The Shattered Sea Trilogy, by Joe Abercrombie / *****

The idea of Joe Abercrombie writing young adult fiction is odd, for anyone who’s read Abercrombie at all. Over the course of the First Law trilogy, Abercrombie made it clear that he was an author who embraced the darkest aspects of human nature, giving us heroes as memorable for the brutality and viciousness they could display as for anything else they could ever accomplish. Abercrombie’s gift was that he made it all palatable and rich somehow, giving everything a dark sense of humor and an empathy for his characters that made the books readable without ever turning them into “misery porn.” But still, young adult fiction?

Well, rest assured, there’s little taming down of Abercrombie in the Shattered Sea trilogy, to the point where I’m not quite sure exactly what makes the series any different from the rest of his works. (Abercrombie himself has some interesting thoughts on the matter here.) It’s still stark, still brutal, still cynical about human nature and what we do to each other, still darkly humorous and understanding of every character while never flinching from what they do – in other words, it’s an absolute treat for someone like me who was disappointed at almost being done with everything else the man had written.

So what is this series, then? While the exact nature of the storyline is best unfolded over time – like The First Law, it really takes until the final volume to see the threads that have tied it all together – the series starts with Yarvi, a disfigured son of the royal family being thrust onto the throne far before he was ready. It doesn’t take long for things to go wrong, and the first volume of the series – Half a King – follows Yarvi as he plots his return to the life he once had, as well as finding a way to get revenge on those who put them there.

By the time Half a King ends, we’ve come to understand Yarvi quite a bit – we see his weaknesses and strengths, we’ve seen how he’s grown and blossomed into the person he’s always been capable of being…which makes it all the more jarring to open Half the World and realize that we are no longer in Yarvi’s head, but in the minds of two new characters – a hardened young woman named Thorn who wants to be a fighter in a men-dominated world and a deeply moral would-be male warrior named Brand. (Well, mostly new characters, anyway; one of the treats of this series is to see how Abercrombie has linked the books together in ways that we never noticed.) Yarvi is still a player here in no small way, but the focus has changed, locking us out of his head and his immediate motivations, even as we remember everything we learned about him from the previous novel. There’s a new adventure here, with a trip into new parts of the world, but even through Brand and Thorn’s eyes, we’re realizing the shape this saga might be taking. And yet, Half the World is entirely satisfying on its own terms, giving Thorn and Brand an entire story all their own, even while it’s a necessary piece in the bigger trilogy.

It’s less of a surprise, then, when the third volume, Half a War, does the same trick again, adding Brand and Thorn into our supporting cast (along with Yarvi) and giving us some new characters to follow around. But the end effect is something more than the sum of the parts, building a rich world out of the pieces and helping us to better understand everything that’s unfolding, even though we’re only seeing it through limited eyes each time. Each book feels wholly complete and compelling on its own terms, giving each of its characters an arc, an ending, and a story all their own – and yet, the books also undeniably make a trilogy, a story that begins with an ill-chosen ruler and ends in something far more epic in scope.

I’ve said little about the plot of the series yet, I know, but part of that is an unwillingness to rob people of the joy of watching it all unfold. Suffice to say that what starts as the story of Yarvi and his throne becomes something far more epic, mixing the personal narratives of each book into something more epic and sprawling in scope. It’s not a spoiler to say that the final book’s title being Half a War gives you a sense of where the series is going; this is Abercrombie, and his worlds are violent ones. (Mind you, the setting here is unusual and fascinating, gradually changing as we continue to read, revealing more and more to readers in subtle, quiet ways until our very perceptions of this world have completely transformed.) So, yes, this is a story that culminates in a war – but the reasons, logic, and motivations that drive us there are what compels us, as do the characters and people we meet along the way.

The Shattered Sea books may or may not be your definition of young adult (personally, I’m waiting a little bit before giving them to my thirteen-year-old son; while he might enjoy them, I think they’re harder than I’d feel comfortable giving him at this age), but they’re great fantasy that does everything that made me love Abercrombie from the first pages of The Blade Itself. The plotting is epic in scope and yet never loses its character-driven focus. The world feels plausible and honest while finding the dark humor and humanity that keeps it from being a miserable slog. The characters are rich, leaving you understanding them, feeling their pain, and worried about their moral choices. In other words, it’s a rich, complex world that Abercrombie has created, and it’s been an amazing place to lose myself – and one that’s made me a little sad for whatever I read next that has to live up to it.

