The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: The Shield, season 4

TV #1 of 2023:

The Shield, season 4

This is a rebuilding era of sorts after the shakeup of the previous year, with the Strike Team disbanded and Aceveda finally moving on from the Farmington precinct, albeit for a supervisory political position that keeps him relevant. In the wake of those familiar power structures, we have Glenn Close as the replacement captain and Anthony Anderson as the major drug lord from her past joining an already-strong ensemble, resulting in what’s probably the finest run of this series since the first. (Neither seems likely to stay for long, of course — I’m getting Dexter vibes in the casting of these ringers to presumably do their thirteen-episode showcase and depart. But while here they’re great adversaries for one another, and Monica is marked as a classic tragic heroine from the start.)

The primary plot arc follows her big controversial policy of asset forfeiture, which Rawling swears will curb crime in the region but, as typical for the depictions of policing on this show, mostly appears to hurt civilians without making an impressionable dent otherwise. I can’t say it enough, but The Shield is anti-copaganda through and through. Call them antiheroes if you must, but the officers and detectives on this program are self-interested and morally compromised at their best, and outright hostile to the community around them at their worst. Protagonist Vic Mackey obviously strays outside the lines of appropriate conduct all the time, even now when he’s nominally trying to keep his nose clean, but his do-gooder colleagues Dutch and Claudette quite shamelessly (and legally) mislead and lie to the suspects and witnesses they interview, all while largely overlooking the antics of Vic’s gang within the force.

And the dramatic irony, of course, is that it’s not the times when the once-and-future Strike Team are most egregiously nefarious that seem poised to bring them down. Instead it’s the smaller moments of humanity, like Lem reluctantly stealing and then returning a dealer’s stash to pressure him to give up the location of a missing girl’s body, that ultimately get them pinned — so far still unknowingly — by an internal affairs investigation.

My favorite storyline, though, involves Shane splitting from his temporarily-reformed friend/partner/boss, remaining a dirty cop and swiftly entering into collusion with the reemerged kingpin Antwon Mitchell, who subsequently sets him against Mackey for spoiling his business. Repositioning the loyal subordinate as a threat — one who can’t be taken down without all their shared sordid history coming out — is just smart writing, and if this angle had lasted through to the finale, I’d likely be looking at a five-star rating for the season. As is, the reconciliation and defusing of that tension comes slightly too soon in my opinion, leaving several episodes of relatively falling action and a reversion to something closer to the old status quo. It’s still outstanding and incisive TV from scene to scene, but a slight step down from the electrifying edge-of-your-seat feeling earlier on.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, pedophilia, rape, drug abuse, domestic abuse, racism, homophobia, and violence against children.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel

Book #4 of 2023:

Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel

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

A darkly twisted tale of two toxically codependent young women studying abroad for art school, drawing on the infamous Amanda Knox scandal as well as debut author Calla Henkel’s own experiences as an American expat in Berlin. I’m from the same area of Florida as this writer, so I am also pleased by the authenticity of her descriptions of the heroine’s hometown (even if the audiobook reader regrettably mispronounces the name of one of our local restaurants, Capt Hiram’s — come on, there’s a catchy TV jingle for it and everything).

The plot is very heavy on partying, drug abuse, and the exploration of budding sexuality, but always in service to conveying how messed-up these characters are, rather than feeling in any way sensational or gratuitous. And although matters do turn predictably violent by the end, I appreciate how the story nevertheless goes in some unexpected directions, while never seeming built around the sort of big gimmicky twist that’s become common in this genre.

Overall it’s a great and vivid piece of writing, albeit not one I’d recommend for anyone who needs a relatable / likable protagonist in their fiction. I’d be incredibly frustrated with people like Zoe and her friends in real life, but I’ve found their downward spiral to be rendered quite irresistible on the page.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse including drunk driving, sexual assault, domestic abuse, disordered eating, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

Book #3 of 2023:

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay

A horror novel with very little horror in it. This reads a bit like one of those Stephen King stories about an older man looking back on his haunted adolescence — Christine crossed with Revival, maybe? — which is a tone that I could theoretically get behind. Except in this case, the ostensibly frightening element is that the narrator suspects his friend of being some sort of misfortune-inducing energy vampire, which she repeatedly denies. And since not much else happens in the plot, the result is mostly just a whole lot of middle-aged white male angst and 80s music name-dropping.

One neat structural flourish is that the entire book is presented as a found manuscript, complete with annotations from that allegedly undead acquaintance. The marginalia of her disputes help puncture the self-importance of the main writer — who seems by biography to be a stand-in for author Paul Tremblay; take that as you will — but they also shroud the few legitimately supernatural moments in a haze of unwanted ambiguity. In the end it feels like both characters have spent decades gaslighting one another and us, while being generally insufferable as people. I’m not surprised neither appears to have any other friends.

