The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

Book #53 of 2023:

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

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

This is the second of author Brandon Sanderson’s four “Secret Project” novels, which he wrote over the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021 in the time he’d normally spend traveling and making public appearances and then triumphantly revealed in a record-setting Kickstarter campaign to fund their publication. More so than the previous release Tress of the Emerald Sea, this one has the definite feel of a creative writing exercise that grew long enough to be worth polishing up and sharing with the world, for better or for worse. It also reads like a throwback to certain 20th-century science-fiction adventures like Ben Bova’s Orion or Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, with which it shares a general premise of an amnesiac Übermensch from an advanced civilization gradually rediscovering his powers and his origin. (With maybe a hint of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in how the text is intercut with excerpts of the titular guidebook that accompanied the protagonist in his memory-wiping journey to a parallel dimension resembling the middle ages.)

The result is pulpy but fun. Sanderson can’t resist his usual worldbuilding twists, but the big one that the superstitious locals are correct to claim invisible spirits aid them when no one’s looking is drawn out for far too long without significant payoff. In scene after scene, the hero sees evidence of these beings’ interference and dismisses it as a coincidence or someone else’s actions, which grows tiresome after a while. I likewise could have done without the perfunctory-seeming romance, which generally echoes that sexist trope of an experienced woman inexplicably falling for the novice man who supplants her as team lead (The Matrix, The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc.). On the other hand, the main character’s eventual arc towards being a better person is well-constructed, and his tech-enabled grifts along the way are pretty amusing. Ultimately I’d say this book succeeds as the piece of light entertainment that its title implies, thankfully unconnected to the writer’s sprawling cosmere saga, but it’s unlikely to go down as anyone’s favorite.

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

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: League of Liars by Astrid Scholte

Book #52 of 2023:

League of Liars by Astrid Scholte (The League of Liars #1)

I was intrigued by the notion of a YA fantasy legal thriller, but the result here is severely underwhelming at every turn. Take the minimal worldbuilding, for starters. This is nominally set on a different plane than ours, with magic and unfamiliar place names and so on. And yet it basically reads like late 20th century America, or our own society minus the smartphones and internet.

The primary protagonist is “a high school student” whose friend “wants to get into a good college.” He’s interning for a “public defender” whose clients are warned upon arrest, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say here can and will be used against you in the court of law… You have the right to an attorney; if you cannot afford one, the Crown Court will appoint one for you.” In court, the lawyers make objections that the judge overrules or sustains, while a jury of twelve weighs the evidence that the two sides present. There’s a prosecutor, and a stenographer, and a courtroom clerk who says, “All rise for the Honorable Judge __.” Witnesses are questioned, after being asked to “solemnly swear on all that is good and light that you will tell the truth and only the truth.”

Of course, no genre story can build up an entirely new culture from scratch, but generally there are signs that at least some measure of creativity has been brought to the task of embellishing the setting beyond any obvious historical analogue. In this title the parallels are so unimaginatively exact as to be unintentionally quite comical, and sadly, that’s representative of the plot and characters as well. (The main lawyer’s last name is Toyer, which to me sounds about like when Dwight on The Office lied that he had just been to see a dentist named Crentist.) There are four viewpoint teens caught up in this drama, and the stakes boil down to charges of forbidden wizardry and a conspiracy of one government branch trying to take over another, which the kids are somehow in a position to uncover. The enemy against them is faceless and thus personality-free for most of the text, and the strategy behind their actions falls apart upon any close consideration. (They’re powerful enough to kill the king with impunity, but insist on arresting his sister and putting her through a show trial? When one of the few cultural flourishes we’re given is that the royal family wear masks everywhere so no one could even identify them on sight anyway?) Luckily for them the heroes are equally inept, except perhaps for the one whose role in the narrative is to smugly hide the information that the others need until it’s time for the big reveal that his chapters haven’t been irrelevant after all.

There are glimmers here and there of potential for something better. I actually think this reads a lot like a salvageable early draft! The idea that anyone can perform sorcery just by touching the strange arcane shadows and making a wish, or that it’s fulfilled by temporarily dragging some object out of either the past or the future to accomplish the stated goal — that’s neat! It’s not really utilized for any impressive showcases, just introduced and described as highly illegal, but the concept is solid. The boys and girls and their apparent romances could be interesting if they were fleshed out beyond archetypes. Overall I don’t feel that this is awful as a finished work; it’s just disappointing and a bit embarrassing that it was allowed to come to print this way.

[Content warning for gun violence and death of a parent.]

★★☆☆☆

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

Book #51 of 2023:

The Last Tale of the Flower Bride by Roshani Chokshi

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

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

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

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

★★★☆☆

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

TV #14 of 2023:

Star Wars: The Bad Batch, season 2

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

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

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

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Book #50 of 2023:

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

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

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

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 3

TV #13 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander by Victoria Goddard

Book #49 of 2023:

Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander by Victoria Goddard

I like this midquel novella to author Victoria Goddard’s excellent fantasy tome The Hands of the Emperor, but I think I’m not totally impressed by it, especially after the previous short spinoff work for this series Petty Treasons seemed to up the ante on what the format could do. Unlike that title, this one feels essentially like one long deleted scene from the original novel. It’s the tale of Kip’s uncle Buru Tovo coming from their island home to see him in his exalted station at His Radiancy’s side, which means it plays out as a few interactions we’ve already seen from a different point of view, along with some looks at the older man’s travel and his personal reflections throughout.

