The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 4

TV #23 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 4

After three seasons right on the cusp of greatness, I am willing to say that this fourth year of Bob’s Burgers has finally crossed that quality threshold for me. We have a few all-time classic installments like Fort Night and Christmas in the Car — a Halloween and a Christmas episode, respectively — and several others like The Frond Files or the two-part finale that I wouldn’t rank quite as highly yet still take memorably thrilling stylistic chances. And the humor is top-notch throughout, keying into the specific weirdnesses of this family and their bizarre little town, which by now is populated by all manner of well-defined recurring characters who can pop in for a hilarious line or two without needing to be the focus of the story. Plus the writing loves nearly all of them, resulting in more good-natured barbs than some of the earlier cruelties this show could sometimes deliver.

At the end of the day, this is an animated sitcom that’s content to remain niche programming. But this particular run feels like it’s really come into its own.

[Content warning for gun violence, stalking, and drowning.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Revelation by K. A. Applegate

Book #88 of 2022:

The Revelation by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #45)

[Note: Spoiler warning! It was too hard to write a review for this book without going into significant detail about its various surprises.]

This series has been spinning its wheels for a while now, putting out volumes that are sometimes better and sometimes worse but generally pretty episodic overall, doing little to alter the status quo and advance any larger plot. Luckily, all of that changes here, in spectacularly thrilling fashion. Marco’s dad is working on a research project that discovers evidence of zero-space — a development Ax is hilariously miffed about, showing his usual Andalite concern / jealousy over the speed of human technological progress — and could soon allow earth to communicate instantly with anywhere else in the universe. The Yeerks understandably want to keep that under wraps, and swoop in to take all the engineers as Controllers. Only Marco, who has already lost one parent to the enemy, can’t stand to sit back and watch it happen again with his customary detached strategic analysis. He jumps in and saves his dad, bringing our first instance of an Animorph coming clean to their family about the ongoing alien invasion and the kids’ secret resistance campaign against it.

It’s a major coming-of-age moment, which on this reread reminds me of Joyce Summers finally learning about her daughter Buffy‘s extracurricular habit of vampire-slaying. It’s exciting for the narrative to no longer have to sneak around that particular obstacle, and it forces a parental reckoning of how the young protagonist has grown up, in many ways reversing the ordinary child/guardian dynamic with the assertion of familiarity in this strange and dangerous world. To the extent that these novels are allegorical for normal teenage life, with its confusing physical changes and deadly serious drama, Marco is crossing a recognizable threshold here into adult maturity and responsibilities. And his father must grapple not only with the loss of his comfortable existence in society and his new status as a fugitive among the free Hork-Bajir colony, but also with the realization that his little boy has become a hardened soldier willing to kill and die for the mission.

Marco’s days as a regular teen are over now too, which is perhaps even more surprising of a shift. Realizing that the Yeerks will aim to take him and his stepmom in order to control the situation, he has the Chee fake his death to shut down that avenue of a lead. From now on, he will be living off the grid with those pacifist robots, the biggest upset in a character’s home life since Tobias got stuck as a hawk way back in book #1. (I don’t quite get why our narrator would live somewhere different than his father, though.)

Working together, Ax and Marco’s dad are able to finish constructing the z-space device, which is the only element of this story that feels a bit too conveniently coincidental to me, as they immediately learn that Visser One, the nominal Yeerk leader whose host is his mother, has been brought home to be executed by Kandrona starvation for treason. It’s the culmination of a long-running power struggle between her and the more merciless Visser Three, and another great sign of the series plot moving forward. The Animorphs rush to the side of their tentative ally, although it’s not clear whether the plan is to do something to restore her leadership position and stop her rival from launching the all-out war he favors, or simply to prevent her from sharing their secrets and to rescue Marco’s mom. In any event, amid the chaos of another exhilarating Yeerk pool action sequence, it’s the latter task that wins out as Edriss 562’s winding journey comes to a definitive close. The human host has been saved, but the way is cleared for the team’s brutal adversary to become the new military commander.

In one last twist of the knife, Marco sees his parents unexpectedly reunited, but only because in a return of his usual coldness, he’s left his stepmother to be seized by the Yeerks and falsely implied to his dad that she might have been a Controller all along and their relationship nothing but a ploy. It’s a sting that helps mitigate the treacly unlikeliness of this happily-ever-after, and an appropriately somber note to end on as the heroes finally make contact with the Andalite fleet across the galaxy and really kick off the series endgame.

