The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★★☆

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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.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi

Book #51 of 2023:

The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi

Based on the lush prose, the flowery title, and the other pieces I’ve read by author Roshani Chokshi, I was expecting this novel to fit squarely in the fantasy genre, but to my surprise, it’s relatively rooted in reality instead. Although the central characters believe in the supernatural, and spend quite a great deal of time trying to invoke certain witchy powers to bend the universe to their will, there’s ultimately nothing here that a straightforward explanation couldn’t account for — more’s the pity. In the absence of true magic, we’re left with a plot twist that’s been done too many times before and several interesting potential pathways that are unfortunately ignored on the way to the predictable end.

It’s hard to discuss a story like this that builds to some big reveal without spoilers, but I’ll try. Part of me worries that even alluding to that sort of structure will tip future readers off, but since I correctly guessed the surprise less than a quarter of the way through the text myself, I’m not too worried about keeping it a secret for others. I will simply note that the book is presented in two alternating timeframes and narrators: a teen girl in the past with a friend who looks and acts close as a sister, and a man in the present-day who’s married to the latter. The earlier thread sees the girls playing darkly violent games of make-believe and developing a toxic codependency on one another; the later one finds the hero struggling with his wife’s insistence that he never look into her personal history, as well as his own conflicted memories about a brother who vanished that his parents maintain was just an imaginary friend.

A lot of the individual scenes are spookily effective, especially at conveying the power that the bare idea of witchcraft can have over a suggestible mind, even without the spells being strictly real in any meaningful sense. It’s got a solid gothic atmosphere and a neat incorporation of the old Bluebeard legend. I would have happily read a whole narrative focused on the ambiguously missing sibling angle alone, and I’m impressed with how the protagonists in both eras deal with their respective significant traumas. And yet, I find that I’m cold on this title overall. It’s too self-congratulatory in its imagined cleverness at setting up that would-be gotcha moment, when I suspect I would have been more invested if that had been front-loaded into the premise instead. Don’t try to dazzle me with something that wasn’t particularly well-hidden in the first place — tell me about it at the beginning, and then let us explore the fallout with eyes open together.

[Content warning for gore, pedophilia, sexual assault, incest, bullying, drowning, and child abuse.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 2

TV #14 of 2023:

Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 2

The first year of this Clone Wars spinoff was a surprisingly propulsive affair, but this sophomore season struggles to recapture and maintain that sense of momentum. It’s still a solid delivery of weekly Star Wars thrills — although I question the decision to have its release schedule overlap with the current run of The Mandalorian — but with less of a guiding throughline about why we should care about these particular characters at this particular moment of galactic history. There’s some plot movement and bigger stakes from time to time, but mostly it’s a string of episodic filler like the franchise’s version of The A Team.

I also continue to feel that the members of this band of protagonists are not especially distinctive, and not just because they’re all literal clones voiced by the same actor. Wrecker and Omega are each relatively well-drawn, but their brothers Hunter, Echo, and Tech can often come across as roughly interchangeable from scene to scene. (One of them leaves for a few episodes this season, and I’m not 100% sure I can even remember which one without looking it up. The group dynamics don’t appear to meaningfully change in his absence.) An emotional finale seems likely to alter that situation going forward, assuming Disney renews the show again, but it’s a continued weakness in the storytelling here.

At its most interesting points, we’re at least getting a look at how the Empire transitioned away from clone troopers to imperial stormtrooper recruits, which is not an area that any previous series or movie has delved into before in much detail. The driving logic behind that push could be made more explicit, and I can only assume that all the nebulous talk about research into cloning is meant to eventually tie with what’s happening decades later on the Mando program (and possibly the sequel film trilogy), but it’s probably the main takeaway from this season beyond its downbeat ending.

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Book #50 of 2023:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Everyone in this 2006 debut novel is either deeply pretentious and misanthropic or else a fringe figure patronizingly pitied by those who are. They’re regularly sexist and racist, too! I actually tried reading this once before, five years ago, and put it down after the first 20% due to the intense emotional abuse the young heroine was receiving from all directions, but particularly from her distant academic father. I’ve returned to it now at a Patreon donor’s request, and unfortunately, I can say that this element only gets worse as the slow-rolling plot unfolds.

In broad strokes, I guess you could call this a high school riff on The Secret History. The protagonist is a transfer student who falls in with a mysterious exclusive clique, and who informs us on the first page of a death in that circle that won’t actually arrive until the midpoint of the text. That comparison is a disservice to Donna Tartt’s classic, however, whose characters may have been unlikable nihilists but whose general narrative at least aimed at interrogating and critiquing their empty hedonism. In this title, there is so much casual cruelty directed from and towards our impossibly well-read narrator — her new friends jeeringly call her things like Retch and Puke! — but her only interest beyond constantly name-dropping books in a variety of overwrought metaphors* is scratching at the mystery of their inappropriately close faculty advisor’s private life.

