not just because the narrative switches back and forth between first-person and various third-person perspectives. Author Agatha Christie could write good mysteries and good spy thrillers, but she seems to run into trouble whenever she tries to combine them, as here. The premise at least is distinctive: an intelligence agent pursuing some seemingly-unrelated inquiries in a certain neighborhood stumbles across a flustered typist, who has just found a murdered man surrounded by clocks in the home of the blind woman she has come to assist. Only the client maintains that the timepieces are not hers, and that she never requested anyone from the secretarial agency that day in the first place. The police are thus understandably flummoxed, both by the identity of the killer and by the question of why the victim’s body was arranged to be discovered in that fashion.

Hercule Poirot wanders into the plot around a third of the way through, and by the time he’s laid out all the available clues, the solution turns out coincidence-heavy to a highly unsatisfactory degree. (I don’t judge such books by whether I can figure them out before the detective, but in this case, it does seem relevant that I cracked the whodunnit well in advance but remained clueless about the actual motive behind the crime until the end.) Just how many murderers and spies are there in this small stretch of houses, inadvertently contributing red herrings to one another’s respective shenanigans? More than you’d think, that’s for sure.

[Content warning for racism including slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Light Bringer by Pierce Brown

Book #99 of 2023:

Light Bringer by Pierce Brown (Red Rising #6)

Another thrilling installment of the sprawling Red Rising space opera, and although I still don’t think this sequel era quite matches the engaging fury that propelled the original trilogy, this is easily the finest of the later books yet (and a welcome step back from the bleakness of its excellent but aptly-named predecessor Dark Age). The four narrator perspectives are nicely woven together, the cinematic action sequences are as stunning as ever, and the various plot twists of sudden betrayals, alliances, and other intrigues are breathtaking yet firmly rooted in a sense of personal history amongst the relevant players seeking to outmaneuver one another. A few individual confrontations are particularly well-earned — CLANG! CLANG!, eh, fellow readers? — and pay off longstanding arcs with aplomb, while central protagonist Darrow undergoes remarkable growth and change in his own journey through life and reckoning with past misdeeds.

Indeed, I like this novel so much that I’ve come close to rating it five stars, which I haven’t done for this extended series since #2 Golden Son. My one critique — which might be unavoidable for volume three of a planned quartet, spanning in Game of Thrones fashion such a deep ensemble and vast arena of space — is that a few characters who are important early on seem to then vanish from the narrative, while others we would expect to take a role in the latest events instead stay largely off-screen for now. I remain fully on-board with this saga and have complete faith in author Pierce Brown to deliver a satisfying conclusion in the next title, but this one falls just short of his best work in my final analysis.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova

Book #98 of 2023:

Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova (Orion #3)

This time-travel adventure sequel offers probably the most problematic of its saga’s dabbles in what the back of this book calls ‘speculative theology,’ taking as its premise the wild notion that the ancient Egyptian god Set is the same being as Christianity’s Satan — and a murderous reptilian alien from another universe, to boot. The ensuing plot finds humanity’s champion Orion struggling against that foe and his minions in the Neolithic, Cretaceous, and far-future eras as they seek to supplant us throughout the space-time continuum, and while I think author Ben Bova is trying to offer a twist on the first novel in the series (which revealed that humans once did much the same to Neanderthals), it plays out here as too similar a conflict in practice.

More interesting on a character dimension is the fact that the protagonist’s divine love interest accompanies him for most of this title, having previously been largely either separated or present in a mortal guise with no memory of her true self. We finally get to see the lovers as an actual couple for an extended period of the narrative, and they seem like a good match with their shared warrior spirit, although Orion has some needlessly angsty moments when he temporarily (repeatedly!) thinks she’s abandoned him.

This was my least favorite of its series when I read the lot as a teenager, and I can’t say that it’s improved after decades away. It’s also definitely the work of a male science-fiction writer from 1990, with its gratuitous female (including underage) nudity, infanticide, and gore, none of which are handled with particular respect. At its best amid all the flamethrower-wielding dinosaurs and whatnot, the story does manage to achieve a level of pulpy fun akin to something like A Princess of Mars, or perhaps Planet of the Apes crossed with the prehistoric epoch of Chrono Trigger. But the hero’s dour moping cuts against the effectiveness of that as a sustained mood for the overall piece, and together with some sloppy plotting in the end ultimately lands this installment a lower rating than its predecessors for me.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 7

TV #41 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 7

It’s certainly far from Gilmore Girls at its peak, but I don’t believe this final season deserves quite the low reputation it maintains in certain fan circles. Not-so-behind-the-scenes drama may be to blame — the CW network rather infamously fired showrunner/creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and head writer Daniel Palladino and then later canceled the program outright, leaving this year as the only one not produced under their creative leadership. It generally still has the same feeling and rhythms, though, and it’s not as though the remaining producers (or actors) were unfamiliar with the series or obviously poor stewards for it. The finale in particular is a very satisfyingly emotional send-off to the entire enterprise, as great subtext under the development of Rory graduating from college and going out into the world far from Stars Hollow. Could everyone’s stories have continued on after this, if the show had gotten renewed? Sure, and I think the eventual Netflix revival speaks to that. But this is a logical place to leave the Gilmores, at least for a while, and season 7 takes advantage of that built-in catharsis.

