The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Movie Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Movie #2 of 2023:

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Perhaps inevitably, this sequel is not as strong as its rather extraordinary 2018 predecessor. But it nears that level of quality at times, and might well be the best possible follow-up given the awful loss of original star Chadwick Boseman to colon cancer in the intervening years. The studio made the surprising but appreciated call to kill off his title role rather than recast it, and this movie plays out in part as a memorial to them both. Indeed, it’s hard to shake the feeling in one early funeral scene that everyone involved is mourning their real-life friend as much as his on-screen alias.

I like too that because of the events of the first film, there is no immediate heir apparent to T’Challa’s position as Wakandan protector / superhero. While someone does eventually don that mantle, the bulk of the story is focused on a disparate group of individuals taking time to grieve and sort out their feelings, rather than rushing into the next Black Panther’s era. That, and defending the nation from a new power that’s risen up from the ocean depths in challenge, which seems likely to have been the only element retained from the earliest drafts of this script.

Namor and his people are serviceable antagonists at worst, and sometimes offer striking messages on indigenous sovereignty. They’re a great fit for this series and narrative foil for Wakanda overall, and the movie does a good job of showing how the two communities could be natural allies against the colonialist regimes of the world, yet still different enough to reasonably end up at each other’s throats instead. In that light, I think updating Atlantis in the comics to the Mayan-descended Talokan is a particularly smart adaptation choice, even though the exact plot logistics and motivations behind their actions don’t always track for me.

In the end, we circle back around to grief and a verdict on its appropriate responses, which is not unexpected by the standards of the Marvel franchise. (A lot of dialogue is devoted to the question of whether a certain character will intentionally kill the villain, despite the fact that that’s obviously not how Disney’s going to let this morality tale conclude.) And while the 161-minute runtime is simultaneously over-long and overstuffed, featuring too many hard-to-see underwater combat shots and giving short shrift to elements like American college whiz Riri Williams, it hits enough of the right notes enough of the time. There’s no one here with the easy charisma of Boseman, and the project decidedly suffers for it. But director Ryan Coogler’s vision of Black excellence and a bastion where it thrives still lives on, and that’s as fitting a tribute as one could imagine.

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

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

Book #21 of 2023:

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

This is certainly a distinctive fantasy novel, but it’s not one that entirely works for me in execution. Part of the problem is the split timeline, alternating between the heroine’s experiences leading up to her separation from her family and her subsequent life on the run from them. Telling the story this way keeps a few surprises preserved for longer, but early on it makes it hard to grasp the stakes of the situation, and later there are chapters that feel like they’re simply providing information that everyone ought to have figured out already by then.

The minimal worldbuilding also proves a letdown for me. True to the title, the protagonist is of a supernatural species that generally subsists on books, whose contents they internalize via digestion. This has some thematic resonance to the ultimate point that their society cannot progress because generation after generation sticks to the same familiar volumes and shuns all new ideas, but its actual mechanics and implications are pretty vague. (Why do they keep hidden from humanity? Why can the main character recognize written words on at least two occasions without comment, when we’re repeatedly told that her people are physically unable to read at all? Why are some of them instead born as vampiric creatures who feed on the souls of their prey, and why are those ones alternately called mind eaters, dragons, and saints throughout the text? Why are there so many tossed-off references to a wider global community that are never developed at any significant depth?)

I like the core of this plot, with its rebellion against an oppressive patriarchy and the acute personal anguish of a woman forced into marriage, raped and impregnated, and then separated from her beloved children. The fact that she’s a lesbian who at one point makes an asexual male friend — likewise marginalized in their culture — and starts the tale as a single parent raising a child who can be read as disabled is valuable representation for the genre. But overall this feels more like a swirling assortment of promising brainstorming results than a satisfyingly edited final draft.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, drug addiction, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Book #20 of 2023:

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This is far from my favorite Grady Hendrix novel, but I do think it’s closer in quality to his typical output than to Horrorstör, the only title I’ve previously rated lower than four stars. A lot of this will come down to personal taste, but I’m not a big fan of the horror sub-genre where people are tormented by a malevolent doll — or creepy clown puppet, in this case — and I was definitely expecting more of a straightforward haunting with ghosts when I picked up this book. I was also looking forward to the real estate element, which winds up being a fairly minor part of the text. For most of the read, the heroine and her brother are not actually trying to sell the house that they’ve inherited; they’re warding off attacks from the little imp, seeking to exorcise it, or belatedly processing old family secrets and the associated generational trauma. (Contrast this with The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires from the same writer, in which the titular social group is of key importance to the plot.)

