The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

Book #120 of 2023:

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros (The Empyrean #2)

A surprisingly-quick sequel to May’s runaway ‘romantasy’ bestseller Fourth Wing, but I suppose the publisher wanted to strike while the iron was hot — no pun intended. This one is just as great, although truth be told, it probably could have been half the length, especially given that accelerated release schedule. At 623 pages in hardback, it’s even longer than its predecessor, and it also falls into more of a discrete two-part structure, with various plots and tensions building to a natural climax midway through the text and resulting in a massive status quo change for the series that easily rivals the cliffhanger ending to book one. As an editor, I likely would have pushed for this volume to end there, and for the remainder of the narrative to have been saved for the next sequel after another six months. And as a reader, I likely would have awarded such a novel a full five stars, as it’s considerably stronger than the somewhat more padded material that follows in this one.

But let’s back up a second. The debut title in this series introduced a dragon-rider cadet in her first year at a literally-cutthroat academy where both the coursework and the fellow students regularly kill a large portion of each graduating class. Though originally trained to be a scribe, she made it through unscathed (at least physically), fell in love with the resident bad boy, and learned some society-shaking secrets about the larger war effort along the way. This sequel finds the heroine reentering her school nevertheless, which is a bit of a relief — I’ll try to keep the Harry Potter comparisons to a minimum, but the framework of daily assignments and schoolyard rivalries helps scaffold the ongoing story as it did in that famous wizarding saga, and is similarly missed when it eventually falls away. This book especially calls to mind The Order of the Phoenix, given that Violet is now in an openly antagonistic situation with a few particular teachers and their lackeys, who abuse and flat-out torture her under guise of the accepted rules.

The back half of the novel is a little messier, though the action in the battlefield and the bedroom alike is still pretty well-written. It gets harder to put up with certain flaws in both the protagonist and her beau, however, each of whom is doing that tiresome ‘keeping secrets from my loved ones in order to protect them even as they beg me to open up’ nonsense and occasionally falling prey to standard rom-com miscommunication woes. There’s a lot of repeated breaking up and making up in the central relationship, which at some point starts registering as clear manufactured drama rather than serious conflict with actual stakes. At least there’s a deadly enemy on the horizon and numerous significant character deaths to remind us of what really matters.

But I’m a fantasy reader at heart, not a romance guy. While the steamy bits are fine, it’s primarily the dragons and their bonded humans that I’m here for, and on that front, this volume is a definite success. I wonder how long we’ll have to wait until book 3?

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Bosch: Legacy, season 2

TV #57 of 2023:

Bosch: Legacy, season 2

I’m still mad that the first season of this Bosch spinoff sequel ended with — spoiler alert — its young female lead getting abducted from her home by the serial rapist she’d been investigating. It was a cruel cliffhanger and threatened fridging, and while I have no idea whether there were any serious conversations among the production team about using the event to potentially write her out of the franchise or not, the possibility seemed frustratingly real to me as a viewer who’d watched her grow up from a child on the original series and now had to wait a year-and-a-half to see the matter resolved. It remains an indefensible writing choice.

But given the baggage of that damaging lead-in, I think this second run acquits itself fairly well. Maddie’s kidnapping rightfully dominates the first couple hours, and since her name stays prominently in the credits, I don’t consider it a spoiler to mention this deep into my review that she’s safely rescued in the end. She’s also pointedly not assaulted sexually by her captor — it appears he’s such a racist that he only preys on women of color and targeted the white cop on his trail simply as a bargaining chip — and going forward, the incident seems to complicate but not derail her burgeoning career in law enforcement. It’s probably the best resolution to that particular plotline we could have hoped for.

The remaining episodes largely adapt Michael Connelly’s novel The Crossing, with Honey Chandler stepping in for the Lincoln Lawyer as usual due to the rights issues and that character’s own show over on Netflix. The meaning of the book’s title is twofold: retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch, now a private investigator, has ‘crossed over’ to work for a defense attorney for the first time, and he’s hunting for the elusive point when the true killer(s) crossed paths with both the victim and the innocent defendant. Honestly, I think this story works better on paper, where we get to see the two half-brothers team up, the bad guys are a little more devious and hard to identify, and Bosch feels more obviously conflicted about his new allegiance. But it’s not bad here in its streamlined version.

