The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

Book #135 of 2023:

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske (The Last Binding #3)

Romantasy is the buzzy new publishing genre these days, but for me personally, the fantasy elements always take priority over the romance ones in such a blended work. For that reason, I’ve grown less enamored of this particular trilogy as it’s gone along, with its explicit bedroom scenes feeling increasingly irrelevant to the high-stakes plot of the villains trying to steal all the Edwardian world’s magic for themselves.

Our protagonists this time are two characters introduced in the previous volume, a rakish lord and a lower-class newspaperman who now find themselves swiftly drawn together romantically amid the scramble with their friends to beat the antagonists to the last maguffin. The couple’s dynamic involves lots of dominance-and-submission roleplay, and while I appreciate their careful negotiations of safewords and consent — not to mention the reveal of Alan’s literary alter ego, which extends their personal history back further than either man initially realized — it’s ultimately all a distraction from the worldbuilding premise that drew me into these novels in the first place. I still like the series overall, and the original novel specifically for how its slow-burn character arcs scaffolded the emerging wider story, but these sequels have unfortunately offered diminishing returns for me as a reader.

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

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

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TV Review: Animorphs, season 1

TV #61 of 2023:

Animorphs, season 1

I’ll admit, I went into this 90s Nickelodeon adaptation rather skeptically. I’m a big fan of the original book series about kids turning into animals to fight an alien invasion, which I felt held up pretty well on a recent adult reread, whereas I remember giving up on the show in frustration after only a few episodes when it first aired. Luckily I’m more forgiving now about some of the changes that irked me then, and I do think the program grows into itself as it goes along. Still, I can’t honestly call this great television.

The budget is the first big issue. It likely always would be, and I’m sure some of the transformation effects were cutting-edge for their era, but I’m actually somewhat charmed by how much of the morphing here happens off-screen, along with the creative decision to just have all clothing shift along with a person rather than worry about depicting the logistics of leotards and shredded outerwear and the like. Visser Three and Ax spend most of their time in their respective human morphs, which seems like a reasonable concession to the realities of the production and those characters’ abilities to emote (at the slight expense of story logic for when they’d more naturally be in their Andalite forms). It’s also a shame that we get no Taxxons and basically no Hork-Bajir as muscle for the body-snatching Yeerk invaders, but again, I can see the justification behind simplifying the enemy threat and saving a bit of money by having the bad guys almost all appear human. What we do glimpse of the various alien species doesn’t inspire much confidence or live up to the books at all.

The non-human morphs are a problem, though — a combination of stock footage, poorly-trained animal performers, tinted ground-level camera work, and the occasional static prop, as when Marco clutches an obviously stuffed toy to his chest that’s supposed to be Cassie in skunk morph. I’ll give the directors credit for trying, and I don’t know if there’s even a great alternate way that they could have rendered some of those moments instead. But as in the novels, it’s the human interactions that tend to hit the hardest — when the weight of the world comes crashing down on these reluctant teen warriors — and not when they’re turning into lizards and mice to scurry after someone. We’re not getting the big battle scenes anyway, so I almost wish the series had leaned more into the theatricality of having the kids simply talk about the results of their missions rather than showing them directly (although I can understand why the network would have considered the use of live animals as a key selling point).

The characters are presented more or less as they are on the page, and many of the episodic plots are taken right from the books, at least after some initial nonsense about an invented Andalite disk maguffin that the heroes and villains keep trading back and forth (the reason I quit the show in the first place, if memory serves). The worldbuilding isn’t as well thought-out, though, with weird details about Yeerk biology and culture that contradict each other or generally don’t add up to a convincing whole. It’s not just that certain elements have been changed from the books; it’s that what’s offered instead often comes across as a little half-baked.