Amazon: Half a King | Half the World | Half a War

Over the Garden Wall / **** ½

I’ve been told to watch Over the Garden Wall, Cartoon Network’s first mini-series, for quite some time. More than that, I’d been told so much about its reputation – its nods to Dante’s Inferno, its emotional subtext, its beauty – that what I expected was something heavy and complex – something dark, mysterious, moody, and metaphorical. What I didn’t expect was something as silly, weird, and fun as Over the Garden Wall is – and just how long it took to reveal its depths.

For about three-quarters of its length (the entire series is ten 10-minute episodes), Over the Garden Wall is a whimsical, odd little story about two brothers (Elijah Wood and Collin Dean) who are lost in a forest, trying to find their way home. They’re escorted by a bird named Beatrice (Melanie Lynskey) on that path, and what results is an episodic little journey with any number of colorful characters along the way, including a mysterious woodsman (Christopher Lloyd, whose raspy voice is deployed here to excellent results) whose agenda is unclear, an unsettling village of harvesters, a boat manned by frogs, and so much more – and that’s not even mentioning the disturbing figure of The Beast (played by operatic bass Samuel Ramey to chilling effect) lurking on the outskirts of the story.

During this stretch of the show, Over the Garden Wall feels slighter than it is, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to watch. Little brother Gregory is an anarchic delight, constantly earnest and honest in a way that’s all but impossible not to enjoy. And as a fan of animation, it’s a treat to see all the ways in which the series pays tribute to classic animators and styles. Homages to Max Fleischer, Little Nemo, Hiyao Miyazaki, and more fill the frame, all done in a way that’s unmistakable to any fan of the art but doesn’t detract from the story along the way.

And that story, while odd and disjointed at first (this is definitely more mini-series than “film broken into pieces”), is a blast to lose yourself in, even as you find yourself wondering exactly how any of this ties together. There’s an air of unease and darkness constantly simmering just under the surface, even as it’s constantly belied by Gregory’s silliness and the joyful oddities of the world. But Patrick McHale’s writing lets the depths of the story sneak up on you, from older brother Wirt’s self-doubt to the guilt felt by Beatrice for past sins. For much of the series, I didn’t really see the depth that everyone else was seeing, but I loved the art, the writing, the performances, and the fun of it all.

And then the series pivots in its final two episodes, laying some cards on the table that change the nature of the series and had me reevaluating the series and the events I’d seen. Without getting into spoilers, McHale reveals that the worries of the characters have more relevance than just whimsical fantasy, and the emotional beats become more complex and nuanced in hindsight. How this all leads up to a knockout final episode full of haunting imagery and beautiful moments should be experienced, but suffice to say, Over the Garden Wall really is going somewhere – it’s just not necessarily evident at first.

In some ways, that lack of clarity is the biggest weakness of Over the Garden Wall (well, that and a somewhat tedious dream episode I could have lived without). It makes the series hinge on a twist reveal that admittedly deepens and enriches the show, but I can’t help but wonder how much more the show could have been knowing that information in advance. (I’ve considered rewatching it but haven’t yet.) But in some ways, I can see how that would lessen the fun of those early episodes, making explicit the themes that only came into focus for me at the end, and taking away from the enjoyable odd touches that had my kids (and, sure, me) cracking up so often. In the end, I don’t know that I’m as fervent a fan of the series as so many people, but I can’t deny that I enjoyed it a lot, nor that it’s continued to grow in my estimation as more time passes and I think on it more and more. And that’s not nothing, is it?

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Swords in the Mist, by Fritz Leiber / ****

I’ve really been enjoying my trek through the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Fritz Leiber’s influential, entertaining, and just plain fun series of fantasy stories about a barbarian and a thief who become inseparable partners. You never know exactly what you’re going to get when you read classic fantasy, but Leiber’s pulp tales are a treat – full of classic prose but told with a sardonic wink and a sense of humor, giving us heroes who are both larger than life and yet undeniably human in their weaknesses and faults. Oh, these are fantasy tales, make no mistake – it’s said that Leiber is the originator of the term “swords and sorcery,” which fits these tales perfectly – but more than anything else, what you’re getting in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories is swashbuckling, classic fantasy fun. And the third volume of the series, Swords in the Mist, is no exception.

That’s evident even in the opening story of the collection, “A Cloud of Hate,” in which a dark force is spreading across the city of Lankhmar, and our heroes battle it all while keeping themselves entertained (and maybe not really understanding exactly the threat they’re facing). And you’ll see it in “When the Sea-King’s Away,” which finds the barbarian and the thief descending through a literal tunnel of water down to an undersea kingdom, being tempted by beautiful creatures and a load of riches along the way. Both of these are exactly what you’ve come to expect from Leiber, and they deliver perfectly, giving adventure, banter, thrills, personality to spare, and more imagination than you’re expecting.