I’ve almost given this title a full five stars, in recognition of ghostwriter Ellen Geroux surpassing even her typical skill to deliver a rousing and continuity-heavy adventure. There are just a few of those small details that stand out as minor weaknesses, although I’d still say this is one of the stronger later installments of the franchise overall.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life by A.J. Jacobs

Book #87 of 2022:

The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life by A.J. Jacobs

A fun but lightweight survey of different puzzle types from around the world and across history, sporadically broken up by brief musings on the human preoccupation with / enjoyment of such diversions. I would have liked more of this latter element, or at least some sort of larger framework linking the various chapters in the way the work’s subtitle suggests. (I haven’t read any of the author’s other books with that naming convention, like The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World or The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, so I can’t say how the approach compares. It appears to be an overstatement here, though.) The subject matter is still interesting, and as a puzzler myself, I’ve enjoyed hearing about all those many varieties and trying my hand at the example brainteasers included in the text. But this has all the depth of a magazine article, and not much imprint of a distinctive viewpoint on its topic.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao

Book #86 of 2022:

Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao (Zachary Ying #1)

This is a solid and charming #ownvoices middle-grade fantasy debut. I’m rounding up my rating slightly since I’m so outside the target audience, and because I appreciate the effort author Xiran Jay Zhao has gone to in conveying their protagonist’s complicated relationship with his Chinese-American identity. While twelve-year-old Zachary is proud of his heritage, his family is from a Muslim minority population in China, and he is appalled at the authoritarian government they fled from there as well as the bigotry directed towards them in the States. That element, along with a minor thread of the hero gradually realizing he’s not straight, helps distinguish the book considerably. I also really like a certain plot development that happens late in the text for how it fuels his personal arc, although I don’t want to spoil that here.

As for the story itself, it’s a somewhat standard Percy Jackson premise of a tween discovering figures of myth and legendary history are real and have designs on the modern world. That unfortunately involves a lot of educational exposition, as the narrative must repeatedly stop to summarize each original piece of folklore and then show us how the writer has reinterpreted it as part of Zack’s quest. In consequence I’m not totally thrilled with this work, and I don’t think it comes anywhere close to Zhao’s superb YA novel Iron Widow. But it has enough cool sequences and concepts a middle-schooler would probably enjoy, so a four-star grade seems fair overall.

★★★★☆

Book Review: I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

Book #85 of 2022:

I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

Author Casey McQuiston’s third novel is the first that doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. The basic premise here is that prom queen and principal’s daughter Shara Wheeler has vanished in the last month before graduation, after spontaneously kissing three people: her boyfriend, the guy who lives next door, and the girl who’s her sole competition for valedictorian (our narrator). She’s furthermore left them a series of cryptic messages hidden as scavenger-hunt riddles, and the unlikely trio grow closer and learn more about themselves, each other, and her as they follow the clues around town.

It’s a fairly gimmicky concept, full of so many logical gaps. What would happen if the kids aren’t able to magically intuit all the coded notes, some of which are really remarkably vague? How does their sender know which order they would get to the ones that aren’t directly in sequence, even going so far as to accurately predict the dates? When has she had time for all this, along with somehow doing weeks’ worth of schoolwork in advance so as not to let her grades slip? And regardless of her endgame, why couldn’t she simply have a conversation like a normal person, rather than setting up this whole elaborate scenario in the first place? Beyond the strained reasoning necessary to drive this narrative, the ploy has the additional consequence of making Shara seem smug and arrogantly cruel — to the extent she’s a presence at all, and not merely a Manic Pixie Dream Maguffin for the others to project onto — and I’ve found I am only able to accept her as a legitimate love interest later on in the tale by disconnecting that part of the plot from everything set during her disappearance.

Like me, the protagonist can’t stand this girl, but in her case, it’s very obvious that her long-time obsessive rivalry is masking a heavy crush. That’s a device that the writer uses to great effect for the M/M romance and bisexual awakening in Red, White & Royal Blue, but it’s a bit harder to swallow here, when the character has been out as queer since she was 13. She regularly talks to her friends about how pretty and smart and horrible this classmate is, and none of them have ever wondered whether there were deeper feelings at play? I’m just not buying it.

The end of the book redeems all this, to a degree, when the title figure comes back and calms down. I also should mention that I like most of the students we meet, and I love how they are figuring out things like gender and sexuality in the midst of a repressive Christian high school in conservative Alabama. (I’m in my mid-thirties, and am honestly not sure how much today’s teens are openly having these conversations outside of fiction. But the representation is appreciated on aspirational grounds, at least.) Still, the story resolutions and bittersweet coming-of-age moments in the final quarter of the text are severely hampered by the weaker material beforehand.

