The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Paradise by Toni Morrison

Book #59 of 2023:

Paradise by Toni Morrison

A complex work that weaves back and forward in time and around a large cast of people associated with the fictional all-Black rural township of Ruby, Oklahoma. The structure of this book reminds me somewhat of Catch-22, but with less of a central protagonist, a more difficult set of themes, and a much heavier narrative tone. (It literally opens with a mass shooting at the local convent, and things don’t exactly brighten from there.) In fact, I’ve found it very hard to consistently follow the action and keep track of all the different characters, although there are moments when the plot slows down to focus on some specific predicament at length that are viscerally breathtaking — as in the early chapter of Mavis fleeing her abusive husband in the dead of night before he can manage to turn their surviving children against her and internally struggling over her culpability in the recent deaths of their infant siblings whom she left in a parked car while shopping. As these examples illustrate, the novel overall is grim, grim, grim.

If I ever read this story again, I will try and do so with a physical copy of the text in front of me, as it may be easier to process that way than on audiobook (despite author/reader Toni Morrison’s evocative narration of her own words). For now, though, my experience with the title seems too disjointed to feel the full impact that the writer likely intended. Impressionistically, the somber mood from this kaleidoscope of scenes will linger, but I personally would have benefited from more of a clear throughline connecting everything together.

[Content warning for gore, rape, racism, sexism, self-harm, and induced miscarriage / abortion.]

★★★☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

TV Review: The Mandalorian, season 3

TV #16 of 2023:

The Mandalorian, season 3

A very uneven installment, and one that probably seems even weaker for being the first live-action Star Wars property to follow the franchise-high achievements of Andor’s debut year. While not awful, this is certainly the worst (or more generously, the most inconsistent) the Mando show has ever been, a cut above its aimless Boba Fett spinoff only in that the episodic adventures are a more natural fit for this program’s wandering lone-wolf-and-cub style of shaggy storytelling.

Where did The Mandalorian go wrong? Off-screen, it’s easy to point to Grogu, the lovable scamp whose initial arc with his bounty hunter guardian seemed to reach a natural conclusion when he departed at the end of season 2. But Disney presumably realized how much merch his cute little face was selling for them, and so had him reunite with Din Djarin over on the Boba Fett series, likely confusing anyone who skipped that on their way here and found the pair suddenly traveling together again. There’s also a clear effort to shoehorn in some setup context for the upcoming Ahsoka show, as yet another outside imposition on the creative process. So far, the Star Wars writers are not managing such crossovers as gracefully as their Marvel counterparts.

So Baby Yoda is back, but without any major conflicts or stakes accompanying him. Instead the main plot this time involves the “retaking” of the planet Mandalore, a vague proposition that doesn’t feel especially grounded for the characters no matter how much exposition about it they occasionally deliver. Pedro Pascal’s figure is arguably not even the titular Mandalorian anymore, since more attention is given to the returning Bo-Katan Kryze and by extension the entire diaspora of their people. She’s the only one with anything approaching a traditional hero’s arc as she struggles to step up and unite the tribes under her leadership, but it’s still not a terribly compelling drama. Most of the challenges raised by the narrative are solved by throwing a combination of beskar and laser blasts at them, and while there remains a degree of fun in watching that action spectacle unfold on the small screen, it’s an increasingly hollow source of entertainment without engaging protagonists who could invest it with personal meaning.