Turning the pseudonymous protagonist into a more explicit villain could have been an intriguing angle on this, with the heroine growing more and more aghast at the manic pixie fiend version of her he’s built up in his delusion over the years. But the text only ever gestures vaguely in that direction, spending countless pages waxing philosophical about things like the abstract differences between memoir and fiction instead. I kept feeling like there might be an interesting tale happening just outside my range of vision here, but Tremblay never manages to bring it into focus.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

Book #2 of 2023:

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

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

Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, already one of the more prolific members of his field, realized in the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021 that his canceled public appearances and associated travel left him with a lot of spare time for writing, beyond what he’d already planned out for his various ongoing series. His reaction was to work on additional material in secret, telling only his wife, before triumphantly revealing four completed manuscripts to the world in early 2022 and announcing a Kickstarter for their publication. That campaign went on to become the most-funded in the platform’s history, and this title is the first of the quarterly releases that backers will receive this year (with each available for general purchase after a short delay).

And it starts us off with a blast, delivering a thrilling and whimsical high-seas adventure that takes place within the writer’s expansive Cosmere setting but still stands alone and doesn’t require any particular background knowledge. This is a world we’ve never seen before in that multiverse, with oceans made up of different-colored sands (technically spores of alien particulate) rather than water. When the grains get wet, they react violently: green by bursting into a growth of choking vines, red by producing hardened crystalline spikes, and so on. Our teenage heroine sets sail across that treacherous landscape to rescue her sweetheart from a wicked sorceress, a plot reportedly inspired by Sanderson’s love for The Princess Bride but frustration that the titular Buttercup doesn’t actually get to do very much in it, even when her own beau is kidnapped by pirates. The clever Tress by contrast is a very agentive protagonist, and one who grows a lot as a person over the course of her adventures.

With respect to the broader continuity, long-time fans will spot a kandra here and an Elantrian there, but the central Cosmere connection is the storyteller Hoid, appearing as both the later narrator of events and a character still within them. Hilariously, he is suffering under a temporary curse for the earlier role, leaving him spouting inanities and able to contribute only circuitously to the efforts unfolding around him. Meanwhile, his irreverent presentation of the tale adds a rollicking conversational tone to the novel while also establishing a critical distance from the epic struggles that Sanderson typically relates. (Indeed, since Hoid has a reputation as a bit of a liar and a braggart, I suppose it’s an open question as to how much of this yarn we can even trust at face-value.)

The end result is a project that seems welcoming to most audiences, yet inconsequential enough to the main Cosmere storyline(s) that it could probably be skipped without any subsequent confusion down the line. It’s a great girl-power story, and one that provides some valued genre representation of a deaf character with a nifty piece of assistive technology. The only real sour note for me is some sporadic fatphobia in comments about certain people or large bodies in general, which is not something I’ve picked up on in this author’s work before — so perhaps it’s meant to be part of his characterization of Hoid’s voice? But I’ve found it obnoxious and mean-spirited, and it’s the primary element holding me back from giving the book a full five stars.

[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #1 of 2023:

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #4)

The second book in a row to be marketed as the final volume of Earthsea would ultimately, of course, prove not to be that at all. Author Ursula K. Le Guin just kept discovering new things to say about the fantasy setting and its characters, and this 1990 novel, then intended to be read as the (second) conclusion to the series, well merits her reopening the finale of 1972’s The Farthest Shore.

At the end of that previous title, the main protagonist of the original trilogy had given up his magic in an epic quest to save the world. He features as well in this sequel, which takes place soon after, but our attention is fixed on the returning heroine from The Tombs of Atuan, now middle-aged and going by the name Tenar. Through that widow’s eyes, we get a quieter and more domestic impression of the pastoral archipelago, as a backdrop to her efforts at helping a young girl she’s adopted, who had been viciously attacked and burned by her birth family. It’s a slow and character-driven plot, but rich in its everyday worldbuilding and thematic considerations.

Primarily, Le Guin seems to be interested in revisiting and challenging the gender assumptions behind her earlier stories, which cast men as the powerful wizards of Earthsea and severely restricted the available roles for women. Pushing back against that dynamic, she now shows how the marginalized female perspective may be better suited for long-term healing in the face of adversity, in contrast to grand displays of male despair. There’s a degree of binary essentialism in both that initial framework and its critique here — the position that all men are X, all women are Y, and everyone fits neatly into one category or the other — but generally, it reads more as a commentary on the societal construction of masculinity than an endorsement of such a polarized schema.