The tone is off as well, as though aimed at a slightly younger audience than the novels. Visser Three never gloated like a Power Rangers villain quite so much in print! And the Yeerk Controllers were much more secretive about their operation too, in addition to not giving themselves away by acting stiffly and tugging on their earlobes after being infested. (The whole point of the paranoid atmosphere of K. A. Applegate’s work, and why it succeeds as a neat metaphor for typical feelings of teenage alienation, is that anyone could be an adversary in disguise.) The show simplifies and flattens all that, much as it substitutes actual deadly combat for the supposed battle morphs simply snarling and chasing off the bad guys. There’s no real body horror, or gore, or existential dread, or torture, or any of the other heavy themes that the book series dealt with on a regular basis. It’s all a bit cartoonish by comparison.

Regardless, the program has its charms, lightweight and throwback as they are. I don’t know that it would be appealing enough for non-readers, but it’s better as both an adaptation and a story in its own right than I thought it’d be, at least over these first 20 episodes. (A truncated second season of 6 more would follow; I’ll get to those at some point too. I hope they come to a stronger resolution than this first year, which ends suddenly on a random cliffhanger.) Watching it today is a frustrating experience, however, as the Freevee / Amazon Prime streaming service has most of the episodes mislabeled and thus out-of-order. For future reference, here’s the actual listing:

My Name is Jake, Part 1
My Name is Jake, Part 2 (labeled as 6)
Underground (labeled as 2)
On the Run (labeled as 3)
Between Friends (labeled as 4)
The Message (labeled as 5)
The Escape (labeled as 11)
The Alien (labeled as 12)
The Capture, Part 1 (labeled as 7)
The Capture, Part 2 (labeled as 8)
The Reaction (labeled as 13)
The Stranger (labeled as 9)
The Forgotten (labeled as 14)
The Leader, Part 1 (labeled as 10)
The Leader, Part 2 (labeled as 16)
Tobias (labeled as 15)
Not My Problem (labeled as 18)
The Release (labeled as 17)
Face Off, Part 1
Face Off, Part 2

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 3

TV #60 of 2023:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 3

Discovery’s messy second season ended with the ship jumping far away from the familiar, and this next year quickly confirms that the crew have arrived in the distant future, 900 years after their original era directly preceding TOS. That’s a smart writing choice on a couple levels to address issues that this series has had since its debut. The advanced technology that the modern effects budget likes to show off no longer needs to be justified in the context of a prequel scenario, and the plot and worldbuilding possibilities are likewise much more expansive without the existing franchise continuity boxing them in. This is more or less the latest moment in time that Trek has ever depicted, which gives the scripts a greater feeling of freedom than they’ve ever had before.

I’ll also give the show credit for sticking to its dystopian elements, as my initial assumption at the revelation that the Federation has been shattered by a mysterious event a century ago was that our heroes would spend the season somehow reversing that and aborting this timeline, much like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. did when it sent its own team into a cataclysmic future for season five. (I also half-expected protagonist Michael Burnham or a relative to wind up responsible for the catastrophe, given that it’s been nicknamed the Burn.) While Michael and her shipmates do investigate the incident and discover its cause — which is deeply silly, unfortunately — it eventually becomes clear that the new interstellar and political landscape is here to stay. The central storyline goal for the crew heading into the finale isn’t to undo the Burn; it’s to survive the attack of a dangerous villain on the scene. I wish that could have been made clearer earlier on, but it retroactively makes the setting a bit more interesting once we’re convinced it won’t all be wiped away.

On the downside: plot and character beats still aren’t being given enough room to breathe, which often makes key developments feel arbitrary and artificial. Certain details of the 32nd century don’t have much personality beyond Generic Dystopia, either. And while there are a few cast shakeups this year, the departures aren’t especially well-motivated or emotional the way that I’d prefer for serialized television. At least the newcomers are neat, including a person I believe is Star Trek’s first openly nonbinary cast member / character.