This year brings some nice new guest actors into the fold, at least, including a few I can honestly say I never would have expected to see in a Star Wars title. The individual episodes are sometimes fine on their own terms, especially if you can manage to shut off the pesky part of your brain that asks questions like, “Wait, was she just sitting around moping in an empty building on an empty planet until he happened to drop by?” or “Why does he need that particular droid again?” Bottom line, I just don’t think the scripts / editing have been as carefully produced for round three, and I’m hoping that that’s stemming from unforeseen production issues and not the cynical view that fans are now a proven commodity who will lap up anything with Grogu in it.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter

Book #58 of 2023:

I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter

Author Barbara Rae-Venter is a retired patent lawyer who in recent years has found a new career in the burgeoning field of genetic genealogical research, and specifically its application in aiding law enforcement. Most notably, she was on the team that used partial DNA matches with relatives to finally identify a suspect as the Golden State Killer, a notorious serial rapist and murderer who had represented an agonizing cold case across California for decades. This book is about several of the writer’s criminal investigations, but primarily that one and her first, which involved finding the birth family of a woman who had been kidnapped as an infant and abandoned by her captor at age 5 with no documentation or knowledge of her past.

The resulting text is partly in the true crime genre, but the focus is more on Rae-Venter’s role in using new tools and investigative legwork to solve these long-standing puzzles by building out family trees around victims and potential suspects. It’s certainly not as comprehensive an account of the GSK’s body of crimes as Michelle McNamara’s excellent posthumous work I’ll Be Gone in the Dark — written before Joseph DeAngelo’s arrest — but it’s a good complement to that one, describing how the man was caught and following him through to sentencing. (And because the killer’s atrocities were so extensive, the researcher is even able to pull out specific illustrative examples that I don’t remember McNamara mentioning.)

Where this volume falters for me is in its author’s approach to the ethics of her newfound profession. While she acknowledges that the use of genetic material submitted to companies like 23andMe to identify related criminal suspects is controversial (and oftentimes nonconsensual / beyond a site’s agreed-upon terms of service), she doesn’t give a fair consideration of these objections in my opinion, instead seeming frustrated and performatively outraged that people are daring to stand in the way of justice. She’s dismissive of privacy concerns and hesitations over expanding the scope of police surveillance into personal lives and medical records, and generally uninterested in even framing the matter as a subject of reasonable debate. Likewise, she repeatedly complains about some crime or another being past the statute of limitations for prosecution by the time she’s located a suspected offender, but spends no time addressing why the protections of such expiration dates exist in the law / why we as a society might want them to. And in general, she positions her findings as clear smoking guns for guilt, rather than as pieces of evidence that a jury might eventually consider and weigh alongside the limitations of the science and anything else potentially exculpatory. That reflects a repeated bias towards the prosecution and police that a stronger title could have addressed and attempted to mitigate.

Overall, then, I would call this an interesting yet flawed overview of a topic that is less straightforward than its writer suggests. Her expertise helps illuminate her activities, but it also leads her to overstate the reliability and acceptedness of what is still a relatively new and contested domain.

[Content warning for gore, gun violence, domestic abuse, and violence against children including rape.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick

Book #57 of 2023:

Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick

A journalist in the late 21st century visits a secluded island where he instantly feels a sense of mutual romantic attraction and familiarity with a local woman. In the next section of the text, set decades earlier, there are two other people there who share their names, and so on back through seven different time periods in all. The implication is that these are the same souls, reincarnating and remaining forever connected across history, but the execution of this idea doesn’t really land for me. I don’t buy the bond between these characters in the first place, when they’re skinny-dipping and imagining a future together, let alone when their prior selves instead manifest as siblings, or parent and child, or adult stranger and tween whose photograph he recognizes in her father’s wallet, and so on.

If this book were strictly a collection of unrelated short stories, I would probably give it three-out-of-five stars. No individual chapter impresses me too much, but most are interesting enough for their length and I especially enjoy the few that more overtly verge on the supernatural elements that are otherwise generally backgrounded throughout the work. But the framework joining these disparate plots is a mess, and there’s no particular thematic echoing or boldness of format changes that strengthen the superficially similar structure of a novel like Cloud Atlas. Ultimately I just don’t care about most of these protagonists, particularly when considered as repeated iterations of some bland eternal love affair.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Abhorsen by Garth Nix

Book #56 of 2023:

Abhorsen by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #3)

