The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 8

TV #45 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 8

I seem to have liked this season better when I watched it upon airing in 2018, given my review back then:

“I don’t have much to say about this season of Bob’s Burgers that doesn’t apply to the show at large, but it remains impressively strong this late in its run. Top-notch, character-driven comedy that somehow hasn’t worn out its welcome despite the general lack of any sort of ongoing plot or narrative stakes. I think it’s the character work that really powers this show: the main cast has grown naturally over time, and the extensive bench of supporting characters all have a great comic specificity to them. If Bob’s Burgers can keep effortlessly hitting this level of quality, I’m happy to keep watching.”

While I generally stand by all that, I think my tastes have shifted enough towards serialization in fiction that I’m less satisfied now by the absence of apparent ambition in a stretch like this, and by the sense that Bob’s Burgers is somewhat coasting on its established reputation at this point. Watching 150+ episodes in about as many days has also tended to drive home this program’s typical plot formulas, and although I still tend to like what they produce, I’m not as delighted by it as I could be in the show’s prime, when it felt as though the writers were regularly digging in and pushing the ensemble forward as well as nailing all the jokes.

With a few exceptions like “The Silence of the Louise,” “V for Valentine-detta,” and “Something Old, Something New, Something Bob Caters for You,” the installments in season 8 just aren’t making me sit up and pay attention like television can manage at its best. I continue to enjoy the cartoon in this era, but I wouldn’t say that I necessarily love it anymore.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Happy Endings, season 1

TV #44 of 2022:

Happy Endings, season 1

This sitcom launch from 2011 is fine, but somewhat unremarkable. Although it improves over the course of these first 13 episodes — not that original audiences would’ve fully realized, with the season airing all out of its intended production order — I still feel as though I don’t really know these characters all too well in terms of their personalities, jobs, general life goals, inter-group dynamics, and so on. In my mind as I’ve watched and thought about this show, I keep comparing it to New Girl (which began later the same year) and How I Met Your Mother (a 2005 debut), two series which seemed much better defined along those dimensions right from the start. Also, even with streaming services restoring the episode lineup, there’s not much significant plot across this initial run, either in overarching developing stories or even simple callbacks and recurring guest roles. The main throughline is the fallout from Dave and Alex’s failed wedding in the pilot, and that doesn’t particularly impact anyone else before long.

I might be at a disadvantage here as a viewer, since the program this comedy probably most resembles is Friends, which I’ve seen almost none of. (Please don’t take this as an invitation to convince me to change that! If I were interested in watching it, I would have already.) I say that because the overall vibe seems to be just an insular group of six, uh, buddies hanging out a lot, with all other people kept at a distance and any concerns easily pushed aside for the latest round of in-joke shenanigans. On the other hand, I understand that that classic series did incorporate plenty of serialized storytelling throughout its tenure, so I’m hopeful that Happy Endings develops along similar lines over the next 44 installments despite not appreciably doing so in what I’ve seen thus far.

Another area where I’m lukewarm and hoping for improvement is in the representation of Adam Pally’s character Max. While I’m glad he isn’t a token stereotype — like the main other gay person we meet appears to be — I’m not thrilled with how his friends / the scripts regularly invalidate his identity with comments like, “You’re a straight guy who likes dudes.” His scene when he comes out to his parents is nice, at least. But TV has come a long way in the past decade, and it’s rather jarring to dive back into punchlines built around ignorant and essentialist views of sexuality.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

Book #144 of 2022:

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers (Monk and Robot #2)

This Monk and Robot sequel retains much of what I enjoyed about the setting in the original novella: its “warm hug of hopepunk goodness… rooted in empathetic respect and curiosity toward different cultures,” to quote from my review last year. This is still a very pleasant vision of a leftist utopian future, where community networks of mutual aid have taken the place of money, every sort of personal identity appears cherished, and people are free to seek their bliss in any way that doesn’t harm someone else. And with its ongoing loose story of a nonbinary monk and their robotic companion, this series is probably the only one out there whose two main characters use they/them and it/its pronouns, which continues to feel fresh and exciting as a writing choice.