Overall, this isn’t a great outing for the program, and it’s certainly nowhere near the propulsive twists that powered season one. But it’s a big step back in the right direction after a much weaker season two and the similarly-underwritten first run of Star Trek: Picard.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice by Ellen McGarrahan

Book #134 of 2023:

Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice by Ellen McGarrahan

In 1990, reporter Ellen McGarrahan witnessed the state of Florida’s botched execution of death-row inmate Jesse Tafero. (The electric chair sparked and caught fire, ultimately taking seven minutes and three separate jolts to execute the prisoner when it should have taken less than one minute and only a single shock.) The incident clearly traumatized the author, especially after new evidence emerged to suggest the dead man might have been innocent of the charges against him — the 1976 murder of two police officers at a traffic stop involving Tafero, his girlfriend, her baby and 9-year-old son, and a family friend.

McGarrahan switched careers to become a private detective, a route that eventually led her to go back and look into the case. Four decades later, she dug into the files and interviewed all the surviving witnesses, trying to finally get to the bottom of the matter and free herself from the ghost she’s felt haunting her over the years.

As a book, it’s a mixed effort. The true-crime details are interesting, if sometimes presented less straightforwardly than I’d like, as are the more memoir-like passages where the writer reflects on why the investigation is so important to her. It’s impressive how far she goes to track people down, even to the middle of the Irish wilderness or a LARP event in Australia, and her note about how much evidence has been lost over the years is rather trenchant. (She has a trial transcript, for instance, but none of the original exhibits that would help a reader interpret the lawyers’ comments.) But it never seems like her search really lands anywhere substantial. Instead she repeatedly asks someone questions, gets contradictory answers, and then frets about whether they’ve told her the truth or not.

Her eventual determination is that yes, Jesse probably did kill the two cops, after either Sunny or her boy distracted them by firing a taser in their direction. But all three adults in the car were drug runners with organized crime connections, with plenty to lose if law enforcement inspected the contents of the vehicle too closely. And with so much conflicting testimony, so long after the fact, we’ll likely never know for certain which of them pulled the trigger(s) on that fateful day.

It’s not a great conclusion to the narrative McGarrahan has built for us, and I can’t shake the feeling that the facts of the case are not what truly bothered her all these years anyway. In my opinion, it’s the horrific way that she saw a man tortured to death in front of her, regardless of his guilt or innocence: an event that literally caused her to flee her relationship, her profession, and even her whole time zone to reinvent herself in California. A work that dug more deeply into the personal angle of that, or into the justice of the death penalty itself, might have been better than this muckraking road trip that sets out to definitively identify one bad guy over another and then doesn’t even manage to accomplish that goal.

[Content warning for sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Third Girl by Agatha Christie

Book #133 of 2023:

Third Girl by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #40)

A fine mid-1960s title from author Agatha Christie, although at this point she’s clearly struggling to understand the contemporary counterculture youth movement. So there’s some silly depictions of nihilistic young people and their supposed drug habits throughout, and the mystery itself hinges on a few instances of poorly propped-up false identities that you’d really think detective Hercule Poirot would start seeing through earlier than this. Still, I appreciate that he’s here poking into things for the entirety of the story — along with Christie’s recurring self-insert novelist character Ariadne Oliver — rather than swooping in near the end, and the premise is at least an interesting one. A distraught teenager approaches the old Belgian with the extraordinary claim that she thinks she’s murdered someone, but then vanishes before offering her name or any further details. Who was she, and was she honest, or confused, or playing some odd deeper game? Poirot is on the case, and so of course are we.

[Content warning for gaslighting and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings

Book #132 of 2023:

100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife by Ken Jennings

A breezy survey of different ideas about the hereafter: both those of various world religions and the ones dreamed up for particular works of fiction, from Riverworld to Dead Like Me to San Junipero to Defending Your Life. (Spoiler alert for some, like The Good Place or Lost, although author Ken Jennings does manage to discuss The Sixth Sense without giving away its notorious big twist.) It’s all interesting enough, but there’s no deeper analysis here to bring out universal themes or even sort the entries into smaller common groups.