This 2003 sequel is a thrilling end to the fantasy coming-of-age tale begun in 2001’s Lirael. (Although described upon release as the conclusion to the Abhorsen / Old Kingdom trilogy, these two volumes are really pretty separate from the original 1995 title Sabriel that launched the series. And as their loose saga has since grown to encompass six novels, two novellas, and a few short stories so far, the ‘trilogy’ label for these first three installments now seems even more of a misnomer.) I would even say it’s an improvement over its immediate predecessor, if only because it doesn’t have as slow a rising arc at the start or cut off at an odd anticlimax later on. Honestly, if I were author Garth Nix’s editor considering both manuscripts, I probably would have recommended expanding the story of Lirael’s childhood in the Clayr’s glacier into a full-length and self-contained adventure, and presenting all of her eventual quest beyond that familiar domain in this follow-up entry. Of course, I also would have chosen a more descriptive name than Abhorsen for it!

Here we rejoin the young heroine and her companion Sameth as they seek to live up to their respective family legacies and finally discover what the villainous necromancer Hedge has been trying to accomplish with all his machinations. They likewise learn certain truths about their talking animal friends and their surprisingly lengthy personal history together, a topic which had been previously hinted at but is still satisfying to see confirmed. There are the usual Nix zombie combat sequences and comedy involving Ancelstierrans not understanding / believing the basic reality of magic in their neighboring country, plus some additional fleshing out of the worldbuilding lore surrounding the ancient formation of the Charter and our most in-depth look yet at the seven realms of the setting’s afterlife. The characters have developed nicely in the time we’ve known them, and their decisive actions and willing sacrifices register keenly to underscore the grave threat now facing their world.

The plot ultimately resolves this crisis, while laying out potential threads that would later be picked up in 2014’s Clariel and 2016’s Goldenhand. As a big fan of the Old Kingdom books I’m glad that they eventually continued past this point, but I think this third one functions well as a temporary capstone on the overall project. It’s a Return of the Jedi moment for the franchise, wrapping up all the current concerns in an atmosphere of triumph until further prequels and sequels would someday arrive with their own fresh complications.But whether viewed as a period or a semicolon, this novel is a strong close to the Lirael duology.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, and the death of a dog.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées by Agatha Christie

Book #55 of 2023:

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées by Agatha Christie

The criteria for inclusion in author Agatha Christie’s short story collections is often somewhat haphazard, and in the case of this 1960 publication, it turns out that I’ve read four of the six entries elsewhere already (or five if you count the title piece, which has been expanded from the “Christmas Adventure” version included in 1939’s The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories). None are dreadful, but the mysteries aren’t especially impressive or memorable, either. The best is probably the one that’s new to me, the Miss Jane Marple tale “Greenshaw’s Folly” that closes out the volume, although it hinges on one of the writer’s usual sleight-of-hand gambits that are getting increasingly easy for me to spot as I progress through her body of work. Oddly enough, that story has been left out of some US editions of this anthology, perhaps to produce a more cohesive feel for the remaining contents, which all feature Hercule Poirot instead.

Fun fact: this is apparently the only book published in Christie’s lifetime to include both of her famous detectives! They still never cross paths, though, unfortunately.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Killing God by Stephen R. Donaldson

Book #54 of 2023:

The Killing God by Stephen R. Donaldson (The Great God’s War #3)

If book 1 of this fantasy trilogy offered an allegorical fable, and the sequel delivered a stream of complicating intrigues amid some thankfully deepened worldbuilding, this closing volume brings everything together for an action-packed finale as the threatened war against an invading enemy finally breaks out into open bloody combat. There is a lot of fighting in this text, and I feel similarly as I did whenever Game of Thrones would build a season towards some epic episode-length battle sequence: that kind of spectacle is fine, but it’s not really what interests me about the possibilities of the genre. I greatly prefer the quieter character moments before the swords are drawn over the specific military tactics available in the heightened reality of a magical realm.