The material leading up to that point is a little shakier, however. This run is also notable for the increased presence of Rory’s dad / Lorelai’s ex Christopher, and if it’s interesting to see the show bend its usual formulas to accommodate him, the petty jealousy he has with Luke gets old fast, and a lot of the subsequent fights and resolutions come off as somewhat arbitrary. The same goes for Rory and Logan, and I really don’t care for the subplot where her old friend Marty comes back as a manipulative liar and entitled Nice Guy™, fun as it is to see a young Krysten Ritter in that corner of events. Still, I like the quiet tragedy of where the relationship with Logan leads, especially as a counterweight to the expected emphasis in the closing episodes that Lorelai’s perpetual will-they-won’t-they partner Luke is who she’s ultimately meant to be with. Yet overall the writing skews the happily-ever-after endings that some viewers might have wanted for these heroines in favor of more nuance and ambiguity, which feels like a bolder and more honest note to me. Their respective journeys will go on, just with less time shared together and without us here watching.

(Meanwhile two different recurring female characters have unplanned pregnancies that they’re initially resentful about, and April’s mother has to be taken to court to maintain Luke’s custody rights. There’s an odd sexism and puritanical vindictiveness to elements like that if you think too hard about them in aggregate, but again, it’s not so removed from the program’s history under Sherman-Palladino, which repeatedly seemed to punish Paris for her own sex life.)

In general, however, this season doesn’t make too many major missteps, other than perhaps under-utilizing Richard and Emily, whose final scene is a reminder of how powerfully they could pull on the emotions of the younger Gilmores (and how scathingly funny Emily could be to the last). I’m glad to have stuck with it for this rewatch, and as my ratings below indicate, I wouldn’t even consider this to be the weakest of the show’s original seven outings. We’ll see how I feel about coming at A Year in the Life with fresh eyes, next.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked:

3 > 2 > 4 > 1 > 5 > 7 > 6

TV Review: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 2

TV #40 of 2023:

The Lincoln Lawyer, season 2

Overall I enjoy this legal procedural, but this sophomore season hasn’t impressed me quite as much as its first year did. Both runs are built around a single big case (drawn from a single Michael Connelly novel each time), but this one doesn’t kick off until the end of the second of its ten episodes. There’s less structure to every individual hour too, whereas previously each seemed to focus on a separate aspect of the central trial. And while the series debut utilized the hero’s driver Izzy as a legal neophyte he could share explanatory exposition with for the audience’s benefit, this follow-up swaps her in that role for secretary-turned-paralegal Lorna — which is rather different from the written version of events, and in practice often feels like the characters telling one another things they would clearly already know.

Other changes from the source material are more cosmetic: Mickey was romantically involved with Lisa Trammel before she became a client, her associate Henry Dahl (né Herb, in the book) produces podcasts now instead of movies, and so on. Generally, though, it’s a faithful adaptation, although the choice to use story #4 The Fifth Witness right after #2 The Brass Verdict draws an unfortunate parallel between the two similar endings that had more space between them in print.

I’m still missing the presence of the attorney’s half-brother Harry Bosch, not included in Netflix’s license due to his own ongoing franchise with Amazon, but I’m definitely engaged enough to continue watching if the streamer commissions any more of this show. The final scenes here seem to set up book #5 The Gods of Guilt as the next plot the program will tackle if the production does go forward, so I only hope that it lasts long enough to get to my favorite #6 The Law of Innocence after that.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 3

TV #39 of 2023:

Seinfeld, season 3

This 90s sitcom remains just funny enough to keep watching, without really blowing me away. My favorite episodes from this third year are probably The Parking Garage and The Limo (featuring future Six Feet Under star Peter Krause!), with The Stranded (featuring future The Shield star Michael Chiklis!) also worth a watch for that casting note alone. But the average half-hour is merely decent, and I wouldn’t say any of them are better than season 2’s The Chinese Restaurant, which is the program’s high-water mark of quality so far for me.

Some of the material simply hasn’t aged well, making jokes out of sensitive subjects like suicide, but even the stuff that would be generally fine to air today is very hit-or-miss in terms of its actual humor. And the misses tend to revolve around either Jerry’s hoary observational standup routines or Kramer’s wacky shenanigans, two major elements in pretty much every installment. I keep hoping that each will improve as the show goes along, but so far they just haven’t for me — and based on the bigger and bigger laughs he’s getting from the studio audience whenever he bursts into the set of Seinfeld’s apartment, that kooky neighbor is presumably only going to get wilder from here on out. So I’m not looking forward to that, much as I understand the impulse of the writers to lean into their clear breakout character.

