The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly

Book #101 of 2022:

The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #19)

It was interesting to read this novel soon after watching the first season of Bosch: Legacy, which adapted both of its main plotlines: the quest to find a possible heir to dying billionaire Whitney Vance and the hunt for a serial rapist who cuts through window screens to access his victims. Those parallel stories obviously don’t carry nearly the same weight as one another in either version, but at least here, both cases are Harry’s to work on. (His daughter Maddie is still a college sophomore at this point in the book series, whereas she’s a rookie cop investigating the crime spree on the show.) So there’s a natural tension as the ex-LAPD detective tries to split his time and satisfy both his PI client and the smaller police force he’s been volunteering with lately, especially once he starts improperly using resources from the latter to help out with the former.

But the Vance issue is a cold case that feels abstract and bloodless for too long as the hero scans through archival records from decades ago, and the prowler takes on new urgency when — spoiler alert for both this and the TV program — he abducts and assaults Bosch’s partner, raping her and holding her captive while the rest of the team scrambles to determine where she crossed paths with the suspect and rescue her. It’s a problematic victimization of a character we barely know just to raise the stakes for the male protagonist, and it makes me even more wary of how the Freevee adaptation ended its debut year with a cliffhanger of Maddie’s apparent abduction by the same creep. While that sort of climax is undeniably pulse-pounding in the moment, I would not say this is the franchise’s finest hour overall on either page or screen.

[Content warning for racism, homophobia, and gun violence.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Resistance by K. A. Applegate

Book #100 of 2022:

The Resistance by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #47)

Although the Animorphs books are short, they tend to be rich in heavy and complicated thematic material, which is why my reviews discussing them often wind up quite extensive. But there’s honestly not much to say about this one. The plot is half the regular length, because Jake’s story alternates with that of his ancestor fighting back in the Civil War. The parallel situations are reductively obvious, and the alternate viewpoint contributes basically nothing to justify its share of the pages. Meanwhile in the present, the team helps the free Hork-Bajir defend their colony by turning into beavers and rerouting a river to drown the approaching Yeerk army.

A few interesting details stand out, like that the kids have apparently learned how to morph jeans and t-shirts at some point, rather than the skin-tight bike shorts and leotards that have been their morphing outfits for so long. Or how the once-pacifist aliens refuse to flee their land without a fight, just like how a group of freedmen in the past insist on staying and helping the Union soldiers against similar overwhelming odds. Or the sci-fi enthusiast campers who won’t move from the path of the coming battle until Jake makes them the latest humans to learn the big secret about the invasion, after which several decide to pitch in with the immediate resistance effort too.

But overall, this is an okay three-star outing hitched to a two-star dud of a throughline, for a two again altogether taking that structure into account. It’s a rare miss both for credited author K. A. Applegate and prolific ghostwriter Ellen Geroux, and it doesn’t feel remotely appropriate for such a late-franchise volume. Jake has scenes with his family in which no one even mentions how his lifelong best friend and his dad were supposedly recently killed! It just doesn’t track logically or emotionally for where the series ought to be at this stage.

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

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

Movie #11 of 2022:

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)

This is generally another fun Marvel movie, but it’s one that feels frustratingly both overstuffed and understaffed. True to its title, there is a lot of universe-hopping, yet only to realities we’ve never seen before (after Spider-Man: No Way Home, for all its own faults, showed the power of tapping into audience nostalgia by applying the multiverse framework to film franchises not originally in the MCU). So although we get a version of — spoiler alert — Professor Charles Xavier here, it’s not one that actually corresponds to any of the prior X-Men movies, nor is he joined by any other mutants from that corner of the Marvel Comics IP empire. Reed Richards, too, is the sole representative of his traditional team for some unexplained reason, and while there’s a certain thrill in seeing these characters in this continuity for the first time since Disney bought Fox Studios and thus reunited their adaptation rights, the effect feels somewhat threadbare when examined too closely.

And then there’s the Wanda of it all, an antagonist whose arc doesn’t read coherently even if we ignore the massive leap from where she ended her Disney+ series as a conflicted but relatively decent heroine. She wants to return to the children that she dreamed up on WandaVision, seeking a timeline where they’re real, but she can’t find one where they’re already orphaned and she wouldn’t have to kill and replace their mom to get custody? She can’t use her new witchy powers to just, I don’t know, create new fake kids for herself? I hate indulging in this sort of what-about nitpicking, but the fact is, the script to this movie doesn’t ever give us enough information about the limits of its magical elements, which makes it hard to remotely accept her bad guy logic of ‘the single possible way I can be a happy mother is by murdering my way to stealing someone else’s babies.’