While author Stephen R. Donaldson remains one of my favorite authors overall, I’ve just never warmed to this particular series of his, and I can’t say that it ever poses the satisfying moral conundrums of his classic Thomas Covenant or Mordant’s Need sagas. Outside of strict survival, the biggest question plaguing a protagonist in this title is whether a wondrous sorcery is worth its cost of her hearing (and specifically the ability to hold private conversations with her husband), an agonizing decision which reads as both mildly ableist and honestly somewhat silly even before the queen’s librarian allies find her a guide to sign language that renders the whole thing moot.

I’m also underwhelmed by the ultimate villain of this piece, who after a lot of build-up turns out to be a simple warlord with a few special powers, unclear motivations, and no real personality on the page. Everyone calls him a god, but he’s instead just sort of vaguely supernatural in the way of Xerxes in the movie 300 — which isn’t a bad reference point for the novel all-around, come to think of it.

I’m giving this installment the same 3-star rating that I did its predecessors, reflecting my bemused acknowledgement that the craft in its construction is plain despite not especially doing much for me as a subjective reader.

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

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1 > 3

TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 3

TV #15 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 3

This HBO drama about a family who run an independent funeral home has been steadily growing on me, but even in this third season I still don’t think the series is consistently strong enough to deserve a rating higher than three-out-of-five stars. The first episode of the year is a neat encapsulation of my issues here. Following after the medical cliffhanger that concluded the last stretch, the premiere hour back fakes us out with a succession of possible futures before landing on one that was never particularly likely and sticking there. That’s an experimental approach to TV storytelling that I admire, and one that requires the writers to have a great grasp on the characters involved to flesh out their different permutations in a believable manner. But on the other hand, it ultimately boils down to a deus ex machina solution, and the explanation that we happen to be watching the one strand of the branching multiverse where the trillion-to-one odds have fallen this way grows less satisfying as a writing choice the longer you think about it.

It also raises the question: what part of the story that comes next was so important that it was effectively worth cheating death to pull it off? The personal dramas on this show are interesting for the most part — although they can certainly be frustrating at times as well — but I don’t know that any of them merit placing such a noticeable authorial thumb on the scale to undo how the previous scripts painted a certain element into a corner.

In terms of new arcs this season, Claire’s foray into art school and her entanglement with an abusive mentor figure is probably the best, while I continue to hate how much time we’re spending with Brenda and her relatives in spite of the many ignored potential off-ramps that could have her leave the plot for good. Somewhere in the middle of these poles is matriarch Ruth, who gets some decent material in her eventual romance with a new lover, but not before an unfortunate attempted dalliance with a much younger man (played by Rainn Wilson in the sort of off-putting manner he’d soon bring to Dwight on The Office) or a promising early friendship with Kathy Bates who then abruptly announces she’s leaving to visit her sister and never returns.

Speaking of which: the biggest storyline this year involves someone else’s disappearance and presumed death, and while that ambiguity and its necessary pause in the grieving process provides a solid counterpoint to the regular treatment of mourning on this series, it’s an odd avenue in terms of where the broader plot is coming from and the direction it’s now headed toward. That is, if the creative team looked at the general landscape of the program at the close of season 2, decided how they wanted that status quo to be altered going into season 4, and then mapped out these thirteen episodes as a way of joining one to the other — which is not necessarily how these decisions actually get made in the moment, but works as an analytic tool for grappling with serialized fiction — this is a very strange way to get there. For now I’m not convinced that the detour was wholly worth it.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

Book #53 of 2023:

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

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

This is the second of author Brandon Sanderson’s four “Secret Project” novels, which he wrote over the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021 in the time he’d normally spend traveling and making public appearances and then triumphantly revealed in a record-setting Kickstarter campaign to fund their publication. More so than the previous release Tress of the Emerald Sea, this one has the definite feel of a creative writing exercise that grew long enough to be worth polishing up and sharing with the world, for better or for worse. It also reads like a throwback to certain 20th-century science-fiction adventures like Ben Bova’s Orion or Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, with which it shares a general premise of an amnesiac Übermensch from an advanced civilization gradually rediscovering his powers and his origin. (With maybe a hint of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in how the text is intercut with excerpts of the titular guidebook that accompanied the protagonist in his memory-wiping journey to a parallel dimension resembling the middle ages.)