That is to say, the former archmage is “unmanned” by losing his sorcery only because his civilization, like ours, folds notions of self-worth into traditionally gendered activities / behaviors. A man who has been accustomed to power reverts to a shameful boy in its absence: not because there’s anything inherently male about any of that, but because his people have long taught him that there is. It’s only when the hero starts reaching for new ways to still be effective that he’s able to break free from the lethargy of his personal crisis and start actively defining who he’ll be in the next stage of his life.

Meanwhile, Tenar is steadily caring for her ward, providing a nurturing space for recovery and repelling the abusers from her past who view her as but a tool they now seek to reclaim. That child undergoes a redefinition of self and assertion of might in the end too, made possible solely by the new mother figure who refuses to ever give up on her in spite of everyone’s insistence that she’s too damaged to have a purpose anymore. While the ending is a bit rushed, it’s overall a triumphant and contemplative return to Earthsea that deepens and complicates our understanding of the realm.

[Content warning for slavery, torture, and implied child rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie

Book #200 of 2022:

Dead Man’s Folly by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #28)

This is a fairly standard Agatha Christie mystery, notable mainly for stumping her retired Belgian detective for several weeks, during which time he retreats from the rural crime scene to sulk in frustration at home before an ultimately triumphant return to solve the case. The premise and the answers more or less work, although they each rely on some pretty unrealistic human behaviors. A fake murder is arranged for a party only for the attack to be carried out for real, and its planner feels that someone she knows but cannot now pinpoint was subtly influencing the details she designed for it. Later it turns out that a certain person has been living under multiple identities without detection, and the motive for the death(s) was to protect a secret that literally anyone in town could have plausibly guessed.

It’s always so hard to critically break down which elements succeed or fail in this sort of title without spoiling the whole thing, but for me, this one is effectively structured yet not quite satisfying in its eventual reveals. It doesn’t help that the protagonist shares his deductions with a random side character, rather than confronting the culprit in the traditional denouement, or that there’s no closure from news of an arrest or any other means of justice at the end. While I value these signs of the author’s willingness to experiment with form, they haven’t paid off as much as one might hope.

[Content warning for racism and eugenics.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Katerin Moran

Book #199 of 2022:

The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Katerin Moran

[I read and reviewed this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke today!]

I don’t love every part of this book — and in fact, I think the last 10% or so is probably its weakest, which is a disappointing note to leave on, especially for what’s likely to be my final read of the year. But overall, I like the work better than author Jenna Katerin Moran’s earlier novel Fable of the Swan, which I gave four-out-of-five stars, so I can hardly assign a lower rating here. (The two titles share a setting within the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG framework, but are generally unrelated.) She’s plainly grown as a writer over the decade between, resulting in a narrative that is both more complex and paradoxically easier to follow as a reader. While we are still dealing with fairly mind-bending concepts involving the magic of perception to rewrite / erase reality and transcendent attempts to access the hidden truth beyond the known universe, this is a gentler and more accessible easing-in to the notions at play.

It’s also more of a collection of interlocking stories than a novel per se, which may be why my disappointment over the ending isn’t reflecting onto the publication as a whole (and why I can accept “The Night-Bird’s Feather” as a name no worse than any other, despite its general irrelevance). The chapters are long, but each is somewhat of a self-contained fable, offering the rhythms of a fairy tale inflected with Slavic fantasy flavoring and the warp of Moran’s distinctive ethos and sense of humor. A girl beset by a witch has dreams in which she can seek advice from her far-distant descendents and the people who will know her when she’s grown — an even stranger experience from their perspective. When her opponent is ultimately defeated, the corpse of its presence is somehow left within her soul, to be later bartered away and thence revived. Elsewhere, a kindhearted and agoraphobic vampire helps her neighbor against the creature of chaos that’s forced its way into being her houseguest. A woman manifested from the ether builds a home inside the embodied landscape of someone else’s despair. And so on.

These heroines and the impossible tasks that they nevertheless perform are all cleverly written, and the bizarre rules of the worldbuilding yield plot developments and punchlines that categorically couldn’t work anywhere else. Am I entirely convinced that I understand what’s meant by phrases like “the power of the eyes that look upon” or “the daughter of the lord of Death’s dominion he”? Not really! But the vibes are fantastic, and the text is engaging despite its length and occasional abstract philosophizing. It’s been a great mental palate cleanser, if nothing else.