But there are really two stories that we need to talk about with regard to Swords in the Mist, and the first is the concluding novella of the collection, “Adept’s Gambit.” Despite this being published in the third volume of the series, “Adept’s Gambit” actually represents Leiber’s first ever Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale – written in 1947 as a fantasy tale set in the real world and sent along to one Howard Phillips Lovecraft for editing and comments. “Gambit” is an odd entry in the series; as mentioned, it takes place in the real world rather than Nehwon, and it’s far more…bloated and clunky than the best tales of the series. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its moments – there are the usual imaginative touches and fringes of horror, and even here, you can see the personalities of Fafhrd and the Mouser coming through. But on the whole, “Adept’s Gambit” is a bit of a weak note in the collection, spending too much time on a secondary character, trading in a rich fantasy world for a bland Earth setting, and just generally feeling like what it is – a first effort at something that would only improve with each successive attempt.

However, that weakness is more than made up for by the inclusion of “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” my favorite tale of the two to date. Our heroes have gone their separate ways for a bit as hard times have hit the city; the Mouser is working for a local crime boss, while Fafhrd becomes a religious acolyte. Leiber takes his time here, giving us a fascinating window into religious practices in Lankhmar, and how your position on a key street in the city tells everyone everything they need to know about your success as a religious leader. For a while, “Lean Times” feels interesting just for the separation of our heroes, letting them each show some new sides of their personalities. But as it builds towards its end, the story reveals itself to have been far more tightly constructed than we realized – and it’s constructed as a gloriously bonkers joke, with a climax that had me literally laughing out loud both in delight and genuine comic entertainment. It’s a fantastic story, giving you everything that Leiber does well – characterization, world-building, dialogue, personality – and giving it all an even more elaborate and clever sense of humor than usual. I had a ton of fun with it (and, hey, did I mention that you can read it online for free?), and it’s good enough that it makes Swords in the Mist essential reading all on its own, even if “Adept’s Gambit” hurts the collection a bit.

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The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck / *****

One of the perks of teaching English for a living is the fact that my job forces me to catch up on what I affectionately call my “literary vegetables.” I’m undeniably the kind of reader who loves genre fiction of all sorts, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate and admire great fiction. More than that, sometimes it’s the chance to re-evaluate something I didn’t appreciate the first time, seeing it through a new lens – that of a teacher, which means looking at its historical context, its larger purpose, and so much more.

Such is the case with The Grapes of Wrath, which I honestly can’t remember if I’d ever read before picking it up for my AP Language and Composition course this year. I knew the story, of course, both through the masterful John Ford film and through a stage production starring a good friend of mine as Tom Joad. But really, I don’t know that I had ever truly read Steinbeck’s novel, because I was unprepared for the unusual structure of the book – despite the fact that that structure may be what makes the book so special.

For those who haven’t read the book, here’s the basic idea: only about half of the chapters of The Grapes of Wrath are literally about the Joad family, a family of farmers pushed off of their land and journeying west in search of work. The other chapters – often called “intercalary chapters” by some critics – are more unusual. The writing style is more poetic and “literary,” and the perspectives constantly shift to something more universal and archetypal. There are conversations that take place between the universal ideas of a “worker” and an “owner,” or windows into the world of car salesmen watching migrants drifting west, or overviews of the history of communities. And while the chapters often are linked in esoteric, vague ways, it ends up collectively doing more to the book than just broadening it – it turns the story of the Joads into the story of America as a whole during this time, giving us a sense of the more universal story happening over and over and over again as the Dust Bowl ruined farms and the Depression loomed large.

None of that is to detract from the story of the Joads themselves, which is beautifully told with an ear for dialogue and realism that’s undeniable. Yes, sometimes that story can get grueling and unpleasant – there’s little denying that Steinbeck is trying to pull readers’ emotional strings to get a reaction, even if much of his story is drawn off of interviews and experiences with the migrants. At the same time, Steinbeck is clearly invested in giving his characters a humanity that much of society is uninterested in giving them – and it’s all but impossible to read the book in the modern era without thinking of how immigrant workers are going through many of the same experiences and treatment, even though we should have learned from this when it happened so long ago.