The result is pulpy but fun. Sanderson can’t resist his usual worldbuilding twists, but the big one that the superstitious locals are correct to claim invisible spirits aid them when no one’s looking is drawn out for far too long without significant payoff. In scene after scene, the hero sees evidence of these beings’ interference and dismisses it as a coincidence or someone else’s actions, which grows tiresome after a while. I likewise could have done without the perfunctory-seeming romance, which generally echoes that sexist trope of an experienced woman inexplicably falling for the novice man who supplants her as team lead (The Matrix, The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc.). On the other hand, the main character’s eventual arc towards being a better person is well-constructed, and his tech-enabled grifts along the way are pretty amusing. Ultimately I’d say this book succeeds as the piece of light entertainment that its title implies, thankfully unconnected to the writer’s sprawling cosmere saga, but it’s unlikely to go down as anyone’s favorite.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: League of Liars by Astrid Scholte

Book #52 of 2023:

League of Liars by Astrid Scholte (The League of Liars #1)

I was intrigued by the notion of a YA fantasy legal thriller, but the result here is severely underwhelming at every turn. Take the minimal worldbuilding, for starters. This is nominally set on a different plane than ours, with magic and unfamiliar place names and so on. And yet it basically reads like late 20th century America, or our own society minus the smartphones and internet.

The primary protagonist is “a high school student” whose friend “wants to get into a good college.” He’s interning for a “public defender” whose clients are warned upon arrest, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say here can and will be used against you in the court of law… You have the right to an attorney; if you cannot afford one, the Crown Court will appoint one for you.” In court, the lawyers make objections that the judge overrules or sustains, while a jury of twelve weighs the evidence that the two sides present. There’s a prosecutor, and a stenographer, and a courtroom clerk who says, “All rise for the Honorable Judge __.” Witnesses are questioned, after being asked to “solemnly swear on all that is good and light that you will tell the truth and only the truth.”

Of course, no genre story can build up an entirely new culture from scratch, but generally there are signs that at least some measure of creativity has been brought to the task of embellishing the setting beyond any obvious historical analogue. In this title the parallels are so unimaginatively exact as to be unintentionally quite comical, and sadly, that’s representative of the plot and characters as well. (The main lawyer’s last name is Toyer, which to me sounds about like when Dwight on The Office lied that he had just been to see a dentist named Crentist.) There are four viewpoint teens caught up in this drama, and the stakes boil down to charges of forbidden wizardry and a conspiracy of one government branch trying to take over another, which the kids are somehow in a position to uncover. The enemy against them is faceless and thus personality-free for most of the text, and the strategy behind their actions falls apart upon any close consideration. (They’re powerful enough to kill the king with impunity, but insist on arresting his sister and putting her through a show trial? When one of the few cultural flourishes we’re given is that the royal family wear masks everywhere so no one could even identify them on sight anyway?) Luckily for them the heroes are equally inept, except perhaps for the one whose role in the narrative is to smugly hide the information that the others need until it’s time for the big reveal that his chapters haven’t been irrelevant after all.

There are glimmers here and there of potential for something better. I actually think this reads a lot like a salvageable early draft! The idea that anyone can perform sorcery just by touching the strange arcane shadows and making a wish, or that it’s fulfilled by temporarily dragging some object out of either the past or the future to accomplish the stated goal — that’s neat! It’s not really utilized for any impressive showcases, just introduced and described as highly illegal, but the concept is solid. The boys and girls and their apparent romances could be interesting if they were fleshed out beyond archetypes. Overall I don’t feel that this is awful as a finished work; it’s just disappointing and a bit embarrassing that it was allowed to come to print this way.

[Content warning for gun violence and death of a parent.]

★★☆☆☆