That’s the program in a nutshell, really: not bad. Never going to win any major awards or attract a large fandom or anything, but a solid middle-of-the-road product that still winds up better than some ambitious bombs I’ve seen lately. This season even manages to make a seemingly-filler subplot about Harry’s hacker friend Mo ultimately connect back with the larger thread about the FBI investigating Bosch and Chandler, which is a pleasant surprise. I’d have to say it’s a perfectly cromulent show overall, especially when it’s not actively threatening its heroines with rape.

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

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Picard, season 1

TV #56 of 2023:

Star Trek: Picard, season 1

Patrick Stewart seems to be enjoying himself in reprising the title role of this Star Trek sequel series set and produced decades after his time on The Next Generation, but this whole first season is built around a huge miscalculation of what sort of story would be worth taking the character out of mothballs over. I wouldn’t dismiss the plot idea outright as a misstep for the franchise — though it cribs more than a bit off Battlestar Galactica with its identical androids who don’t know they’re androids and the video game series Mass Effect with its beacons to signal advanced synthetic lifeforms — but it’s never a tale that feels personal or essential for Jean-Luc Picard to be involved with, and it’s ultimately executed pretty poorly, with wide gaps in the narrative logic and needless retcons to established canon.

We learn that the Romulans, for example, have a super-secret cult operating inside of their already fairly secretive security force, and that this inner group has for millennia been dedicated to the destruction of all artificial life. This is despite the fact that they obviously never did anything to Data or any of the other synths seen in previous Trek series, and while their clandestine nature explains why we’ve never heard of them before, it doesn’t account for how brazenly they operate here or how little they seem to mind having their ancient secret finally outed. And of course, their entire existence carries no dramatic weight, as we’re given no Romulan protagonists to invest in who might plausibly feel betrayed to find out about the order and its murderous actions carried out in their name.

But that’s this season in a nutshell. It goes for flashy concepts that fall apart the longer you think about them, features a few frankly silly coincidences, draws certain key developments out for too many episodes, and tries to cram in last-minute declarations of how much the characters mean to one another despite their having basically just met. As expected for a nostalgia piece like this, the most affecting moments are when the hero rejoins his old crew members Troi and Riker, allowing the program to slow down and reflect on their shared history and catch us up on everything they’ve been doing in the meantime. But that’s a brief interlude in all the underbaked chaos, and must be balanced with how the show brings back three (arguably five!) other named characters from TNG and Voyager only to subsequently kill them off.

On the Voyager connection — yes, Seven of Nine is here too, for some reason. If this year’s storyline doesn’t seem especially relevant for Picard, at least the Borg angle brings this other fan-favorite into play. But the two powerhouses don’t share that many scenes together, leaving her inclusion feeling like yet another squandered opportunity.

I missed The Next Generation when I was growing up, and perhaps came at it too late to ever be a properly committed fan. If you are that sort of viewer, maybe this all works better for you and you’ll be able to glide over the bumps on the emotional wavelength of getting to see your old captain again. Make it so! Engage! Tea, Earl Grey, hot! I won’t deny that there’s a totemic power in those familiar elements, which is something TV and film producers seem to be increasingly realizing in greenlighting belated follow-up projects like this. But spot-the-reference isn’t enough to sustain a work of fiction that hopes to become iconic in its own right, and this one sadly falters along its other dimensions. I hope the writers get more serious in the seasons ahead.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Loki, season 2

TV #55 of 2023:

Loki, season 2

This first second year of a Disney+ Marvel show could have easily faltered, given the production troubles that have been leaking out about the studio in general, the pivot away from their previous model of standalone miniseries events, and the recent domestic abuse allegations and arrests of major villain actor Jonathan Majors. As it happens, however, the Loki team have struck gold again, producing a followup run that’s even stronger than the series debut (and one that generally keeps Majors to a minimum, though that seems just by random chance, since the timing of the Hollywood strikes would have prevented any significant rewrites after the news about him began to break).