I can’t go so far as to call Grapes flawless. Rose of Sharon is a tedious, one-note character that feels more like a symbol than a real person, and that problem never goes away until the end of the book. Indeed, many of the characters feel more like archetypes at times, and while that generally works, there are times when you can’t help but feel frustrated with their one notes that they’re hitting again and again. When Casey starts another speech, or Rose of Sharon moans about her baby, you want to get frustrated…and yet, that’s what people do, isn’t it? And as I told my students, look, sometimes you may not enjoy a book – but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t accomplish what it sets out to do, nor that it’s not intentionally making you live with the sadness and awfulness.

It’s easy to see why so many modern audiences and high schoolers push back against Grapes, as well as why some more modern literary critics seem to be qualifying their praise of the book, if not outright turning on it. But as a piece of agitprop designed to make you feel the experience of a people that the nation was trying to ignore, The Grapes of Wrath is undeniably effective. Does it hammer home some of its points and ignore subtlety? Sure it does. And is it sometimes a miserable slog (same as the Joads’ lives)? Indeed. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not exactly what Steinbeck intended – a righteous, furious novel that reminds audiences what it’s like to suffer and be rejected, and the importance of dignity and kindness in the face of people with no connection to individuals anymore. And the fact that it still feels relevant after so long is only further testament to its importance and greatness.

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Ever the Hero, by Darby Harn / **** ½

I won’t deny that I’m suffering from a bit of superhero fatigue, same as many people, so trust me when I tell you that Darby Harn’s Ever the Hero is worth the time, whether you’re the kind of person who attended the MCU marathon or wouldn’t be caught dead even looking at a Superman movie. Sure, you’ve got fantastic powers with alien origins, superhuman slug fests, and the other staples of the genre, but Ever the Hero also gives you a fantastic lesbian heroine motivated more out of love for her crush than the good of humanity, complex social class commentary that grapples with the nasty visuals of some superhero stories, and even some ideas about the real-world implications of superpowers that feel like the next logical step after Watchmen (or The Incredibles, depending on your reference point).

Ever the Hero opens in a world where superheroes are quite real…but they’re also incorporated and regulated. Sure, most people have a device that allows them to ask for super-assistance, but you know, the city hasn’t been paying its bills lately, so, maybe you’ll have to sort this one out yourselves. Into this comes Kit Baldwin, a young woman just trying to get by and make ends meet. She lives in the run-down section of town, making her living scrounging from the alien wreckage which started all of this years ago. But even without powers, Kit can’t help but get involved when she sees a bank robbery unfolding. It’s a little bit decency, a little bit living up to the image of Valene, her hero, and, sure, her crush, too.

All well enough so far, and Harn handles it all superbly, giving us the context of the world, developing Kit effortlessly, and helping us understand all of these events while never resorting to a massive exposition dump. Instead, the world feels organic and real, as though we’re coming into the final acts of a story that started long before we came onto the scene, and we’re just living with the results without much hope of change.

It’s hard to overstate how great of a character Kit is for all of this, either. Kit is fundamentally decent, but she’s also very aware of her own limitations – as a woman, as someone without powers, as someone without much money, as someone caring for her mentally ill mother. Kit has a lot going on, and her fears and worries are deeply understandable to us, making her a vibrant, honest character that draws us in for every twist and turn. We understand how her crush and her emotions drive her, even when they’re working in ways they shouldn’t. We see why she’s oblivious to certain realities around her, because we see what she is focused on. And more than anything, we rapidly realize that Ever the Hero is less a story about good and evil and more of a story about Kit herself finding her place in the world and becoming the person she can be.

That’s good, because the biggest knock on Ever the Hero is the fact that the larger story/mythology can get overly complicated at times. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes here, from political maneuvering to double-crosses aplenty, from love triangles to secret identities, from hidden secrets to corporate intrigue, and it can all get a bit overwhelming. Kit is a small pawn in a very large game, and sometimes Ever a Hero makes that all too clear, as we get more and more sense of just how much is going on, and how limited our perspective is. That means that sometimes the stakes are less comprehensible than they should be, or that our sense of what Kit’s focus needs to be isn’t always as clear as we wish it was.

And yet, Ever the Hero still works, and that’s because no matter how complex the plot gets, Harn makes the emotional stakes always grounded and understandable. I may not always know exactly who’s playing who, or which events are being engineered by which person, but I always know how it makes Kit feel – how she worries about Valene, or how she cares for her community, or her concerns for her mother. And more than anything, that’s what makes Ever a Hero such a great read. Lots of things can give you the punching or the flying or the powers. But the human, emotional connection? That’s not always there – and Ever a Hero has it in spades.