Indeed, my biggest issue is that the ordering of these items is pretty haphazard throughout. The first third of the text deals with the spiritual claims of actual practitioners — problematically / artificially divided between “mythology” and “religion” — with the remainder then sorted into chapters on the depictions of afterlives from books, movies, music and theater, etc. That means that lightly-divergent spins on the same reference point like the traditional Christian cosmology are scattered across the book, when they instead could have been centralized together to easily compare and contrast. More confusingly, some fictional universes are split into multiple ‘places’ for the alternate destinations they depict, while others are not — and because each chapter’s contents are alphabetized, that results in for example Dante’s visions of the Inferno, Paradise, and Purgatory being presented separately as #40, #46, and #48 in the overall work.

(The alphabetization is also a strange choice given that some of the locales seem to have been informally-named by Jennings himself, e.g. The Bogus Journey from the Bill and Ted movie of that name or Canine Heaven from All Dogs Go to Heaven. Assuming that the intent of arranging each chapter alphabetically was for ease of the reader looking things up, that seems like a further misstep on his part.)

The aggregate effect of these issues is that the book winds up feeling somewhat underbaked to me, despite the breadth of information and the inherently-appealing topic. It reads more like the Jeopardy! mainstay showing off his surface-level trivia knowledge than ever seriously engaging with the material or reflecting on what we can potentially learn from it. Humans plainly have a recurring cross-cultural preoccupation to tell stories about what happens after we die, but this writer is content to merely summarize a hundred or so of them for us.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine

Book #131 of 2023:

Horses of Fire by A. D. Rhine

I’ve generally been enjoying the recent cottage industry kicked off by the popularity of Madeline Miller’s Circe in 2018, wherein ancient Greek myths are given novel-length treatment and in the process often reapproached with a feminist lens. On the surface, this title is just such a work — a rendition of the Trojan War through the eyes of three women at the heart of the besieged city-state. Together the kidnapped Helen, her sister-in-law Andromache, and their servant Rhea offer us an immersive view of the Bronze Age society that debut author A. D. Rhine (a pen name for the team of Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson) has extrapolated from various mythological, historical, and archaeological records.

The ensuing worldbuilding is interesting, but the result is too far removed from traditional accounts of the siege like Homer’s Iliad. This is somewhat a matter of taste, but in my opinion, a successful retelling either presents a familiar tale from a different character angle or else fills in the existing gaps in the narrative with plausible additional material. It doesn’t explicitly contradict what’s been established before except to intentionally raise questions of honesty and bias in the earlier narrator(s). I know that mythology is an inherently fluid, oral tradition and that Homer isn’t the absolute authority on the war from his stories, but I’m at a loss here as to how we should interpret radically new inventions like a plague ravaging Troy or Paris trying to poison his way up the line of succession. So many of the standard Trojan plot points have been stripped away that the remaining elements are almost a distraction whenever they do appear. The Greek forces are particularly missed, as they are mostly cast as a distant impersonal threat and given no substantial individual characterization until very near the end.

If this had been a reimagining simply inspired by the Trojan War and set in an entirely-new fantasy world, I’d probably feel a lot more charitable towards it (though the lack of closure in the final pages would likely still bug me). As is, it’s too well-written to rate lower than three-out-of-five stars, but it never manages to come together in a satisfying fashion for me, especially compared to the excellent 2019 Natalie Haynes book A Thousand Ships that likewise retells this conflict from a women’s perspective. I could easily see other readers liking it a lot more, however, if they don’t approach it with the same preferences I’ve brought to the experience.