And that’s all interesting, to a degree! It provides a deeper perspective on the cultural practices of the Vangavaye-ve and helps to unlock a figure who could be somewhat enigmatic before — now with some additional queer representation — but there’s just not enough of a spark here for the story to satisfyingly stand on its own. While it wouldn’t have felt too out of place as part of the longer book and succeeds fine for readers who come at it with the context of that broader narrative, it doesn’t seem as friendly to newcomers, nor as distinctive in its emotional climax. (In other words, either you can recognize the repeated beats for what they are at a diminished value, or you’re likely too lost for their charms to wholly register.) I’m glad I checked this out, and at less than a hundred pages it certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, but I wouldn’t call it an essential volume in the franchise by any means.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

Book #48 of 2023:

We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets

On the one hand, this translated novella offers a blisteringly grim look into the work of content moderators for social media platforms like Facebook: the employees paid to review posts that other users have flagged, to remove any material they confirm as illegal or otherwise against site policy. That’s a job that exposes the workers to a lot of distressing imagery, from gun violence to self-harm to bestiality to child abuse and more, and author Hanna Bervoets also presents the insidiousness of how even less-graphic footage of something like Holocaust denial could gradually convince and radicalize the screeners. The human cost on their relationships and mental health is very, very high, while the meticulous corporate checklist they’re forced to apply to each ticket — can you see blood? is the person specifically threatening to kill themself within the next five days? etc. — is a dark satire that’s probably more realistic than anyone would want to accept.

On the other hand, as an actual story, this title leaves a lot to be desired. It’s short, and it ends quite abruptly, and the characters are not particularly well-drawn. For some reason it’s framed as a letter to the lawyer handling a class-action suit against the company that employed these people, but there’s never any payoff to that stylistic choice. I think there are elements here that could have been built into something powerful, and the subject matter is an important facet of modern life that should be talked about more often, but as a finished product, I’m pretty unimpressed by this book. Maybe it reads better in the original Dutch.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Book #47 of 2023:

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

This 1966 Nebula Award co-winner is a product of its time and the New Wave movement that grew into the cyberpunk aesthetic, the sort of hard sci-fi that tends to be more interested in big ideas than compelling characters. It’s practically overflowing with tossed-off worldbuilding details that could have easily merited a closer look, while being preoccupied throughout with a flawed exploration of what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the proposition that language determines or at least influences the way people think, such that speakers of eg. English and Japanese may be processing the world differently due to the different semantic categories encoded in their respective vocabulary and grammar. In real life the evidence for this claim is mixed at best, but in genre fiction like this or the later works like Story of Your Life / Arrival or Embassytown that it has likely inspired, artificial and/or alien tongues can be weaponized and used to warp reality by individuals trained in their cognitive pathways.

A half-century on, the novel feels surprisingly progressive in some degrees, like its casual acceptance of body modification and queer and polyamorous relationships, and regrettably dated in others. The far-future heroine, herself described by a term that’s now generally seen as a slur for Asians, blithely asserts at one point that Mayans and Seminoles are effectively the same thing, whilst attributing to the former a cultural practice that in actuality was associated with the Incan civilization instead. There’s also a perfunctory romance, of the kind that seems to happen by default when a certain type of author writes a man and a woman into a scene together, weakened further by the silly notion that this particular love interest initially doesn’t have a conception of the self because he doesn’t know any words like “you” or “me.”

Overall the story has potential. I could have stayed longer in this setting to learn more about its various inventions, but the plot never really grabs my attention and the folks within it don’t register as more than archetypal sketches. Two-and-a-half stars rounded up, with the recognition that the title was probably a lot more impressive in the context of its original publication.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Shadow and Bone, season 2

TV #12 of 2023:

Shadow and Bone, season 2

I continue to enjoy this YA fantasy adaptation, but I think this second season fumbles its ending enough that downgrading my rating to three-out-of-five stars feels appropriate overall. After rushing through a condensed version of the novels Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising that close out the original Grisha trilogy — as well as fitting in another brand-new prequel subplot for the Six of Crows team — the finale seems unable to split the difference between a satisfying conclusion to all threads if the program isn’t renewed by Netflix (as is still officially unannounced) and the setup for whatever comes next if it is, which appears to be increasingly divergent from how author Leigh Bardugo had things go before.

And I get it — much as the TV rendition has genuinely benefited from incorporating the Crows into its narrative so early, the producers are going to want to keep their main character Alina centrally involved in a way she isn’t in the written Nikolai duology. But perhaps because this is such a new configuration for the show, it lands awkwardly at least for this reader and my expectations of her personal arc. And the same goes for all the other attempts at establishing closing status quos for everyone else around the map in the final hour, which rarely track well onto the chronology of the books.

On the brighter side: Sturmhond is an amazing and hilarious new addition this year, as he was on the page, and I continue to love all the Crows, even as the invented material for them strikes me as more obviously a stalling tactic this time around. I also have some concerns, if their story does go on in either a third season or a more focused spinoff, after so much of it has by now been lifted outright or majorly riffed upon before the proper Six of Crows / Crooked Kingdom plot arrives. But setting that aside, they remain my favorite element of this series, and watching them go up against rival gang leader Pekka Rollins is enjoyable even so far ahead of schedule. And generally speaking, this second season benefits from the strong casting and production choices it inherits from the year before, although when everything converges by the end it starts running into the Stranger Things problem of having so many focal protagonists in a scene at once that no one especially stands out.

So there are some ups and some downs, but I hope this isn’t our last look at this world on-screen. I do like it and will miss it if this turns out to be the end.

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

★★★☆☆