The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

Book #7 of 2023:

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

I know this 1968 novel is a beloved fantasy classic for many, but I’ll admit that reading it for the first time today, I’ve struggled to connect with the characters or their story. The imagery is certainly beautiful enough, and the equity in gender representation is a step up from The Lord of the Rings, but the long stretch of plot during which the titular unicorn has been transformed into a fair human maiden of minimal agency (who’s initially titillatingly naked, of course) really leaves me cold. I’m also not a big fan of the half-hearted anachronisms in what’s otherwise a straightforward fairytale out of mytho-historical Europe, which was the same issue I remember having with The Once and Future King. I think tonally I need either a full-on Shrek level embrace of that sort of chaos, or else the use of elaborate worldbuilding in place of generic olden times for the setting.

Now, there’s something very poignant about the initial premise of a creature discovering she might be the last of her kind left in the world, and I especially love the detail that most folks have lost the ability to even recognize a unicorn when they see one, somehow overlooking the glowing horn and continually mistaking her for a simple wild mare instead. (I’m reminded of the similarly forlorn Narnians in The Last Battle who convince themselves that animals can’t talk despite all evidence to the contrary, to the extent that it finally becomes tragically true for them.) I also appreciate how author Peter S. Beagle skews against genre convention / expectation for his ending, even to the point of making characters metafictionally reflect on the unwanted yet compelling nature of their respective hero, damsel, and villain roles.

Yet all of that ultimately adds up to a title that I enjoy in pieces, rather than as a composite whole. The soul of the work generally passes me by, resulting in a personal rating of three stars on the Goodreads scale: I liked it, but I didn’t love it.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Book #6 of 2023:

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

This sophomore work from 2010 is definitely an Emily St. John Mandel title, displaying that author’s trademark tendency towards a narrative that unfolds nonlinearly, disclosing new elements of explanatory character backstory well after we’ve been following the cast’s foibles in the present day. I think it’s an improvement over her debut novel Last Night in Montreal too, although I don’t love it nearly as much as her later Sea of Tranquility or especially Station Eleven.

I particularly enjoy the beginning of this book — long before either the titular singer or her gun has shown up in the plot — which largely revolves around a rather Kafkaesque situation at the protagonist’s office. His employers have discovered that he likely falsified his credentials to get the job, but they don’t have quite enough proof to fire him, so instead they gradually restrict his company access until he is showing up each day to an empty room on an otherwise unused floor of the building with no responsibilities whatsoever. (And why not? He’s still getting paid for this! It doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me at all, and I wouldn’t even have to resort to throwing crumpled-up pieces of newspaper out the window to keep myself occupied.)

It’s a great sketch and a pointed satire of corporate America from the Canadian writer, but she loses me in the back half of the text, when we’ve learned enough about the estranged worker to find him more pathetic and odious than endearing. He gaslights and cheats on his fiancée, whom he then marries and abandons on their honeymoon to help the cousin he’s had a lifelong incestuous crush on, whose criminal career appears to have progressed from smuggling and selling fake IDs to outright human-trafficking. Phew! I suppose the smooth reversal of reader favor is evidence of Mandel’s skill, but at a certain point I have difficulty investing in her creation’s self-inflicted angst or still rooting for a happy ending to come his way. While the closing arc does indeed bring us the promised singer and her gun, their arrival comes too late to feel integrated as storyline essentials, let alone to make up for how little I care for the ostensible hero by then.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn

Book #5 of 2023:

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn (Legendborn #2)

The plot in the middle of this YA fantasy sequel picks up a little, but the beginning spends too long reiterating the overall premise — a Black teenager from North Carolina finds herself the unlikely inheritor of King Arthur’s magical powers, which she must use to fend off both an impending demon war and the racists in Legendborn society who don’t think she belongs — and engaging in some empty political intrigues. And while the action improves as the story goes on, it also becomes more of a romance with the protagonist’s angsty brooding bodyguard, which is not especially to my taste. (Plus it’s strange to read an apparent love triangle where the heroine was with / still has feelings for the first guy, but he’s now absent for most of the present volume and she evinces no guilt or conflict over her budding attraction to his best friend. If they all survive I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if these characters end up in some sort of polyamorous triad, but it’s bizarre that no one is talking or thinking about the potential for misunderstanding, betrayal, and hurt here in the meantime.)

I’m not sure whether this is intended to be a trilogy or a longer series, but I remain interested enough in where it’s all headed to check back in for the next novel. I do think this one is a step down from the debut, however.

[Content warning for slavery and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 12

TV #2 of 2023:

Bob’s Burgers, season 12

I’m not quite caught up on Bob’s Burgers — there’s the block that’s currently airing, plus the feature film that came out last summer yet to go. But this is the latest full season to be released, which I’m finally through after starting from the pilot and watching an episode most nights for close to a year. At this point it’s hard to be wholly checked-in as a viewer, especially since the series itself hasn’t evinced any particular aspirations of growth or substantive plot developments in rather a while. At best… I guess Louise has a new loft bed now? That actually comes up again in episodes after its introduction, which makes it feel more meaningful than nearly any other incident across this run. But we’re obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel for continuity there.

I think part of the problem I’m having with this show rests in its stubborn insistence on doing annual holiday episodes for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and so on, while also keeping the characters in a permanent state of timeless stasis. The kids are 13, 11, and 9, as they have been for over a decade now. It’s a sleight-of-hand that plenty of other long-running cartoons engage in as well, but it’s made weirder when Bob’s Burgers keeps showing us these new installments of festive celebration. We’ve seen twelve Christmases with nine-year-old Louise. Which ones are ‘real’ for her, in the sense that she remembers and could plausibly have been shaped by experiencing them? How are we meant to understand it when she complains about how her father always acts on Thanksgiving? How can we respond emotionally when her sister and Bob share happy dreams about the older girl’s future prom, when she’d already be well out of college in any reality with a normal progression of time?

Maybe these things don’t bother you. If you’re an audience member who tunes into a program like this primarily/exclusively for the jokes, you are in luck: it’s still pretty funny! The central family and their extended town of weirdos have well-established personalities that clash nicely and produce a range of entertaining comic scenarios and punchlines. In any given half-hour, I’m certain to laugh repeatedly. I’m not disappointed by the humor, even though I’m rarely entirely surprised by it.

Nevertheless, I personally watch television for at least the illusion of serialization, the impression that events are building in an ongoing narrative that has a weight and texture for the protagonists living it. Some sitcoms can achieve this, and this particular title managed to do so at first, which is one of the main elements that helped get me hooked. But it’s all felt considerably more hollow lately.

★★★☆☆

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.]

★★★★☆

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.]

★★★☆☆