The visual effects are good, if a tad overindulgent of director Sam Raimi’s quirks at times, and Hispanic daughter of two moms America Chavez is a wonderful bit of added diversity to a franchise that remains pretty white, male, and straight overall. The returning Doctor Strange himself is a fine leading presence, as usual at his best when facing some sort of comeuppance for his customary arrogance. I wouldn’t call this a must-watch for casual fans — despite the surprisingly high body count of recognizable named heroes, it’s all in alternate dimensions we’re unlikely to visit again — but its humor and inventiveness places it above something like Eternals, at least.

[Content warning for strobe effects, body horror, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

Book #99 of 2022:

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

This novel is pretty good, but it’s a little short and takes too much of its limited space to actually get to the point. It’s a time travel story about a forty-year-old woman who discovers a way to revisit her sixteenth birthday, but she doesn’t get there until around a quarter through the text, and we’re well beyond the halfway mark before she finds out that her father has made similar trips himself and learns from him the basic rules of the mechanism. (It basically functions like the portal from Stephen King’s 11/22/63: only leading to one particular day, where your changes can affect the future you return to. Going back again directs you to the same destination, undoing your previous actions. Except here, your consciousness alone makes the journey, always arriving in the past in the body of your younger self.) The actual stakes appear in the last 15% of the book, when the protagonist starts making visit after visit, seeing what possible fates she can create and aiming to avert her dad’s terminal medical condition that seems a constant in each one.

All of these are interesting concepts that are handled fine by author Emma Straub — other than the heroine seizing the opportunity to sleep with her high school crush, which reads like a sleazy act of statutory rape to me — but they just aren’t given enough time to register. If this plot had unfolded over a lengthier narrative, or at least had used its minimal page count more efficiently, its tale of losing a parent right as you’re gaining an adult understanding of who they were in your childhood could have achieved real pathos. But I feel as though I still barely know these characters, in any iteration.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1

TV #28 of 2022:

Obi-Wan Kenobi, season 1

In terms of the other live-action Star Wars shows, this new release is somewhat better than The Book of Boba Fett yet substantially worse than The Mandalorian. I’m glad that the miniseries doesn’t solely revolve around the title figure and a 10-year-old Luke Skywalker on Tatooine as the previews seemed to imply, but I’m ultimately not sure that it adds much to the existing canon beyond a chance for Ewan McGregor to suit up in his robe and beard from the prequel trilogy and say “Hello there” one more time.

Oh — and a young Princess Leia, who really should have been in the trailers since she’s in literally every episode and given how delightfully newcomer Vivien Lyra Blair embodies the former Carrie Fisher role and makes the precocious junior version her own. (Her brother, whose actor I’m not even going to look up, makes no impression whatsoever in his few short scenes.) But on a plot level, I’m not sure we especially needed to see her and Old Ben as the franchise’s latest surrogate parent/child duo, following in the recent footsteps of Mando/Grogu as well as Hunter/Omega on The Bad Batch. Her kidnapping and rescue feels really weird in the context of her holographic plea to him that we know is coming later on, in which her adult self won’t mention the incident at all but will only say formally: “General Kenobi. Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire.”

In another slight retcon, this program brings the Jedi together with his old apprentice Anakin once more, for a series of clashes across the run. There’s one great scene here that flashes back to his pre-Darth days on Coruscant for a never-before-seen practice duel and makes me wish for a version of this show that had incorporated more such material into its narrative. But outside that moment, it seems a bit of a waste to bring back Hayden Christensen and then mostly confine him to the Vader suit with the usual James Earl Jones voiceover work. The other lightsaber fights are serviceable, but unnecessary, and somewhat weakening of that final reunion on the Death Star that had previously been long implied to be the men’s first meeting since the Sith Lord’s original downfall.

And then there’s Inquisitor Reva, our third character featured in every hour of the show. She’s a capable antagonist, but the big twist in her arc is telegraphed way too early and often to land with much impact, and her exact actions don’t make a whole lot of sense if you stop and think about them for too long. Like many elements here, she carries a degree of potential, but maybe would have benefited from another draft or two of the scripts to really draw out what exactly she’s adding to a generally perfunctory tour of old Star Wars hits.

[Content warning for gun violence and violence against children.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change by Danica Roem

Book #98 of 2022:

Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change by Danica Roem

Danica Roem makes it all look easy. As the first openly transgender person to be elected to a U.S. state legislature, the Virginia delegate has faced considerable transphobia (and misplaced homophobia) lobbed against her, as well as opposition dirt based on her time fronting a heavy metal group and its accompanying party lifestyle. And yet she seems to take these difficulties in stride, citing her experience as a journalist for her ability to dissociate from the cruelty of personal attacks and remain laser-focused on the issues that matter to her constituents. People in her district — or a neighboring county, like me — know her as a tireless advocate for expanded school lunch programs, LGBTQ+ rights, and improvements to local transportation, particularly that bugbear of Northern Virginia traffic that is State Route 28. She’s also remarkably accessible to voters, forging strong connections in her door-to-door individualized campaigning and even giving out her private cell phone number with an earnest request for folks to call her if there’s any way her office can help.