With all that being said, however, the first book’s subplot concerning its human protagonist’s depression and potential suicide provided a sharp bite to help offset the more saccharine elements, which is sorely missing here. Beyond a short passage that finds the robot considering whether the morals of its kind would allow it to repair itself with organically-derived materials rather than surrender its damaged body for deconstruction, there’s little here to seriously challenge the heroes, resulting in a somewhat placid read. I like these figures and their world, but I need more from the plot than this volume is ultimately able to offer.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Daughter’s a Daughter by Mary Westmacott

Book #143 of 2022:

A Daughter’s a Daughter by Mary Westmacott

This 1952 title is a decent character study, but a thoroughly unpleasant and exasperating read about a toxically codependent parental relationship. The fifth of six novels that author Agatha Christie published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott — at this point merely an affectation, after the British press had disclosed the writer’s true identity in 1949 — it presents a middle-aged widow and her teenage daughter, each of whom can’t help but hypocritically meddle in the other one’s romantic affairs. (Somewhat awkwardly, Christie reportedly based the younger woman on her own child, who later refused to grant rights for any theatre in her lifetime to ever put on the authorized stage adaptation.)

If I had to pick sides in this squalid Gilmore Girls melodrama, I suppose I’d say that the nineteen-year-old is generally the more reasonable of the pair. Although children shouldn’t really have a say in who their parents date / marry, it’s pretty absurd that the mother meets a stranger, falls in love, gets engaged, and sets a wedding date for the following month all while the girl is off on a skiing trip with her friends. The most powerful part of the story is the tense household struggle that develops between these two and the new fiancé upon her return, but I’ve found the lengthy fallout after that crisis inevitably comes to a head to be less interesting and mostly just sad.

[Content warning for drug abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Movie #15 of 2022:

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

When I first saw this picture in theaters six years ago, I raved that it was “My favorite sort of prequel, that slots neatly into the existing continuity without the need for retconning AND enhances the viewer’s appreciation of certain elements in the original material.” And I stand by that! It’s not a perfect venture: the logistics at the beginning are a little difficult to track even on a rewatch, and the somewhat-arbitrary ensemble cast takes a while to gel. But there’s a power in revisiting the era of the original Star Wars trilogy like this, with all its iconic aesthetics that later projects like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi have likewise sought to reproduce. And of course, the impact of the story is deepened by its ultimate shape as a tragedy, with every last one of its core protagonists dying sometime during their ill-fated mission on the beaches of Scarif. They succeed in securing the Death Star plans for the Rebel Alliance, but it’s altogether pretty bleak and somber for a big-budget Hollywood victory.

On a writing level, I also really love the decision to set this prequel so close to the classics, such that its closing minutes lead directly into the opening of A New Hope. I know not everyone thinks the CGI recreations of a couple key characters are appropriate and/or effective enough, but for me such devices help this chapter of the saga feel like it truly has been waiting just off-screen for us all along. (It certainly works better than the recast Solo movie, for instance.) And come on, it’s surely hard to argue with that Darth Vader combat scene that single-handedly makes his stature seem more daunting throughout the entire Star Wars franchise.

As you might guess from my timing, I rewatched this film now in preparation for the launch of Andor on Disney+, the unexpected prequel to a prequel (but still set a decade and a half after the prequel trilogy of Episodes I – III) that so far looks way stronger than it has any right to do. I’m glad the same creative team is behind that series, although I do think Cassian’s background is a bit of a blank slate in Rogue One, so it’ll be interesting to see what details they’ve come up with to fill that in. And I suppose we’re adopting the Better Call Saul approach of ignoring the fact that the lead actor is five years older when he’s playing five years younger! Anyway, I’m pleased to find that his introductory piece here remains as excellent as I remembered it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how much of its tragic air of doomed inevitability has been retained.