The Doctor Who vibes are turned up full-throttle, and the Bill and Ted ones too, as we get plenty of predestination paradoxes, time loops, and other staples of time-travel action and comedy. This also feels like much more of an ensemble piece, with greater roles for previously one-note characters like Casey and Hunter B-15 and a terrific showcase for new addition and recent Academy Award-winner Ke Huy Quan as O.B.

The ending of the finale loses me a little — it ultimately collapses back into the Loki show alone and features a lot of everyone else staring in wonder at the CGI spectacle before them without the necessary exposition to convey what exactly it means and how it affects them all personally — and I think six episodes probably wasn’t a large enough order to adequately tell this stage of the story. There are a few promising subplots and character arcs early on that wind up getting dropped in the crisis of the last couple hours, and that’s especially frustrating because this corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, featuring variants and branched timelines, seems pretty isolated from what’s going on in the prime continuity of the MCU movies. A hypothetical third season has yet to be announced, nor is it clear how the program and its particular iteration of the protagonist would go on from how this installment ends. So if this is the end of both Loki (the show) and Loki (the villain-turned-reluctant-time-agent), I suspect it will always feel a bit unfinished to me.

Despite my nitpicking, however, I am overwhelmingly very happy with this title. It’s been a lot of fun to watch, and while its own future and that of its wider franchise remain uncertain, it’s a definite bright spot here and now.

[Content warning for body horror.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

Book #119 of 2023:

Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter

Not everything in this short novel quite works for me, but for the most part, it’s an arresting and bitterly funny satire on modern corporate life, skewering the emptiness and performativity inherent to some degree in any buzzword-heavy tech job. The protagonist describes letting her ‘fake self’ take over to get through the assignments and meaningless rituals of the day, while her boss openly encourages her to think outside the box of legality and morals for ways to bring down their company’s competitors. The atmosphere of the piece is also rather striking — although there isn’t much of a traditional plot arc, author Sarah Rose Etter manages to convey a nicely escalating apocalyptic feel to the narrative of a woman and a culture in crisis, helped along by setting the story in early 2020 on the cusp of the initial COVID-19 outbreak.

As for the less effective elements: I’ve personally found the heroine’s drug abuse to be a little over-the-top (doing regular lines of cocaine just to get through the workday, all while worrying and later confirming that she’s pregnant), and I think representing her lifelong depression as a hovering black hole only she can see is an interesting idea that isn’t really the right choice for this particular project. There are times when Cassie seems meant as an audience-identification figure for a universal critique of the toxic capitalist system around her, and other moments when she’s a weird and traumatized loner whose perspective plainly can’t be trusted, and I’m ultimately not sure the book balances those opposing impulses as well as it could. Still, it’s a sharp bit of writing that isn’t afraid to cast its female characters in an unflattering light, and the figurative language throughout is pretty creative. I’d recommend it, overall.

[Content warning for suicide, gore, domestic abuse, sexism, disordered eating, and abortion.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Orion and the Conqueror by Ben Bova

Book #118 of 2023:

Orion and the Conqueror by Ben Bova (Orion #4)

This isn’t the worst title of the Orion saga — it’s a noticeable step up from the angst-ridden previous volume — but it might well be the most boring. Much how the first half of Vengeance of Orion was little more than a straightforward retelling of traditional accounts of the Trojan War, this fourth novel is almost entirely just a factual presentation of the later years in the reign of Philip of Macedon, leading up to his assassination and the succession of his son Alexander the Great. Oh, there are some nominal sci-fi trappings: the reincarnated super-human warrior Orion is there as our witness to events, of course, and the king’s wife Olympias is quickly revealed to be Hera, one of the far-future advanced beings of this series who have gained time-travel and retroactively inspired the pantheons of various world religions. But neither of them make any particular impact on the established timeline, in the end.

Historical fiction has its place, and author Ben Bova seems to have done all the appropriate research for it here, but that’s not really what I’m looking for in a story like this. It doesn’t help that the protagonist’s current mission is so obscure for so long, or that he’s lost most of his memories again (including his original twentieth-century textbook knowledge of Philip and Alexander, which could have at least added some pathos and dramatic irony to the affair). And it’s certainly not great that the divine villainess’s main role in the plot is to repeatedly torture and rape the hero, a topic which this 1994 pulp adventure is not remotely able to handle with the care that it deserves. But this is primarily just a novel-length treatment of a real military leader’s rise and fall, which I guess is fine as far as it goes.