It doesn’t help that I strongly disliked both protagonists for their stubborn refusal to ever see things from one another’s perspective, or that as a parent of young children, I felt very on edge during the many scenes of preschooler / toddler endangerment and distress — whether from the literal peril of the monstrous antagonist or even at the beginning, receiving news of the grandparents’ sudden death. The gore was beyond my comfort level too, with amputations and hammer blows to the head and needles going into eyes and such. And to some extent, all of that speaks to the talent and craft behind this work, of course! The adult siblings especially seem well-constructed in their eventually-revealed complexities. But recognizing and appreciating that fact unfortunately hasn’t led me to enjoy this as a piece of entertainment as much as I imagine other readers might.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

Book #19 of 2023:

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

An interesting little popular science book, but not nearly as funny as I was expecting it to be from the title. This is a cultural history of the human backside, focusing specifically on our conceptions of the female form and how they’ve generally been racialized over the past couple centuries, with women of color alternately exoticized and admired for their perceived deviation from the imagined ideal of a ‘normal’ thin cis white posterior. I think author Heather Radke overstates her arguments at times, presenting reasonable yet ultimately unsupported theories, and she breezes through a lot of heavy material that seems like it could have benefited from a longer treatment. She also limits her discussion to western (and relatively modern) beauty standards, which necessarily leaves out much from the finished picture. Still, it’s a decent overview of a universal yet oddly niche subject, and of how beliefs about everything from promiscuity to fashion to health have interacted with this feature of natural physical variation over the eras, from the flappers through to the Kardashians.

[Content warning for eugenics.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

Book #18 of 2023:

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #2)

Overall a three-star read for me, and a marked step down from its predecessor. I actually do like the middle of this book — the slowest part of many novels — when, as promised by the title, the protagonist and her companions invoke a ritual to descend into hell and rescue the soul of their friend who’s trapped there. The demonic horrors they encounter are genuinely creepy, and represent just about the only time in which this sequel carries the visceral impact of the first volume.

Mostly, though, this all feels like somewhat generic urban fantasy, and the beginning especially struggles to regain any particular plot momentum. The ending fizzles a bit too in my opinion, and the nine squabbling societies whose internal politics were so important before are largely absent throughout. Also, while the Yale setting continues to benefit from author Leigh Bardugo’s personal history at the school, conveying a detailed and lived-in impression of campus, the idea that certain public architectural choices (presumably real) are hiding the riddles to arcane secrets (presumably fictional) is a bit too silly and Da Vinci Code-esque for me.

I’m invested enough in the character arcs that I’ll probably check out any further installments, but I’ll admit I had hoped for more from this series after its startling debut.

[Content warning for rape, gore, racism, gun violence, drowning, and violence against animals.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Jewish Bestiary: Fabulous Creatures from Hebraic Legend & Lore by Mark Podwal

Book #17 of 2023:

A Jewish Bestiary: Fabulous Creatures from Hebraic Legend & Lore by Mark Podwal

An interesting read, but not quite what I was expecting and definitely not as in-depth or exhaustive as it seems like it could have been. This modern title presents encyclopedic entries for 35 different animals described in the Torah, Talmud, or other traditional Jewish texts, explaining how each one was characterized within the teachings and practices of ancient Judaism. As with a true medieval bestiary, some of these are recognizably real fauna like bears, rams, or spiders, while others are plainly apocryphal beings like the phoenix, the unicorn, or the ziz. (My favorites are those that seem to exist solely within Judaic folklore, like the re’emim — a duo of giant horned beasts that are said to walk in opposite directions around the world, meeting only to mate and give birth to a new pair and then die.)