This is a story that throws a convoluted conspiracy about a secret society of murderous radical political activists at readers in the last 15%, and builds to a sequence of twists that are simultaneously glaringly predictable from the clues Blue has spent the year ignoring and profoundly implausible in any meaningful sense. And while it doesn’t exactly end on a cliffhanger, there’s a distinct lack of resolution in the way everything finally draws to a close.

This novel escapes my lowest rating by the slimmest of margins. The teen girl’s first-person character voice is distinctive, and I like that she proactively investigates curiosities and eventually (maybe?) uncovers the truth. There’s some light ambiguity that I find refreshing, and certain comedic moments or droll asides that are genuinely entertaining. I did stay reasonably invested this time, although that may have been in an idle hope that the various pieces that weren’t quite clicking for me suddenly would. Ultimately, though, this bizarre coming-of-age tale is every bit the calamity of its title. One-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

*An actual sentence from this work, to illustrate what I mean: “Charles and his friends looked forward to the hours at her house (the address itself, a little enchanting: 100 Willows Road) much in the way New York City’s celery-thin heiresses and beetroot B-picture lotharios looked forward to noserubbing at the Stork Club certain sweaty Saturday nights in 1943 (see Forget About El Morocco: The Xanadu of the New York Elite, the Stork Club, 1929-1965, Riser, 1981).”

[Content warning for underage alcohol abuse, suicide, gaslighting, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 3

TV #13 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 3

This year is probably peak Gilmore Girls for me, although it’s overall a show that’s remained consistently strong across its tenure. (I’m already looking forward to defending the less popular final original season and subsequent Netflix revival miniseries when I get to my reviews of those.) Rory’s love life is never more interesting than it is here, and the writers and cast alike do a great job of illustrating both why she and Jess would be drawn to each other and why they’re nevertheless fundamentally incompatible, at least at this stage of their lives. They sizzle with chemistry even before getting together, but they tend to bring out the worst in one another, too. Jess is a great tragic figure all-around, actually, within the bounds of what this compassionate family drama will allow — meaning there’s no significant violence beyond a few black eyes and damage to a classmate’s furniture accompanying his gradual downfall, just an aching sorrow at the sense of loss and missed opportunity.

Luke’s nephew is a classic bad boy with a heart of gold, which is exactly why he’s so enticing to Rory over the prospect of more blandness with insecure first-boyfriend Dean, but his biggest flaw is his tendency to shut down and not communicate when people assume the worst of him, as his reputation as a town malcontent often inspires. I’m glad he comes back later having undergone a fair degree of personal growth in the meantime, but I’m also glad that his present arc ends here, amid a backdoor pilot for a prospective spinoff that never got off the ground. He’s fulfilled his purpose in the narrative of Rory’s teenage life, and provides the perfect bittersweet pang that the end of her high school career warrants.

But enough about that guy, because the title characters are also well-served by this run. The graduation from Chilton in the finale really does feel like the momentous close of an era for them, and the logistics to set up Rory’s replacement college choice are deployed with skill. From a production standpoint, obviously once the program was renewed for a fourth season and beyond, there was no way the girl was going to go off to somewhere as far as Harvard. It’s hard enough to retool and transition a TV show to the collegiate setting, as Veronica Mars, Buffy, and many others can attest, even without going the Dawson’s Creek route of losing the hometown and its established cast to boot. Lorelai and the rest of Stars Hollow are too integral to the story to drop, which means the nearby Yale gets to be her daughter’s chosen destination despite her oft-referenced dream of its rival in Boston. But the steps to get to that point on-screen are solid, and Richard’s status as an alumnus adds another promising avenue for future plots beyond the Gilmore girls making the short drive to visit one another.

As for Lorelai herself, she’s navigating her ex Christopher having another baby, the usual petty dramas with her parents, a crisis at the Independence Inn that turns into an exciting new work opportunity, and the quiet unspoken tension of Luke getting into a serious relationship with a woman who can sense their bond. But mostly, she’s still taking a backseat to Rory in terms of driving the episodic storylines and any larger concerns.

Elsewhere, Lane joins a band and develops a whirlwind romance of her own, which is cute for the moment, yet weakened going forward by the actor’s offscreen departure for a starring role on The O.C. Paris has a college admissions-related breakdown, whilst continuing to be as much a friend as a thorn in the side for Rory. And Kirk is promoted to the main cast for some reason, despite being a pretty tangential figure to the Gilmore clan.

Overall, it’s the same quick-witted, heartfelt slice-of-life series as ever, gaining power from the steady progression of time in its world and the relationship issues experienced by its younger heroine during this section. It remains a comfort rewatch for me, and I’ve enjoyed this season in particular.

[Content warning for sexual assault and underage alcohol abuse.]

★★★★☆