[Content warning for pedophilia, incest, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Party Down, season 3

TV #54 of 2023:

Party Down, season 3

This workplace sitcom about a crew of hapless Hollywood caterers hoping to make it as actors ironically never found much of an audience in its two original 10-episode seasons back in 2009 and 2010, and even today, I don’t know that I would say it’s popular enough to be considered a cult classic, despite the iconic pink bow ties. But the cast is stacked with talented performers like Adam Scott and Jane Lynch and a creative team led by Paul Rudd and Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, which I imagine gave them just enough cachet in the industry to eventually get this belated follow-up greenlit. It’s probably still one of the more unexpected modern TV revivals, and at only six episodes, it’s hard for it to truly stake out a justification for its existence, but it brings back and updates the old formula rather nicely overall.

Is it believable that most of the gang would still be stuck in the same dead-end food-service jobs over a decade later? Not necessarily, and a couple of them do need to get roped back in due to sudden changed circumstances, but at its best the new season makes that static status quo textual by forcing the characters to consider how their dreams haven’t come true and perhaps need to change after all this time. Mostly, though, it breezes by on its considerable charm and some imaginative writing choices to work around limited actor availability and COVID constraints. Newcomers Tyrel Jackson Williams and Zoë Chao round out the cast well — not to mention add some welcome diversity to the program — and Jennifer Garner as Henry’s new love interest helps the lack of Lizzy Caplan not sting as much, even if it strains credulity that a high-powered outsider would show up to so many of his catering gigs.

Still, one of the fun aspects of this series has always been its commitment to only depicting those work engagements themselves, with the clear implication that these coworkers are not friends who would hang out with one another outside of their professional obligations. They chat about their personal lives and aspiring entertainment careers while on the job, but we don’t get to see much of those firsthand, and that remains true in the 2023 version. It’s a sad but funny state of affairs, and that’s really this show in a nutshell with its cringe humor and expert Ken Marino pratfalls. I have no idea if they’ll ever make any more of it, but if they do, I’m sure it’ll be eagerly received by the dozens of fans like me.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, and drug abuse.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson

Book #117 of 2023:

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine #27)

This Star Trek novel was originally published back in the year 2000, soon after the series Deep Space Nine had come to an end. In it, author Andrew J. Robinson writes from the perspective of the recurring character he played on that show across its seven seasons, the fan-favorite Cardassian tailor and former intelligence officer Elim Garak. The book reportedly grew out of a long-running writing exercise the actor maintained as a journal of potential backstory to help him approach the role, which he was later encouraged to expand in this way and cement as canon.

As expected, it demonstrates great insight into the tricky operator and the sort of plots that would involve him in a typical episode. Presented as a letter to his friend Dr. Bashir sometime following the DS9 finale, it primarily relates events from Garak’s earlier life, along with his feelings on the invasion of Cardassia and a few other key moments from the television program, and a little about what he finds himself doing later on. Now admittedly, given how duplicitous we’ve seen the spy could be on the show, I suppose it’s an open question if he can necessarily be considered a reliable narrator in this account. But the yarn he spins is an engaging one, whether taken at face-value or as just another passing facet he’s invented to suit his purposes.

From a lonely childhood and cutthroat military academy to a career under his coldhearted biological father Enabran Tain, there’s a lot here for Garak fans to dig into and enjoy, including some nice further worldbuilding for his people’s culture. It’s more a memoir than a single contained adventure, but it’s all the stronger for that choice, which allows us to see the protagonist gradually shrink from a sensitive youth to the jaded exile we meet in season one. I’d honestly recommend it to anyone who’s finished watching Deep Space Nine, and I particularly suggest listening to the new audiobook version that just came out, which Robinson reads in his familiar character voice.