[Content warning for torture and gun violence.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Answer by K. A. Applegate

Book #142 of 2022:

The Answer by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #53)

(A quick note from your reviewer here. If you’ve read my past few Animorphs reviews, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve been giving away more and more of the plot each time. These final volumes are just so jam-packed with major developments that it’s hard to discuss them otherwise! But here’s one last reminder as I move forward to talk about the penultimate novel below that spoilers are thick in the air.)

Two words come immediately to mind to describe this second-to-last Animorphs book: propulsive and devastating. Each installment in the franchise’s closing sequence (#49 The Diversion onward, roughly) has been a game-changer in its own way, and yet it’s still a shock to hear our narrator introduce himself here with a curt, “My name is Jake. My name is Jake Berenson.” Yes, many volumes later, the original protagonist who first warned us that he and his friends had to keep their identities a secret is now offering his full name, along with the fact that they were 13 years old back then and 16 now. And why not? The enemy knows who he is. They’ve taken his family and destroyed his entire hometown. Whatever the imagined in-universe audience for these accounts, there’s no longer any point in keeping things from them at this stage.

But the sudden shift to forthrightness marks a character note, too. It signals that Jake is finally at his rawest and most ruthless, with no time left for convenient half-truths. As the story opens, he’s watching the Yeerks burn a two-mile radius around the wreckage of the feeding pool that the Animorphs destroyed at the end of the previous novel, torching the surrounding homes, businesses, schools, and any fleeing survivors both for retribution and to create a zone of protection around the spaceship that’s just flown in from orbit as a temporary Kandrona source. The teen general recognizes that, protected though it is, this vessel must be his group’s next target. And they’ll have to act quickly if they want to win this war, before either the ground forces can get a new pool up and running or the Andalite fleet can arrive to wipe out all life on earth, human and Yeerk alike. The near-certainty of friendly casualties can’t be a deterrent from ordering the Animorphs to embark on their final mission ever.

And they’ll need allies willing to risk dying for the cause, too. First the military leaders who have belatedly come around to the reality that there are aliens invading the planet, and who still have plenty of Controller operatives planted among their ranks that Jake helps root out. Then the auxiliary force of disabled teens led by James, who have so far mostly used their morphing for reserve support. Add to those a rival faction of Yeerks who want independence from Visser One and the long-awaited return of the Chee, about each of which I’ll have more to say further on. And in possibly the biggest surprise, there’s a contingent of free Taxxons led by the nothlit Arbron last seen in The Andalite Chronicles, who wish to betray their old alliance with the Yeerks in exchange for the ability to morph away from their all-consuming hunger.

That’s a nice bit of closure and a welcome throwback to a book that came out four years previously, but it’s also one of the many elements in this title that is quietly horrible the longer you dwell upon it. The majority of the Taxxon species is uninfested, since Yeerks hate the powerlessness of their ravenous bodies and the giant cannibalistic centipedes are generally willing to obey orders in exchange for battlefield carnage anyway. So their unexpected offer of aid is too promising for the Animorphs to turn down, and they seem happy with the idea of morphing en masse into anacondas — once the war is over and the morphing cube has been recovered — and staying in that form for good. Yet that would be a genocide of a sort, since any children they’d produce would be just regular snakes. The creatures may have agency in embracing that fate, but by striking this accord, Berenson and his comrades are ensuring that this generation of Taxxons will be the last.

The Chee’s assistance likewise stings, as it’s gained by subterfuge that cruelly abuses the pacifist androids’ long-running friendship with our heroes. Knowing that their primary contact Erek will refuse to fight or otherwise cause damage to a living being, Jake has Marco lure him out to the team’s woodland camp anyway, and then presents him with a terrible ultimatum: accompany and help us on our upcoming strike against the Pool ship, or Ax here will kill Chapman, the known Controller, school administrator, and early minor antagonist of the series whom the teens have now taken prisoner. It’s not a nice position to put either the android or the aristh in, and yet it pales next to Jake’s treatment of his cousin Rachel or the war crimes still ahead.