(And she liked and replied to my untagged tweet that mentioned I was starting this book, so I assume that she either has automated alerts set up or is regularly searching for her name online, and that she will thus at some point be reading this review. Hi, Danica! Love your work, truly.)

In this memoir, the author shares an extensive look at a past she acknowledges is messy, as well as the moral outlook that has guided her time in politics. It’s like no politician’s autobiography I’ve ever read before, simply because Roem herself is so distinctive electorally (although thankfully growing less so as the number of elected trans officials continues to rise). She is forthright about her coming-of-gender story, her sexual history, and her indiscretions with alcohol, which is refreshing not only for someone in an often-sanitized public position, but also as a reader in the same approximate age cohort whose own life is documented on the internet in a way older generations have never had to face. Not everyone would be this brave, but the writer’s approach is to own it all, some parts even proactively, and trust that her platform and track record of results will count more for anyone turned off by anything in her background. It’s honestly not the worst lesson that the left could have learned from the unexpected success of Donald Trump in 2016, a year before Roem entered her first race.

This particular publication is organized by theme rather than chronology, which means that the timeline periodically loops back on itself in a way that’s a little difficult to follow and introduces artificial divisions among various elements in the delegate’s career. There are sections on coming out as a woman, going to therapy, meeting her partner, touring with the band, reporting on local corruption, challenging the bathroom-bill bigot who held his seat for a quarter-century before her, and so on, and it’s sometimes hard to remember / track exactly what happened for her when. But Danica’s voice shines loud and clear throughout, and makes me proud to support her both in her present role that she’s won thrice now and as a newly-announced candidate for the state senate. While she gives no mention here of any dreams of even higher office, I see only bright things ahead in her future.

[Content warning for suicide, domestic abuse, and sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Killing Eve, season 4

TV #27 of 2022:

Killing Eve, season 4

I gave the first year of this show four-out-of-five stars, even while worrying how the writing “seems to revel in ambiguity, throwing out potential explanations and character motivations at times but seldom following through to confirm or reject exactly why anything is happening. As a result, much of the weight of the program rests on its performances rather than its scripts, tasking the actors with the daunting responsibility of ensuring their penciled-in reality feels remotely credible.”

Of season 2, I noted a major step down in quality from that already-shaky start and ultimately awarded it a two-star rating, observing its tendency to “stick people in a scene together simply because they’d been a fun pairing in the past, without necessarily thinking through the implications of their respective histories or articulating a good understanding of what each might reasonably be trying to accomplish now.”

And for the penultimate run, which I again rated a two out of five, I bitterly repeated these complaints along with a plea that “without that fundamental grounding, there’s no particular reason to get invested and care about any of the action that follows, no matter our residual affection for the title or how entertaining certain individual scenes may still be.”

So that brings us here, to a final sequence that inherits a lousy hand but still finds an impressively poor way of playing it. The performers, as ever, are perfectly game, but none of their roles make any sense whatsoever by this point. Watching them floundering for these last seven episodes feels like an interminable chore, and the season offers almost none of the gravity that a conclusion should merit, especially for a story that began with the truly electrifying premise of a middle-aged pencil-pusher growing bored with her husband and captivated by the female serial killer whose work she has uncovered.

For too long, those women have been on a murky quest to sort out their feelings for one another and take down the secretive organization that trained and commanded Villanelle, an amorphous cabal which has never grown any better-defined even when a rare individual member is identified. It’s almost a meta joke when — spoiler alert — the supposed leaders of the Twelve are introduced and immediately slain in a dialogue-free scene in the finale, or at least, it would be if not for the obnoxious moralizing of the Bury Your Gays trope that swiftly follows to close out the series.

And look — I’ll be forever glad that this show actually canonizes its central same-sex relationship, as too many titles remain reluctant to do, even if that romance doesn’t really progress much between the first season finale and this one. Switching to a new woman as showrunner for each successive year is also still an interesting concept, despite the limited payoff in my opinion. But this was a letdown of an ending to a plot that had long ago taken a turn for the mediocre and never recovered. I honestly can’t recommend it to anyone.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

This season: ★☆☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★☆☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2 > 3 > 4

TV Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife, season 1

TV #26 of 2022:

The Time Traveler’s Wife, season 1

I remember enjoying the original novel that this miniseries is based on, but I read it way back in early 2016, so I can’t comment on specific adaptation choices in much depth. (I never saw the old movie with Rachel McAdams, either.) But six TV episodes feels like a good length to do the story justice, and overall, I’ve been swept along again by this most extraordinary romance. If you aren’t familiar with the basic concept, one protagonist has a genetic condition that frequently sends him reeling into the past or future for short periods without warning, and the other is the woman he ultimately marries — who has known him since she was a little girl, although when they meet for real as adults, all of that is still ahead for him.