The articles are short but well-researched, and each is accompanied by an original drawing from author / artist Mark Podwal. Still, I think I’d prefer for this to be more mythologically-focused throughout, or at least to include every creature from the writer’s sources, rather than simply a few dozen hand-picked examples. If this book were a complete concordance of greater length I might round my rating up to four stars, but in this abbreviated format, I’m feeling a bit less enthusiastic about the project overall.

[Content warning for antisemitism.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Petty Treasons by Victoria Goddard

Book #16 of 2023:

Petty Treasons by Victoria Goddard

This novella revisits and expands upon a slice of backstory previously mentioned in author Victoria Goddard’s excellent fantasy doorstopper The Hands of the Emperor, when Cliopher Mdang first began service as His Radiancy’s personal secretary. Except while that book was generally presented from Kip’s third-person limited point-of-view, this one shifts to the perspective of his liege lord, and is interestingly told in both first- and second-person, as though the man is reflecting upon his private memories and drawing a distinction between “I” the individual and “you” the public figurehead of his recently-shattered empire. That’s a device I don’t believe I’ve encountered in fiction before, but it allows for great insight into his character, especially in those moments when he starts a thought with one pronoun but then switches in mid-sentence to the other.

The plot here is minimal — basically just the protagonist meeting his new servant, sending that underling on his first big diplomatic mission, starting to fix the world’s magic, and considering the limitations of his situation and the oblique things he misses from before he came to power — but the careful study of a careful ruler waking up from his inadvertent lethargy (with a little bit of outside help and inspiration) is pitch-perfect. I imagine the story probably works best for an audience already familiar with / fond of both figures from the preceding volume, but it stands well enough on its own that I might recommend it to anyone tentatively interested in the Nine Worlds saga (or merely its Lays of the Hearth-Fire sequence focused on Kip) yet daunted by the length of some of the longer titles. As other readers have indicated, the series seems to be a rather forgiving, Discworld-style hypertext with multiple possible entry points that build contextually and enrich one another the more you explore. This is only my second read in this setting, and I am already itching to come at it again from some other angle altogether.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Bravely by Maggie Stiefvater

Book #15 of 2023:

Bravely by Maggie Stiefvater

This seems like it should have been an easy layup: beloved YA fantasist (and Celticist) Maggie Stiefvater writing an officially licensed sequel to Pixar’s Brave, the one about ancient Scottish magic, the mom who turns into a bear, and the headstrong daughter who breaks the curse by learning to mend their fraught relationship. That all feels squarely within the author’s wheelhouse, yet the result on the page is unfortunately a convoluted mess.

Set an ambiguous “many years” later, but with Merida and her triplet brothers still living at home with their parents, the main plot of this novel involves a bizarre contest between two gods: a force of destruction who vows to destroy the family’s castle and kill off its residents unless they can change — whatever that means, and no, it’s never clear just what they’re supposedly doing so wrong — and his trickster opposite who manages to buy the princess a year in which to save them. Her strategy to achieve this is to take her relatives in turn to visit neighboring kingdoms, where they either see a different way of life and decide they want to emulate it, or are inspired Scrooge-like to take steps to avert a possible fate they witness playing out elsewhere.

It’s all pretty abstract in terms of stakes, and since the protagonist has been bound not to speak of the immortals’ wager, she can’t even guide the others or tell them what the true point of their traveling is. Amid that silence, we also don’t really dig into her interpersonal dynamics with any of her loved ones, despite that element being a highlight of the film. Then on top of everything else, there’s an undercooked subplot with an aggressive rival chieftain pressuring the clan into joining his confederation, and, perhaps most frustratingly of all, a romantic interest for the heroine whose defining characteristic was previously her desire to stay independent and keep practicing her archery rather than marry any of the suitors for her hand. While the Disney script is circumspect about sexuality, she’s been hailed as both a queer and an asexual icon by fans, which makes it galling to find her falling for a handsome lad in this book… even before getting into his problematic identity as — spoiler alert — that same age-old deity who’s been threatening to murder her entire household.