The last party in this unusual association is the renegade Yeerk force led by the slug in the head of Jake’s brother Tom, now promoted to the visser’s chief of security. I still think it would have made more sense for him to have split off when he first captured the cube back in #50 The Ultimate, but by playing a longer game, I suppose he’s in a stronger position to undermine his superior and set Visser One and the Animorphs against one another here. Luckily Jake realizes the likely duplicity in his foe’s claim of just wanting to flee the Yeerk Empire, and he quickly makes plans to counter it. In one of his finer displays of cold, Marco-like strategy, he has the insight both to substitute a Chee hologram for Cassie as Tom’s supposed prisoner (whom the treacherous Controller sure enough arranges to get devoured by a Taxxon), and to secret Rachel aboard the Blade ship on a solo mission he keeps hidden from his teammates and us until the very end of this book, when his group has painstakingly managed to take control of the floating Pool ship. Her orders are simple: to kill Tom once and for all if/when his Yeerk shows its true colors. And as the two cousins have privately discussed earlier, before we learn the specifics, there is no plan in place for getting her safely out again afterwards.

That’s a heck of a cliffhanger, which is not a narrative structure that author K. A. Applegate — or her team of ghostwriters, now dismissed for the two-part finale — has employed too often in these books. But it makes for an iconic scene here, with Rachel revealed on her quest to kill the older cousin at his brother’s command and the remaining Animorphs facing down Visser One on his control bridge, while a bitter Erek off in Engineering refuses to restore power to the weapons despite Tom’s ship drawing near. The protagonists seem on the verge of victory for their planet, but as predicted, the cost to get there has been too, too high. James and the entire auxiliary team are dead, gunned down in an assault meant largely to convince the visser that the morph-capable humans were all outside the ship. (A tragic end to their storyline, albeit one that would register more keenly if they had been developed less fitfully as a central part of the action since their introduction, or if their final moments were depicted in greater detail. Most of them never even get a name or significant characterization before their demise.) The human soldiers, free Taxxons, and Toby’s Hork-Bajir squadron have suffered significant losses, too. And although all of our original team has survived thus far, Jake’s taken one more turn for the monstrous that still needs to be addressed.

This mission is a tough ordeal for the young commander, the latest in three long years of guerilla campaigning that have exposed him and his friends to all manner of trauma and steadily ground away at his youth and innocence. Forced again and again to be the one to make the tough call and put lives on the line, he’s risen magnificently to the occasion and led this band of warriors better than anyone could have hoped. But he’s lost some of his essential humanity along the way, and we see the ultimate consequences here. Although he’s reconciled with his girlfriend Cassie for her role in letting Tom’s Yeerk escape with the cube — hoping she could save the boy from the moral weight of killing his brother, a wish that now seems dashed — she’s exhausted and aware of the stakes too, offering little of her typical ethical objections to the battle plan. And when Jake blurts out that he thinks they should get married after the alien threat has passed, she can only smile sadly at this hasty proposal and tell him that she honestly doesn’t know how he’ll ever adjust to regular civilian life again. After all, while she doesn’t mention specifics, her high school boyfriend has hardened into someone able to send grown adults, disabled peers, and even his own family members to their deaths for the sake of the greater good. And finally, as this volume draws to a close, he becomes a mass murderer as well.