[Content warning for sexism, domestic abuse, rape, pedophilia, torture, claustrophobia, slavery, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023)

Movie #9 of 2023:

Doctor Who: The Giggle (2023)

In hindsight, I probably should have approached these three David Tennant/Catherine Tate Doctor Who specials as a single season of television, miniature though it’d be, rather than a trilogy of discrete movie equivalents. More even than the previous round of Tennant specials that followed series 4 from 2008 to 2010 in the lead-up to his regeneration into Matt Smith, these installments have really all felt of a coherent piece with one another across their run. That’s true both on a level of plot / character — exploring the Fourteenth Doctor’s fresh trauma and allowing him the chance to rehabilitate his earlier self’s treatment of his friend Donna Noble — and as a practical, metafictional transition period for the franchise.

It’s no secret that Whovian viewership has dropped off in recent years, and the BBC has clearly been positioning the upcoming Fifteenth Doctor’s tenure under returning showrunner Russell T. Davies as a great starting place for new viewers. These 60th Anniversary Specials, likewise under Davies, don’t seem to have been part of that same commercial push, but they do form an important throat-clearing effort to win back the segment of the old audience that had started tuning out. The inherent nostalgia appeal of the stars of a decade-and-a-half ago returning to our screens is one element of that, but we’ve also gotten some lovely spins on Classic Who canon tweaked for the modern age and a resolution of sorts to some lingering matters from the Jodie Whittaker years. Though it’s not the cameo-heavy celebration of all six decades that some fans might have wanted, it’s been three strong hours of scripts packed with continuity nods that never obscure the emotional impact of each story. Honestly? This is Davies in his wheelhouse, completely showing off. You want moves, Rose? RTD2 will give you moves.

Which brings us to today’s final outing, The Giggle. Dragging back a First Doctor villain from 1966 is maybe even odder of a choice than adapting the old Beep the Meep comic storyline in The Star Beast, but as usual, Davies makes it work. Guest star Neil Patrick Harris chews the scenery with Master-ish aplomb (and with a variety of Count Olaf-ian accents), and while it’s not quite in line with the character’s original appearance, it’s close enough to get the point across and ultimately succeeds better than The Celestial Toymaker serial ever did at establishing a distinct identity for the figure. He’s a spiteful clown and a cosmic threat who can rewrite reality at will but respects the rules of established games, and that’s driven home in a variety of unsettling setpieces.

Against it, we have our familiar Doctor and his stalwart bestie, joined by some more old friends from UNIT — including Melanie Bush from the Sixth and Seventh Doctor eras, as the latest Classic companion to pop back up again for an adventure. (More of that going forward, please! I’d love to get some additional Classic characters back for an episode here and there that doesn’t try to wring pathos out of their appearance but instead just lets them be trusted competent auxiliary support like Mel is in this special.) And as a regeneration story, it offers us our first look at Ncuti Gatwa in the TARDIS, already dazzling in his role as Tennant’s successor.

There’s a late-act twist you likely won’t see coming if you managed to avoid the leaked rumors, and while my fannish brain wants a little more in-universe explanation for how it’s going to work going forward, it’s no more objectionable than other big swings Doctor Who has taken in the past. And the benefit of the move is clear too, not just for the immediate fun team-up that results from it, but also to satisfy that impetus I mentioned above of presenting the Gatwa era with as firm a fresh start as any incoming Doctor’s ever had. Thematically and then more or less literally, the Fourteenth Doctor’s adventures with Donna represent the Time Lord finally going to therapy and talking through some of that pain they’ve been running from for so long. There’s even an acknowledgement of poor dead Adric from the Fifth Doctor days! (Sarah Jane’s death is also finally made canon, twelve years after the passing of her actress Elisabeth Sladen, while Wilfred Mott is graciously allowed to live on despite the fact that Bernard Cribbins died before he could film the scenes intended for this episode.) It’s no wonder Fifteen seems so much lighter after all that.

It’s a pretty effective passing of the torch, overall. Davies does indulge in some of his weaker impulses, like a new round of ominous yet vague forebodings, and I don’t love that the Toymaker is ultimately defeated more through athleticism and luck than a clever Doctorish plan. But this is an inventive and satisfying way to close out Tennant’s unexpected reprisal of the alien time-traveler, which has turned out to be far more than just a blip of a detour on the path from Whittaker to Gatwa as the main series actor.