[Content warning for racism, homophobia, and anxiety.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Scandal, season 7

TV #22 of 2022:

Scandal, season 7

Credit where credit’s due: the first five episodes on this last year of Scandal are genuinely riveting. The scripts are tighter, and it really feels like the show has finally locked into who these characters are and how to tell trenchant and complex storylines involving them. Taking that narrative leap has required transforming Olivia Pope into a ruthless antiheroine, but the seeds appear carefully planted to track the subsequent rise and fall of her overreach amidst her friends’ horror as the season unfolds. Even her identity as a Black woman and its uneasy relationship to America’s entrenched power structures gains a textual importance seldom previously displayed.

…And then she assassinates a foreign leader for no particular reason, and the next thirteen installments devolve into the usual sort of nonsense. Deaths are faked. New government conspiracies are launched. Liv’s dad threatens to kill a pregnant colleague and/or her baby if he doesn’t get to play with his dinosaur bones. Motivations and allegiances are shuffled around as they have been so many times before, and ultimately it’s Cyrus and Jake’s turn to be cast by the plot as thoroughly, mustache-twirlingly evil again (ignoring everyone else’s misdeeds accordingly). Isolated character moments and simple long-standing audience investment in these familiar faces helps cover for the weaker material to some extent, and of course there’s a natural weightiness to any serialized drama coming to a close. But this is all too silly to be worth investing much energy over.

And it’s a real shame, because early on in this run, the program is written in such an electrifying manner as to dispel those flaws of the past and demand our full attention if not respect. I honestly expected to be writing a very different review and awarding this era of Scandal my first four-star critical rating. But in the end, the unevenness has a momentum all of its own, and that taut center of quality cannot hold. I’ll freely admit that the goofy, soap-opera stuff has its own appeal — which is why I’m still giving this three stars for a middle-of-the-road production overall — but I don’t know if it’s better or worse that we were briefly given that tantalizing demonstration of what this series actually could have been instead all along.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, incest, rape, torture, domestic abuse, gaslighting, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 6 > 5 > 7 > 2 > 1 > 4 > 3

Book Review: A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson

Book #84 of 2022:

A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson

I’m very torn on this 2021 queer gothic horror novella, which reimagines Dracula’s brides by way of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, as decadent and melancholic immortals spending centuries tangling and untangling their codependent emotions as they ravage their way across Europe. The language is florid to the point of distraction, with regular lines from the narrator to her sire like, “I wanted to dash myself against your rocks like a wave, obliterate my old self and see what rose shining and new from the seafoam.” If you can get on board with that style of prose — which I largely can! — the tale is an interesting one that casts the count as a jealous and controlling abuser wrapped up in a polyamorous union whose other participants eventually realize they would be better off without him.

I like this title more early on, when it seems as though it’s merely providing a potential backstory to an underdeveloped element in Bram Stoker’s classic novel (a public domain work that welcomes that sort of engagement). Near the end, however, it becomes clear that author S. T. Gibson has abandoned the canon altogether: there are still only two wives, and while the timing is uncertain, they make vague reference to “that whole debacle with the Harkers” as having happened at some point in the unseen past, despite the fact that their unnamed husband has plainly survived it. But if we aren’t meant to understand this as an extension of Stoker’s story, then it’s robbed of much of its power, and the resulting effect is a bit too flimsy to stand on its own.

[Content warning for gore, gaslighting, and incest.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Three Blind Mice and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #83 of 2022:

Three Blind Mice and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Some of these nine entries are better than others, but overall, they represent a strong if eclectic collection of author Agatha Christie’s mystery offerings. With four tales featuring Miss Jane Marple, three involving Hercule Poirot, and even one with her distinctly rarer and borderline-supernatural investigator Harley Quin, the cumulative effect is of a sampler of the writer’s various styles of cases and their solutions. (The only piece not to connect to a broader series is the title story, an early prose version of her script for The Mousetrap, which would go on to set the world record for longest consecutive theatrical stage run when it played at London’s West End from 1952 until the Covid-19 shutdown in 2020.)

