The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen

Book #81 of 2022:

Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen

An interesting, sporadically helpful, and yet deeply flawed discussion of how current expectations of working environments are poorly constructed and could be reformed. Journalists Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen are talking primarily about jobs in the broad technology industry, whose white-collar workers like me and them shifted to remote conditions at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They are scrupulous to note that work-from-home is not a panacea, and will often replicate existing toxic elements from a company’s office setting. And they acknowledge that traditional in-person work often supports racism, ableism, and other biases that can be mitigated by the shift to an alternative mode.

At the same time, however, their overall assessment of computer-based employment outside of the office is negative in a way that does not ring true to my own professional experiences or preferences. They describe feeling obligated to check their inbox right when they wake up and late into the night, for instance, because work-from-home has blurred the boundaries between work and home. But that’s not a situation inherent to remote access; it’s a problem of one particular kind of corporate culture (and the lack of guardrails against it). Personally, I stop thinking about work when my workday is over and have no trouble transitioning back into the rest of my life, giving thanks that I no longer face an hour-long commute between the two. I would love to never have to work from a desk outside my house ever again. Either I somehow lucked into a shockingly non-toxic firm that meshes well with my personal brand of neurodivergence, or else the writers haven’t done enough research to hear from perspectives like mine.

They similarly make a lot of blanket statements about text and video-chat mediums not being adequate substitutes for face-to-face interaction, which may be broadly accurate for many people but could really benefit from the context and nuance of the academic literature on electronically-mediated communication. Researchers who study that field — including me, back in grad school — would take issue with the universal claims Warzel and Petersen offer without apparent support. There are some things like automatic documentation that text absolutely does better than speech overall, and individuals process and communicate information in different ways, some of which are not conducive to the casual in-person drop-ins that the authors clearly favor.

They are on much firmer ground when they talk about the problems of keyboard-monitoring software and other implementations that encourage a worker to engage performatively with their assigned tasks rather than efficiently, or how the widespread embrace of a productivity mindset over the past several decades has not resulted in higher wages for our greater output. Those elements have been my main takeaways from this read, and are why I’m rating it as highly as three-out-of-five stars.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t criticize the reporters’ treatment of the pandemic itself. I have no idea when their final draft was submitted to editors, but the title was published in December 2021 when the coronavirus continued to rage across the world (as it still does as I write this five months later with no particular end in sight). Nevertheless, Warzel and Petersen blithely mention “the pandemic year” or refer to current conditions as “post-pandemic” throughout their text. It’s hardly the point of their publication here, but it’s frustrating to read and it certainly undercuts their authority as supposed experts.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Book of Night by Holly Black

Book #80 of 2022:

Book of Night by Holly Black

This urban fantasy story is generally fine, and it closes on a stronger note than it begins (albeit in a way that seems it’s likely meant as the launch to a series, rather than the standalone work it’s been marketed as). But it all feels pretty generic, with its most distinctive element of shadow-based magic still a confusion of unclear worldbuilding details by the end. The protagonist is fairly unlikeable too, and driven by poorly-defined motivations for far too much of this plot. It’s a competent enough effort that I wouldn’t want to rate it any lower than three-out-of-five stars, but there’s no promising spark here to suggest I’d have any interest in coming back for the sequel(s) I’m expecting.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, alchohol abuse, poisoning, incest, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 2

TV #20 of 2022:

Classic Doctor Who, season 2

This sophomore season is the most complete of Doctor Who’s black-and-white runs, with only two episodes still missing, available as merely audio recordings and visual reconstructions today. Watching all this through finds a mixed bag overall, but there are a few highlights I’d particularly recommend to modern fans. (See my rankings below.)

And gradually, this series is growing more like what we’re used to these days. The Daleks become the first recurring species / enemy, and are shown with time-travel technology of their own. Another member of the Doctor’s as-yet-unnamed people is introduced in the finale, which represents the debut “pseudo-historical” adventure of the franchise: a story set in the past but with science-fiction elements besides the TARDIS, rather than just showing our heroes getting caught up in local conflicts with Marco Polo or whoever when they arrive in an era. That last serial also finally establishes — after a creative struggle behind the scenes — that history can be changed by willful time-travelers; the Doctor simply feels that it shouldn’t be. This small pivot would have resounding influence over the kinds of plots that the Whoniverse develops over the subsequent decades, beyond the Monk’s anachronisms just being a really fun device in the moment.

In other changes, we have a major casting shakeup, with three companions departing over the course of the year and two others coming aboard. As a result, only William Hartnell’s Doctor now remains from the original group, which cements him as the primary protagonist in this drama where he could seem like a side figure or even partial antagonist at times before. These shifts are happening incrementally and somewhat unintentionally, but they are collectively bringing this program more in line with our 21st-century expectations.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★☆☆☆☆
THE WEB PLANET (2×16 – 2×21)

★★☆☆☆
THE ROMANS (2×12 – 2×15)
THE SPACE MUSEUM (2×26 – 2×29)

★★★☆☆
PLANET OF GIANTS (2×1 – 2×3)
THE CHASE (2×30 – 2×35)
THE RESCUE (2×10 – 2×11)
THE CRUSADE (2×22 – 2×25)

★★★★☆
THE TIME MEDDLER (2×36 – 2×39)
THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH (2×4 – 2×9)

[Content warning for slavery, threat of sexual assault, and racism including brownface.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Archer’s Goon by Diana Wynne Jones

Book #79 of 2022:

Archer’s Goon by Diana Wynne Jones

This 1984 sci-fi / fantasy novel, which I read and reread countless times as a child and is apparently one of Neil Gaiman’s favorites as well, opens with an irresistible premise: a hulking enforcer camps out in the thirteen-year-old hero’s kitchen, saying his mysterious employer is missing the latest delivery of 2000 words from the boy’s father. It turns out Archer and his six siblings “farm” this unnamed British town, each controlling a different domain like its utilities, police forces, public transportation, and so on. None of the rest seem to know the point of those writing samples or why the Sykes family has been caught up in this affair, but they quickly launch a tug-of-war power struggle over the household, all demanding their own pieces to study and learn what the others are up to. In the process they torment the home in their respective fashions, from shutting off the electricity to blaring music from the radio to sending workers to dig up the road outside.

It’s fun for that whimsical inventiveness along with the dry reactions that each new frustration evokes, and the plot moves at an admirably efficient clip to introduce our memorable cast of characters and speed us to a conclusion. There are some solid twists too, including people who turn out to be either friendlier or crueler (and in one notable case, both) than they’ve initially appeared. And while the worldbuilding is no more complicated than it needs to be, with the exact nature of those secretive beings left unclear — are they wizards? aliens? demigods? — it all works fantastically, and leaves a distinctive impression despite the lack of heavy details. There’s time-travel, and mayhem, and all sorts of quotable witticisms. I’m so looking forward to sharing it with my own children someday.

[Content warning for fatphobia.]

★★★★★