[Content warning for torture and mention of rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Book #116 of 2023:

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Is it a little gimmicky and unrealistic that a 16-year-old would bump her head and lose all memory of the last four years? Sure. But in the hands of author Gabrielle Zevin, that premise turns into a neat exploration of high school identity, at least for a while. YA literature is often at its strongest when it’s mirroring real-world dilemmas faced by young adults, and although few are likely to find themselves in this protagonist’s particular position, that circumstance provides her with the freedom to redefine herself in a way that I think rings true to the adolescent experience overall. Teen cliques are permeable — that’s the insight that gave Freaks and Geeks such lasting power, and Naomi’s amnesia is a great allegory for that rush of changing up your hairstyle, quitting an extracurricular that no longer interests you, and falling headlong into an entirely new social circle.

I also appreciate the subtle indicators throughout the first half of the story that the original version of the girl was different — and specifically meaner — than the new one we’re getting to know. She doesn’t understand what she saw in her boyfriend, who now strikes her as a stuck-up jerk. She isn’t sure how she became one of the popular kids, or why she’s lost touch with some old middle-school friends. She doesn’t know why she’s in a feud with her mom. Like Jason Bourne or the aged-up teenager in 13 Going on 30, she has all these inherited pieces of a life that feels like somebody else’s, and the ability to start over again as someone altogether more pleasant.

Unfortunately, the end of the novel doesn’t live up to its beginning. The plot largely collapses into some love triangle foolishness, and we spend a lot of time on one boy whose mental health issues might be interesting to examine in his own book but make him hard to take seriously as a viable romantic interest here. (He leaves her alone on the beach with no phone and no car for five hours! Come on now.) I’m also disappointed that the main character does eventually get her memories back, and that when she does, there’s not really any conflict with reconciling her past and present selves. It all adds up to a letdown for a title that I was genuinely enjoying early on, so a final rating of three-out-of-five stars seems fair.

[Content warning for disordered eating, suicide, self-harm, and mention of rape.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Short Treks, season 2

TV #53 of 2023:

Star Trek: Short Treks, season 2

This second — and so far, final — batch of quick Trek adventures remedies one of my complaints about the first season: that it was too beholden to the show Discovery in particular, instead of taking advantage of the wider canon at its disposal. And yet, I’m still not totally satisfied by the result, and on balance I’d have to say that this year is actually a step down in overall quality from the one before.

Three of its six episodes feature Captain Pike, which makes them Discovery spinoffs — or perhaps proof-of-concept sketches for his own series Strange New Worlds, which would go on to debut two years later. (I’m watching through the franchise in release order, so I haven’t seen it yet.) Another installment technically ties in more closely with its original parent program by presenting Discovery’s main character Michael Burnham as a child being comforted with a bedtime story. But it’s a pretty generic incident that doesn’t tell us anything new about her, and there’s otherwise no look at any of the DSC main cast, which is both surprising and frustrating given how their sophomore season ended.

But my biggest gripe has to be the sense that compliance with canon is starting to fade in importance for this show, which inherently weakens its appeal for me as a viewer. I honestly don’t know what to do with the animated “Ephraim and Dot” which includes quick glances of iconic TOS moments but seems riddled with continuity errors and weird framing choices that are rather hard to square away. Likewise the jokey commercial at the end of “The Trouble with Edward,” which couldn’t possibly be taken at face-value as canonical. Although I can objectively see why people might enjoy such works that coast by on vibes and gestures at familiar concepts rather than needing to explicitly fit in with established events, they’re not at all what I personally want from this title, or indeed any project in an expanded multimedia universe.

The best showing is the final piece, “Children of Mars,” which I understand is a prequel of sorts to Star Trek: Picard. While not any longer than the others, it feels like a more complete tale and one that nicely threads the needle between universal emotion and Star Trek specificity. Two earth girls (one human and one not) with parents who work on Mars wind up in a schoolyard conflict with each other that plainly stems from their respective dissatisfaction at home rather than any deep rivalry. Like “Calypso” in season one, it builds a small and personal world for us centered around compelling new characters, reveals new information about the surrounding timeline, and doesn’t trip over any contradictions therein. If only every episode could meet that standard, I’d be so much happier with this anthology.

★★★☆☆