While this probably wouldn’t make my list of personal favorite Christie releases, I have enjoyed it for the most part, and I think it would be an excellent introduction for newer readers.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Unexpected by K. A. Applegate

Book #82 of 2022:

The Unexpected by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #44)

Pretty much the definition of a filler adventure, and another story where the heroes’ only real victory is living through to the end of it, rather than any strategic objective they’ve been aiming to achieve. This particular mission to stop the Yeerks from recapturing downed Bug fighter wreckage from an interested government agency goes off the rails fairly quickly, with Cassie stranded from her friends in the cargo hold of an airplane that soon takes off for Australia. From there on out, it’s a one-girl survival tale, as the teen has to navigate Yeerks who board the plane
in pursuit of her and then the Outback desert once she escapes.

This is all largely fine, but it’s missing the sharp moral anguish that distinguishes the better entries in this series. Here our protagonist has some belated regrets about having to kill her alien adversaries when they confront her directly, but mostly she’s focused solely on the question of how she’ll be able to get home again, an issue that’s eventually resolved via a quick Chee ex machina. She also spends some time with an Aboriginal boy who saw her morph and thinks she’s a representative of his spirit ancestors, which seems uncomfortably close to the Inuit character who helped the team when they were similarly stuck in the Arctic in #25 The Extreme.

First-time ghostwriter Lisa Harkrader attempts to generate some romantic tension with this figure as well, but this element is so minor that it barely registers, and just makes Cassie sound silly when she later reflects with guilt, “While Jake had been ripping the city apart looking for me, I’d been taking boomerang lessons from somebody else.” More effective is the scene where she has to morph a Hork-Bajir to perform an emergency amputation on Yami’s grandfather with her blades, although her patient must still remind her that she is not responsible for the damage wrought by her enemies.

An Animorphs volume focusing on a single person removed from the ensemble can work, and in fact we’ve seen that before with Cassie-centric novels like #19 The Departure or #29 The Sickness. But this one doesn’t challenge her as effectively or feel as rooted in her distinctive personality as those previous outings. Instead it seems as though maybe author K. A. Applegate had the idea for a kangaroo on the book cover and worked backwards from there to create a plot outline that would justify it.

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

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Bosch: Legacy, season 1

TV #21 of 2022:

Bosch: Legacy, season 1

Note: I have very negative feelings about the last few scenes and the cliffhanger ending to this season. To avoid spoilers, I won’t get into that here. But if you’re interested in my thoughts, you can find them in a Twitter thread at the following link: https://twitter.com/lesserjoke/status/1530415054990061568

Overall, I have not been blown away by this spinoff to Amazon Prime’s Bosch show, now available on their subsidiary streaming service Freevee (previously called IMDb TV). Like the parent series, it’s a mix of loose adaptation of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels and original storylines, with this first season based on the volume The Wrong Side of Goodbye. Mostly, I am not convinced this needed to be a separate program at all. Plotwise, the demarcation makes sense: Harry quit his job as LAPD detective in the previous finale, and we find him now working as a private investigator. Meanwhile his daughter Maddie, elevated to a series lead, has acted on an earlier expressed desire to follow in his footsteps, and has joined the force as a rookie officer. That’s a reasonable dividing line, although their third costar, lawyer and friend Honey Chandler, hasn’t experienced any similar change in her own life.

But in practice, the rhythms of this show are entirely inherited and unaltered. We’ve lost some cast members — a couple of whom make brief guest appearances — and are spending a little more time with Maddie and Honey, but there’s no sense of stylistic departure or experimentation in any of this. I’m particularly disappointed that the show isn’t centering its youngest star more; I was hoping from the title that this would be a Veronica Mars situation, with her father relegated to supporting status. But he’s still got the majority of the screentime for his own investigations, which only sometimes intersect with the plots the two women are facing. Is it really a spinoff if you keep the same main character in the same setting in a largely similar capacity? Maybe we should just call this a sequel instead.

Anyway, if you like the original Bosch show — which I do! — you will probably continue to enjoy it in this iteration under its new name and streaming platform. On some level stories like this will always function as copaganda, selling an unrealistic image of the police as heroes, but Harry’s disgust with the politics of his old department remains, and Maddie sees firsthand how petty and dangerous and criminal her fellow officers can be. In one ripped-from-the-headlines moment, the cops open fire on a suspect and his girlfriend, both Black and unarmed, and then appear to plant a gun next to their corpses. She’s uninvolved in the shooting but gets caught up in the subsequent scandal. While it’s still not totally unproblematic, it’s at least a step up from some police dramas out there and in line with the earlier program’s approach.

That ending, though. I’m pretty livid.

[Content warning for rape, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