Could we quibble about that designation? Maybe. This is a series that regularly traffics in murky morality, and the Animorphs have certainly killed before. They’ve even done it less and less reluctantly over time, culminating in their terroristic bombing attack in the last book, knowing that thousands of enemy forces would be there feeding at the stronghold, temporarily out of their human bodies and in their naturally weaker slug-like forms. But the greater collective of Yeerks on the Pool ship, previously established as a reserve population not yet given a host? Those are helpless noncombatants: 17,372 of them, as Ax helpfully reads off a terminal display. And he and Jake flush them out to die in the cold vacuum of space, a drifting cloud of icy sludge on the bridge viewscreen that adds one final element to that climactic showdown against the weary visser. The dubious justification for this slaughter has divided the fan community for two decades now, but I’ll note that the protagonist seems to have difficulty convincing himself to go through with it, pausing and using the dehumanizing language of “Aliens. Parasites. Subhuman.” before he can bring himself to issue the command and subsequently racing to outrun his feelings of guilt.

We’ll see fallout from all of this in the one remaining novel, which frenetically hops from narrator to narrator like a Megamorphs in all but name to chart the second half of this battle, and with it the epic conclusion of the entire Animorphs franchise. The ultimate fate of our beloved characters remains ahead, and it’s unclear at this point whether anything could possibly heal the cumulative hurt they’ve inflicted and endured to reach this far, that bloody cost of war that seems to be Applegate’s whole point in writing the saga. But you couldn’t ask for a stronger lead-in than the awful rush of this penultimate adventure to get there.

[Content warning for body horror, torture, and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Book #141 of 2022:

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

This new portal fantasy from Stephen King is fine, but its tale of an ordinary kid finding his way into a magical world is not exactly breaking fresh ground for the author of such works as The Waste Lands or The Talisman. There’s also an awful lot of setup here, with over a quarter of this rather lengthy novel devoted to explaining the origins of the Marty McFly-Doc Brown friendship that exists between the teenage protagonist and the old man who eventually reveals the hidden gateway to him. (The curse of being one of King’s “Constant Readers” is that I can’t help but contrast this with the writer’s time-travel thriller 11/22/63, which introduces a similar plot device in a bare handful of pages.) With so much lead-in space dedicated to the hero’s regular life before his mythic quest, it’s somewhat jarring at the end when his ultimate return and transition back to normality isn’t given a parallel treatment.

But the bulk of the story is neat. I don’t know that “Fairy Tale” is the best title for it, since King is mostly just riffing on Jack and the Beanstalk rather than attempting an Into the Woods sort of ur-text mashup, but I like the minor Lovecraftian vibes and the idea of the narrator sneaking into a dystopian giant’s kingdom with his elderly dog in order to find a supernatural way to make her young again. Not all of the component elements quite work for me — like an overly-long dungeon stay while he’s separated from his pet — but as a core concept, the unlikely pair exploring this strange landscape is fun enough. More people in genre fiction should bring animal companions along on their adventures.

My biggest disappointment — beyond a weird editing oversight referencing news events from 2016 in a book set three years prior — is probably that this all turns out to be generally unrelated to the author’s established Dark Tower mythos, with which it shares some obvious thematic dimensions. (There are two direct quotes from that series, but one is unexplained and one is described as something once read in a book, so they function more as sly winking references than overt connections.) It feels like a real missed opportunity to not set these stories explicitly in the same multiverse continuity, especially for a creator who usually revels in that kind of crossover. Still, it’s a solid standalone piece overall.

[Content warning for alcohol abuse, gun violence, racism, ableism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Book #140 of 2022:

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

I don’t love this book, but it’s significantly better once you realize it’s been falsely marketed as a collection of short stories when it’s actually a disjointed composite novel. Each entry ends somewhat abruptly, but they are not telling unrelated plots with distinct sets of characters. Rather, they present vignettes from across the life of a single narrator, shuffled around out of order (and without apparent reason) a la Catch-22. So although the individual chapters are more open-ended than I would like, at least there are connections that a reader can draw to plausibly fill in certain gaps in the overall account of the protagonist’s dysfunctional family and their various tragic misadventures.