[Content warning for gun violence and body horror.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

Book #130 of 2023:

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

This sci-fi novel starts and ends pretty well, but it loses its way rather dramatically for a large section in-between. The early worldbuilding presents us with something like Ender’s Game (or perhaps Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse) by way of The Giver — a dystopian militarized society whose patriarchal horrors have been thoroughly internalized as normal by the teenage heroine who grew up indoctrinated among them. Of course children on her space station are raised as soldiers, apart from their parents, competing with each other to be awarded the best commissions on the base. Of course there aren’t enough of those army positions to go around, so some young women from every cohort coming of age are instead assigned to permanent duty in the nursery: submitting sexually to any man who wants them, forcibly bearing children, and helping to raise all of the resulting babies for the minimum of years still required. It’s deeply unsettling, especially as the protagonist gradually realizes that that’s the intended fate her commanders have in store for her.

This isn’t as bleak as The Handmaid’s Tale, and it could probably be classed as YA fiction despite the heavy themes. Though Kyr is held and kissed against her will at one point by her uncle the cult leader (and it’s clearly a traumatic experience for her), the incident goes no further and we aren’t subjected to graphic scenes of any other assault. As the first portion of the story closes, the warrior girl seems on a path to finally realize and confront the awful extent of her people’s brainwashing propaganda.

And then she travels back in time to before she was born, defeating the alien invasion that inadvertently led to her existence and subsequently spending a while in the alternate timeline that could have been her life. After discovering the same villain is pretending to be humanity’s savior there too, she storms his headquarters to seize and destroy the reality-bending technology for good, but not before using it to return to a slightly-different version of the moment the plot initially began.

From that stage on, things are back on track and resolve well enough with the righteous mutiny we’ve been expecting all along. Both here and at the start, author Emily Tesh does a fine job with her narrator’s characterization as an insensitive bully we nevertheless come to understand and respect. But I can’t rate this title too highly when so much of the middle is an inessential diversion that almost feels lifted from another project altogether.

[Content warning for homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, eugenics, gore, genocide, suicide, and gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea

Book #129 of 2023:

I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea

This debut novel and its heroine should have been right up my alley: an #ownvoices queer Black teen, striving to prove herself in the cutthroat and frequently racist world of French ballet, who makes a pact with a dark force for guaranteed success at the cost of her humanity. In practice, though, we don’t really feel that loss, nor do the character relationships (including the love interest) ever register as anything deeper than mere plot contrivances. This is the latest YA project to dabble in tropes from The Secret History without establishing why the central clique would be so compelling to the protagonist — or vice versa — and that turns out to be just one of several elements that come off as underwritten in the end.

There are weird time skips and dropped details too, like when the dancer finds the body of a murdered classmate and calls the police but the narrative jumps forward to the next day before the officers arrive, with no indication of what they say to her, whether they consider her a suspect, and where their investigation goes from there. (And they apparently don’t search her either, given that she’s pocketed the dead girl’s phone.) We likewise don’t get much clarity as to the nature of the setting’s supernatural power or its limitations, let alone any thematic reflection on the justifications for cheating to get ahead in a corrupt system.

I don’t need every story to be a morality play with tragic consequences for misbehavior, but in a title that wants to cast its main player as monstrous, there ought to be some sort of escalating horror for the reader over what she’s choosing to become and what all she’s giving up to get there. Although this piece occasionally gestures in that direction, it doesn’t deliver nearly enough in my opinion. The publisher’s blurb deems it a “villain’s origin story,” but I’m not leaving with any particular interest in how her arc continues in the forthcoming sequel.

[Content warning for self-harm, gore, body horror, torture, body-shaming, and domestic abuse.]

★★☆☆☆