On the bright side this season, there’s a little bit more continuity and callback references than I had expected for a TV comedy of this era, plus the introduction of the recurring role of Newman. It’s still ridiculous how many romantic partners the main cast are running through, most only for a single episode, but the occasional indication that people on this show can remember the events of previous weeks is definitely appreciated.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, and threat of gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #97 of 2023:

Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Three-out-of-five stars, which as usual is the hardest rating for me to articulate / justify in the space of a review. This horror title doesn’t make any major missteps, other than perhaps a bit of a drawn-out beginning. It’s a mid-90s period piece set in Mexico City, although that doesn’t wind up shaping the plot especially much, and the two protagonists are childhood friends now in their late 30s: one a scandal-ridden actor and the other a cash-strapped sound engineer, who learn that the former’s neighbor is an obscure director whose movies they loved when they were younger. Upon growing closer with him, they discover that the older man still has a reel of his infamously unfinished and supposedly cursed final production. Of course, when the unlikely trio dig it out and begin working on the project again, calamity soon returns.

It turns out one of the other producers was an occultist (and a eugenicist), and he’s not nearly as deceased as he should be. Various spooky shenanigans occur, the creepiest of which are the ways in which the aforementioned dead guy seems to be subtly influencing the heroine’s perceptions and thought processes after she reads some of his old spell-laced writings. But I don’t love how the characters are always snapping at one another, and the novel overall lacks that elusive special element that would really make it stand out from its genre for me. Author Silvia Moreno-Garcia has gotten there before in works like Certain Dark Things or Mexican Gothic, but this latest effort doesn’t seem like it will prove quite as memorable as those.

[Content warning for racism and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Vengeance of Orion by Ben Bova

Book #96 of 2023:

Vengeance of Orion by Ben Bova (Orion #2)

This first Orion sequel is interesting in its own right, but not nearly as good as its predecessor. That previous novel introduced humanity’s demigod champion by hurtling him progressively backwards in time, having to stop an adversary in each era determined to throw history off its tracks. Here, the character starts the book by materializing in the twelfth century BCE on the outskirts of Troy, where he soon finds himself caught up in the events of The Iliad. And I do mean those precise events — for about the first half of this story, author Ben Bova is basically just retelling Homer with a new viewpoint protagonist in the mix. And that’s the period he stays in for the rest of the volume, although after the city falls he moves on to help the Israelite tribes conquer Jericho and ultimately winds up navigating political intrigue in ancient Egypt. (In an afterword the writer justifies the sieges of Troy and Jericho potentially overlapping historically, though I feel that was probably a more reasonable conjecture upon publication in 1988 than it seems today.)

There’s a certain fanfic vibe to some of this, or perhaps teen boy wish-fulfillment, given how the muscular hero manages to attract the beautiful Helen to his bed. And while I appreciate the implication that one of Orion’s new friends will go on to become the famous blind poet, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost of so many pages rehashing what will be a familiar plot to most readers. The warrior’s own ignorance on that front is odd, too: he plainly has some memory of his prior lives, referencing advanced technology and quoting from the Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” but he doesn’t seem to have heard about any of the Greeks or Trojans beforehand or know how their legendary conflict will end. It’s also very frustrating to see him so cavalier about rape as an inevitable consequence of war, at one point even acknowledging offhand that the soldiers under his immediate command are likely engaging in that act while pillaging after a conquest. Do something about that, buddy!

What this entry does best in my opinion is expand the sci-fi worldbuilding of the series. In the first book we met Orion’s creator Ormazd, who took his name from the Zoroastrian god of light but was actually revealed as a far-future evolved / transcended human. Other beings of his ilk were alluded to, but the only one featured was the narrator’s main love interest Anya who was time-traveling along with him. Here Bova includes a whole bunch more of them, along with the confirmation that they’re the original inspirations behind the deities in every earth religion that recognizes any. The Golden One now calls himself Apollo, but also Jehovah and Amon. Anya is Athena, but also Isis. And they have a string of peers present at Troy — Zeus, Hera, Hermes, etc. — who likewise are all represented among the depictions of holy figures Orion later sees in Egypt. That’s a heady concept that rather blew my mind as a younger reader, and it remains a neat facet to build into genre fiction today.

Unfortunately, the narrative structure supporting that revelation is somewhat less impressive, especially compared to the expansive terrain of the previous tale. I still like this installment and have enjoyed revisiting it decades after my first reading, but it’s not quite dazzling enough to merit higher than 3-out-of-5 stars on the Goodreads scale.

[Content warning for fatphobia, slavery, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