The strongest element of this title is its #ownvoices portrayal of the Penobscot Tribe of Maine, the small northeastern community of Native Americans to which debut author Morgan Talty belongs. That authenticity is striking throughout his text, even while I personally want more of a sense of purpose and organization to the narrative here.

[Content warning for alcohol and drug abuse, sexual assault, domestic abuse, and infant death.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

Book #139 of 2022:

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

This creepy little novella is a retelling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher by way of Mexican Gothic or The Girl with All the Gifts — which is to say, it posits that a rare breed of mushroom colony at the family’s rural estate has gotten its spores into doomed siblings Roderick and Madeline, thereby driving their strange illness and madness. The fungus has also spread throughout the nearby population of wild hares, jerkily controlling their bodies even after death, and appears to be trying to communicate with its human hosts. These animals produce some nice moments of eerie zombie horror, and for an unsettling period, the guests at the secluded manor aren’t sure whether they’ve been exposed and might be carrying the infection, too.

Author T. Kingfisher diverges from the original most in the narrator and supporting cast. Our protagonist now has a name and a more specific identity as a nonbinary friend of the Ushers who uses the genderless ka/kan pronouns of kan home country’s military class, and ka is joined by a few other visitors like a fictional aunt of Beatrix Potter who happens to be an amateur expert on mycology. The queerness is a minor yet welcome note, and the story is less open-ended than its predecessor while maintaining a hint of its ambiguous menace. It’s overall a quick read, but a fun one.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis

Book #138 of 2022:

Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis

This Star Wars novel — not to be confused with Alexandra Bracken’s 2015 junior novelization of A New Hope, entitled The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy — is slow on plot but rich in characterization, and covering a period that should be of interest for many fans: the time immediately following Return of the Jedi, when Princess Leia and Han Solo get engaged and married and embark on their honeymoon (which doubles as a public expression of confidence that the Empire has been shattered and call for unity in the new Republic government, due to the identity of the bride). The story moves at a languid pace, spending its entire first quarter with the protagonists still on on the forest moon of Endor and then most of the rest with them on an interstellar cruise ship, but the action does pick up near the end as onboard intrigue spills into open conflict with a remnant of imperial forces who refuse to believe that the Emperor is dead.

And while that summary may not sound like much, the whole enterprise is honestly a delight. Author Beth Revis maintains a tight focus on her two POV leads — avoiding the most common issue I have with spinoff material for this franchise — but she really captures the essence of all the returning figures, right down to the impatient and self-important Chief Chirpa of the local Ewok tribe. She also goes into great depth on the newlyweds’ lingering traumas from the events of the movie trilogy that often get ignored in such sequels: Han losing a year while frozen in carbonite and struggling to adjust to how his friends have changed in his absence, and Leia enduring the destruction of her home planet, torture on the Death Star, and discovery that her assailant there was her birth father. Unlike Luke, she is plainly not ready to forgive Darth Vader and accept his last-minute change of heart, which adds an interesting tension to her character throughout. The romantic relationship at the core of the title is likewise developed at length, showcasing why these lovers mean so much to one another while simultaneously underlining the stress points that will eventually lead to their separation. It’s a tricky balance, pulled off rather well.

Less successful in my opinion is the primary setting itself: the Halcyon starship, better known as the fictional theming for the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel now open at Walt Disney World in Orlando. I have not stayed there — and probably won’t anytime soon, given the exorbitant price tag — so I’m not sure how many of the details here are fun references that would make a visit more immersive versus new inventions from the writer herself. But the book hypes the luxury of the cruiseliner to a frankly absurd degree, with some sections that feel directly lifted from corporate ad copy in their lavish descriptions of the food and guest quarters. I’m assuming the volume was commissioned primarily to help market the resort destination, and I don’t begrudge Revis for working within those constraints. (In fact, I think it’s remarkable how good a yarn she’s spun despite them.) But this aspect of the text is distractingly silly, like when the stars of a TV show start talking about how much they love the new features of the car brand that happens to be sponsoring their episode.

★★★★☆