It’s a twisty and complicated scenario, and the main appeal for me was actually seeing how executive producer Steven Moffat would approach the material, given how he has often cited the Audrey Niffenegger book as one of the inspirations for his tenure as showrunner on Doctor Who. And there are definite parallels here to the Doctor’s dynamic with both River Song and Amy Pond, as well as further instances of how supposedly fixed points in time can still allow for some wiggle room of grace depending on how the partner who’s already experienced events chooses to describe them. Luckily this doesn’t play out as the writer exactly repeating himself, but rather returning to offer new thoughts and variations on an itchy preoccupation of his. We even get some farcical elements out of his old Coupling wheelhouse, too, especially since the hero leaves his clothing behind whenever he time-travels, always blinking into existence somewhere completely naked and having to rush for cover.

In this setting, the entire timeline is set in stone: characters have free will, but the decisions they make can’t be changed even if someone with future knowledge — including themselves — tries to steer things differently. That inevitability contributes to the tragedy inherent in the premise, of a dark fate someday waiting for the man who’s getting older and slower with every sudden jump into the unknown. But it also helps alleviate the potential grossness of this person effectively grooming his child bride whenever he sees her in the past. I wouldn’t say that issue is totally mitigated, but it’s at least addressed explicitly by the individuals involved and probably handled as best as possible within the framework of this particular plot. In addition to Henry having no control over where/when he appears, the series really leans into the idea that his late-twenties self who begins dating Clare is far from the more mature version she’s idolized and already fallen for. So in a sense — and sure, this admittedly remains problematic — she’s subconsciously shaping him into the lover she wants as well.

It’s a great sci-fi project for bringing up those sorts of metaphysical questions about destiny and agency, but it also works quite well as simply a heightened, genre way of talking about relationships in general. Real love stories obviously don’t look like this on the surface, but it’s true that any long-term lovers affect one another as they grow and will sometimes miss the people they used to be, just like it’s true that “till death do us part” implies a coming heartbreak that one soul is going to eventually have to suffer alone. The central sequence here is jumbled around from what’s normal for the rest of us, but it rings with emotional honesty and plenty of laughter amid the tears. The ending even pulls back a bit from the darkness of the source text, leaving the worst moments hinted at but yet to fully arrive. It’s a decision that makes sense if the show winds up getting renewed for any additional seasons, but also serves for a strong finale here and now.

[Content warning for rape, gun violence, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, amputation, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin

Book #97 of 2022:

Tell Me an Ending by Jo Harkin

There’s a great sci-fi premise to this novel — what if a company could erase unwanted memories so confidentially you wouldn’t even remember hiring them, and what if a lawsuit then forced them to contact their clients anyway and offer to reverse the process — yet as it plays out, the story is largely in that literary genre of somewhat-bland people having ordinary midlife crises. Most of the characters are more miserable after they’ve had their recollection of the suppressed incident restored too, which seems like something anyone could have reasonably predicted in advance. And their respective plotlines are only loosely connected to one another, which is a curious structural gambit that doesn’t entirely work for me as a reader. Overall the book feels competent but, ironically, not really all that memorable.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes

Book #96 of 2022:

The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes

This YA novel occasionally slips into didactic exposition, but it is overall a sweet and heartfelt story of a sixteen-year-old gay Mexican-American girl navigating her first year at the predominantly-white Catholic school where she’s closeted but developing major feelings for a friend. I love the #ownvoices cultural specificity that debut author Sonora Reyes has brought to their writing, along with the strong character voice that makes it so easy to fall into this slice-of-life narrative style. It reminds me of Darius the Great Is Not Okay in being willing to sit with the protagonist as the days unfold rather than obviously building to any specific important plot events, and while the material can get heavy at times — check the content warning below — there are other moments so adorable that I can’t help but break out into the biggest grin as I read along. The title works fine as a standalone coming-of-age tale, but I would happily return for a sequel following the heroine as a more confident senior. Highly recommended, especially for younger and/or queer readers.

[Content warning for suicidal ideation and attempt, self-harm, deportation, alcohol abuse, bullying, racism, homophobia, and parental disowning.]

★★★★☆