I’m rating this as highly as two stars because some individual scenes are nice, and Stiefvater generally gets the character voices right. But it’s altogether an odd tale that’s nowhere near as good as either the original movie or the potential for how this follow-up project could have gone.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff

Book #14 of 2023:

Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff

This 2022 publication is a clear and exceedingly thorough account of the various misdeeds, investigations, and cover-ups that dogged the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Historian and journalist Garrett M. Graff has conducted no fresh interviews — which would not necessarily be possible or even all that helpful nearly a half-century after the fact — but he has read and synthesized an extraordinary volume of the existing primary and secondary materials, much of which had apparently never been collected together into one place before.

(As always, it’s difficult to adequately rate / review a nonfiction title without being an expert on the subject oneself. But the obvious level of scholarship and the degree to which the author points out errors and inconsistencies in earlier reporting leads me to believe he’s been careful about researching and presenting the facts himself. It also reads as objective and nonpartisan, although that’s presumably easier for a modern writer to achieve than a contemporary one.)

While the ensuing work is heavy on information both available at the time and in some cases revealed only decades later, it paints a vivid sense of the confusing miasma of scandal and corruption swirling around the Nixon campaign and White House, where one crisis and its illegal, unethical response would often blend seamlessly into the next. Graff pointedly avoids drawing the comparison himself, but the atmosphere will surely seem familiar to younger readers like me who have no firsthand memories of the Watergate era but did follow political news over the Trump years, which in many ways traced a similar pattern.

There are no revelations or new conclusions in this book, but there are plenty of items that had been previously lacking from my general pop-cultural understanding of this moment in American history. Like that the president probably wasn’t initially aware of the hotel burglary that eventually became emblematic of his downfall; he had just encouraged such a corrupt culture among his staff that enterprising underlings would routinely attempt such criminal acts of their own volition. (Regardless, he still knew about and tried to hide the affair soon afterward, and was more directly responsible for other offenses from money laundering to blackmail.) Or that there’s still no agreement on what the point of the Watergate break-in even was, or that Nixon and his team knew the identity of the infamous ‘Deep Throat’ leaker to Woodward and Bernstein pretty much right from the start.

All in all it’s a hefty tome, some 832 pages in hardcover, but it’s well worth reading for the deep dive into its chosen topic. I look forward to someday seeing a book like this on the Trump administration, when all the dust has finally settled.

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

★★★★☆

TV Review: Leverage: Redemption, season 2

TV #5 of 2023:

Leverage: Redemption, season 2

Another pleasantly satisfying year of the Leverage revival, although I think I’ve finally keyed into why it’s not quite soaring for me as its predecessor often did. It’s hard to spot at first, because the cast is nearly all the same, and they are still adults facing ostensibly adult problems… but this is middle-grade fiction now. That’s not to say that tweens are the only ones who could enjoy the show — and I have no idea how it’s being marketed — but the overall sensibility of the program feels built around a simpler cartoon logic than the more grounded original. Bad guys gloat about their evil plans, then walk straight into the traps that the heroes have laid out for them. Those protagonists remain con artists pulling heists to help the underdog defeat the rich abuser of the hour, but they are rarely challenged in a way that isn’t easily overcome or later revealed as the sort of misdirection that’s standard for this genre, where an apparent setback turns out to be a necessary part of the plan all along.

It’s still a good time, mind you! I particularly like the finale and the episode where the main crew are in the background secretly helping a pair of civilians crack the case on their own. The character interactions and the numerous disguises are fun, and I appreciate the concept behind the serialized plot involving Sophie’s backstory, even if it doesn’t prove especially revelatory in practice. But bottom line, this is the kind of zany series where Hardison can just randomly spend most of the season floating in a space capsule, with all of the logistics for either that or any of the episodic missions breezily waved aside by the scripts. And the difficulty of reconciling that with what I remember of the more mature parent program is keeping me at a distance from Redemption.

[Content warning for gun violence and gaslighting.]

★★★☆☆