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

★★★★☆

TV Review: His Dark Materials, season 3

TV #61 of 2022:

His Dark Materials, season 3

This adaptation has long struggled to capture and distill the complex themes of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy trilogy, and this final season faces the additional hurdle of navigating the events of its most complicated volume, The Amber Spyglass. Theoretically, it’s a pretty faithful representation! The series doesn’t shy away from the inherent theological controversies, and it does in fact deliver a war on heaven and the main characters ultimately euthanizing the setting’s version of the Almighty. But it includes that latter moment so perfunctorily and with such a minimum of explanatory dialogue that I’m guessing it will be missed by most viewers who have not previously / recently read the book. Similarly, the earlier scene where Lyra comes face-to-face with her ‘Death’ plays out as a weird one-off party trick, and not the profound humanistic consideration of an alternate society where everyone grows up with those comforting harbingers, as it is on the page. It feels like a binary checklist approach to the material — okay, we’ve got mulefa; what’s next? — rather than a true attempt to tell the soul of the story.

The biggest misstep remains the portrayal of dæmons on this show. I feel moderately invested in the relationship between the protagonist and Pan, or the one between Mrs. Coulter and her monkey, but as a standard feature of the lived-in worldbuilding, these animal companions are still absent and silent far too often. As I noted back in my review of season one:

“Every human in Lyra’s world should have a dæmon by their side at all times, and they should be interacting with them regularly as our young heroine does. Yet in practice, these creatures are missing from most shots — with an offhand reference to staying hidden in pockets — and rarely provided any dialogue or particular characterization. As a result, several big moments related to dæmons and their mythos fall completely flat, since the audience has been given no compelling reason to truly care about them.”

This year additionally spends a bit too long on the excursion to the land of the dead without clear justification, which was already a weakness of the text but is exacerbated here. Unavoidable production delays have aged the cast a bit beyond my easy suspension of disbelief for where the plot ends too, and while it’s great to have James McAvoy on-hand and clashing with Ruth Wilson again after he sat out most of the previous run, their acting is not enough to save this program from itself. It’s all tedious in a way the novels never were, with only the closing minutes achieving a measure of that sublime Pullman grace.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★☆☆☆

Seasons ranked: 2 > 3 > 1

Book Review: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

Book #198 of 2022:

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb

My shorthand pitch for this debut novel would probably be something like “Good Omens meets The Golem and the Jinni“: a tale of the early twentieth century, richly steeped in #ownvoices Jewish elements, in which a friendly angel and demon who have spent eons companionably debating Talmud finally leave their nameless shtetl in the Pale of Settlement (modern-day Poland, the part of the Russian Empire where Jews were confined) for America. They’ve come to find a girl from their village who’s stopped writing home, and partly just because the demon — one of the mischievous shedim, not the more evil Christian variety — enjoys stirring up minor trouble. But the Ellis Island immigrant story that unfolds around them winds up changing both beings far more than they could ever imagine.

It’s also an #ownvoices queer title from author Sacha Lamb (they/them). Angels and demons in this conception are inherently somewhat genderfluid, with the shed generally thinking of himself as male but sometimes presenting differently, and his angelic counterpart being read as a young man by others but insisting on it/its pronouns for itself. These two protagonists quibble incessantly, but outside of the plot specifics, the main narrative arc of the work involves them coming to realize how much they need / mean to one another. Likewise, the third-most important character plainly has romantic feelings for her female best friend, although she figures that out for herself long after it’s evident to readers.

Along the way, these three companions track down their wayward neighbor, put vengeful dybbuks to rest, assist factory workers striking against unfair labor conditions, and engage in some quintessentially Jewish arguments and commentary about the differences between the Old World and the New. It’s a thoroughly delightful blend of classic Yiddish fabulism and contemporary YA fantasy, all about finding your identity and a community that will help you stick up for it, and while you don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy the result, I feel wonderfully seen throughout the book myself.

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

★★★★★

Book Review: The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun

Book #197 of 2022:

The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun

A bitter little novella about a Korean man who’s bedridden and initially only able to communicate by blinking, having been severely disabled by the car accident that also killed his wife. Lacking any other family to take him in, he’s looked after by his mother-in-law, who gradually gets revealed as a resentful tormenter punishing the protagonist for her daughter’s death and the unhappy marriage she feels the younger woman was trapped in beforehand. There’s a bit of Misery in the DNA of this plot, in which the villain gaslights her patient and actively stymies his recovery, but she’s additionally focused on embarrassing him and tearing away all competing avenues for support, as when she shamelessly undresses him and changes his catheter in front of his visiting colleagues.

It’s an unnerving and obviously ableist read, but I think it might have been more effective unfolding at greater length, or else with less throat-clearing early on before the horror really sets in. (The amount of setup likely would be fine in a full novel, but it’s too much proportionally here, taking up more space than what seems like the proper focus of the work.) I also don’t know that the title element, of the massive hole that the antagonist is digging in the hero’s garden while he watches helplessly from his window, is altogether interesting or necessary. But author Hye-Young Pyun definitely conveys the isolated terror of the central predicament well.

★★★☆☆