The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

Book #62 of 2023:

Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide by Rupert Holmes

Overall a fun bit of light depravity. I think the wish-fulfillment ending and the framing device of the book being a published guide to all the secrets of a purportedly clandestine institution weaken it a little, but it’s a fine piece of entertainment in general. The first half of the story follows three students at that school learning the curriculum of how to execute (pun intended) the perfect murder, after which they leave to pursue their separate hands-on “thesis projects.” Those euphemisms are a continual delight, as is the old-timey 1950s setting.

Still, it’s a very bifurcated narrative, and I’d say the front part is more engaging than the back. On-campus, there’s a looming danger from teachers promising to kill anyone who flunks the material and classmates honing their new skills by practicing on one another. It’s all a bit zany, but the plot feels more unpredictable as a result, as though reasonably anything could happen next. Post-graduation, the remaining action reads instead like an overlong heist sequence, which in fiction of this sort can generally proceed in one of only two different ways. (Either the elaborate plan goes awry and the criminal protagonists have to use their wits and talents to improvise a desperate escape, or else everything works exactly as intended and apparent setbacks are whisked away from the hoodwinked audience in the dramatic reveal that they were necessary parts of the plan all along.) It even gets a bit tedious watching the characters line up all the moving pieces of their big Rube Goldberg schemes, especially if you can’t silence the voice in your head observing that people in real life get away with murder all the time via much simpler means, and that all the extra complications are surely increasing the possibility of some critical component going wrong.

These issues have kept me at somewhat of a remove from the text, but it helps that the assassination targets are so odious and their killers so talented thanks to their unusual education. There’s a Count of Monte Cristo / Inigo Montoya vibe in the air when they finally confront their respective victims, and that’s enjoyable to see play out, other than the homophobic implications of staging one crime scene to look like the deceased was struck down by a nonexistent gay lover. But taking the novel as a whole, I fear this is one that I like more than I love.

Weird fact: author Rupert Holmes is the singer-songwriter behind the 1979 classic “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”!

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

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Book #61 of 2023:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

A lovely and heartfelt story about two Gen-X childhood friends who grow up and become collaborative partners in making world-famous video games together. I’m reminded strongly of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as well as the novels Taylor Jenkins Reid has written about her own fictitious celebrities, like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo or Daisy Jones & The Six. As with those titles, you don’t have to know or care about the specific subject-matter field of this one to fall deeply invested in the personal journey of its characters as they inadvertently hurt one another, drift apart, and reconnect repeatedly over the decades. It’s a toxic pattern but a clear source of strength and mutual creativity for the game designers, and author Gabrielle Zevin excels at depicting how these people are each trying their best and undergoing profound changes as they move separately through different life stages. And they are close without the relationship ever turning sexual, which is a refreshing choice for a book with a central hero and heroine.

I think the ending is a little weaker than the beginning or middle, but maybe that’s because there couldn’t really be any tidy resolution to such a messy plot — or because the writer didn’t want to push the narrative too far beyond our present-day. But I like the impression that Sam and Sadie’s future is still out there when we leave them behind, in a myriad of possible paths (quite befitting a book that name-drops Chrono Trigger, a game famous for its own multiple branching conclusions). Like the titular reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth — another recurring fixation across the text — there are quotidian tragedies here existing alongside the sense that the next day, or the next level, or the next game, might finally bring on a change for the better.

The representation is nice as well, although I suppose it’s a double-edged sword with the realistic bigotry that’s likewise on display. Both protagonists are Jewish, and one is half-white and half-Asian with a physical disability that restricts his mobility. Each is also eventually revealed to be queer, and there’s a heartbreaking act of homophobic violence that severely impacts them midway through the novel, in addition to the background levels of racism and sexism that they regularly experience. One abusive mentor figure is astonishingly well-drawn and believable in his cruelty and industry gatekeeping — I was picturing him as the art teacher Olivier from the show Six Feet Under while reading, but he could be any number of men in the real world who take advantage of their female underlings in that fashion.

Bottom line, these folks suffer a lot, but they make great art out of their trauma and are captivating even when unfairly lashing out as a result. I haven’t been able to look away from either their high points or their lows.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, gore, car accident, death of a parent, drug abuse, antisemitism, ableism, amputation, domestic abuse, and sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers

Book #60 of 2023:

Man Made Monsters by Andrea L. Rogers

This is such a nifty idea for a short story collection, with every entry following different members of the same extended Cherokee family yet moving steadily forward in time, ultimately spanning from 1839 to 2039. (There are a few callbacks and recurring characters across the text, but mostly each tale stands fine on its own.) It’s a horror and sci-fi project populated with plenty of pulpy monsters, from vampires to werewolves to zombies and more, while also centering author Andrea L. Rogers’s #ownvoices cultural perspective and the insidious terrors of racism, domestic abuse, and intergenerational trauma. Despite these heavy themes, it’s overall a quick read, and a shiver-inducing delight throughout.

Other reviews mention the gorgeousness of the accompanying illustrations and design choices in the printed book, but I was impressed even just listening to the digital audio version.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 2

TV #17 of 2023:

Abbott Elementary, season 2

Another fine year of this workplace mockumentary set at an underfunded, majority-Black public school in inner-city Philadelphia. The strengths of its humor and character specificity remain, and my biggest concern from before, that season one‘s core romantic tension was too similar to Jim and Pam from The Office except with coworkers who barely even know one another, is largely mitigated this time through. The will-they-won’t-they element is still a factor, but it’s more palatable now that Janine and Gregory have been working together for much longer, and the plot occasionally pushes them in directions that aren’t quite so aligned with their Scranton predecessors.

This season also fleshes out the worldbuilding via a local charter school rival and the running threat that its parent organization will take over Abbott, and the supporting cast is deeper now with recurring students, parents, and other faculty members outside of the core group. The main protagonist’s family life is explored too, via the late introduction of her mother and sister. I still wouldn’t call this an all-time classic sitcom run, but it’s a good indication that the series (and its creator/star Quinta Brunson) has plenty left to say and a motivation to improve year-over-year. All that plus a truly inspired obligatory Gritty cameo, as well.

★★★★☆

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.]

★★★☆☆

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.]

★★★☆☆