Amazon

Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz / ****

If you like your science fiction novels packed with ideas, you’re going to absolutely adore Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous. A cyberpunk thriller about pharmaceutical piracy and military androids, Newitz’s book wrestles with some massive questions – ones that don’t always have easy answers. If artificial intelligence is developed, does that make it property? Do medical companies have the right to patent medicines that are essential to life? If artificial intelligence is truly alive, does it have emotional – or, indeed, sexual – needs? What would gender mean when applied to artificial intelligences or biotechnology? What happens as corporations continue to extend their ownership of more and more of the world around us?

Newitz takes on all of this and more in their book, using the framework of a thriller to explore those ideas and really dive into their ambiguity. And on that level, Autonomous is an undeniable success. Every page feels thought over and leaves you pondering big ideas, all while still being used in service of the story. And while the parallels to the modern world are obvious and/or clear, Newitz doesn’t hammer them home or slam the reader with dramatic irony. Instead, they commit to their distant future, letting their characters not speculate on how we got here, but merely what to do about it.

So, yes, the book has ideas to spare. But the problem – for me, at least – comes in the fact that those ideas so often overtake the book, letting the subtext and ideas dictate the story rather than the other way around. Too often, Autonomous can feel like a polemic or an ethics lecture; instead of a pure thriller, Autonomous can become an allegory, with the ethical discussions and philosophy feeling like the drive of the book, rather than the subtext that the book is exploring.

That comes and goes, admittedly, and as the book goes along, the characters do have a way of developing into their own more fully realized creations. But even then, there’s often a feeling that “oh, this character is being used to explore this idea, and this one is being used to explore this.” Now, those ideas are fascinating ones, and Newitz handles all of them admirably, refusing easy explanations, defying simplification, and instead committing themself to grappling with the ugly, messy reality of it all. But it has a way of robbing the book of its tensions and immersion, turning it into an ethics treatise instead of the gripping thriller it should be.

In the end, Autonomous is a remarkable book, one whose reputation is entirely understandable to me. It’s intelligent, thoughtful, intricate, and grapples with ideas in such a way that it feels new and revelatory, even when it’s handling ideas that other books have handled before. But for all of that, it still feels stilted to me, with its ideas dictating the narrative rather than the other way around, and as a result, feeling more dry than exciting. Was it a good book? Indeed. But did I enjoy it? Not as much as I hoped.

Amazon

The Good Place (Season 4) / *****

Just a quick note before the review: it has been nearly two months since I updated this blog, and I apologize for the gap in content. Let’s just say that between sickness, work stress, natural disasters, and now an epidemic…well, it’s been hard to find time – or motivation – to update this blog. (Everyone is fine. But it has been a pretty remarkably bad few weeks, you guys.) But with an indefinite amount of time sitting at home (between learning to teach online and help home school my kids), well, I felt like getting back into reviews would be a good way to get my brain working again and help me feel a bit more control over life for a bit. So, without further ado, let’s talk about the end of one of my favorite shows in recent years…

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It’s odd to write about how much I love The Good Place, Michael Schur’s uproariously funny, fiercely humane, intimidatingly intelligent while simultaneously charmingly dumb show about the afterlife, morality, the meaning of life, and the horrors of life in Florida. Here is a show I deeply love – a show that moved me, that helped me remember that it’s important to be a good person even as the world burned, that always made me laugh week in and week out…and yet, it’s a show that definitely made major missteps – missteps far more severe than most of the other “great” shows of the modern era. And the final season was no exception…and even so, I loved every minute of it.

Part of that is probably because the major mistakes of the final season were confined to the first half, which aired before the end of 2019 and ended up making that section of the season feel less memorable and relevant as we got to the endgame. Knowing where the show ended up, that first half of the season – which involved a second effort at an experiment to prove that humans were capable of positive growth – feels even more jarring and useless. It doesn’t help that the show’s normally sharp characterization skills fell flat here, giving us a crew of barely-archetypes that were more annoying and flat than funny, with the possible exception of Brett, the epitome of rich white guy privilege – a character who’s final moment on the show moved me more than I expected it to, given how contrived and scattered the whole experiment arc felt along the way. It was an odd choice for the show to make, focusing on a crew of characters we didn’t really care about and breaking up the group dynamics as we moved into the endgame, and given the lack of impact on that experiment in the long run, I can’t help but feel it was a bit of a missed opportunity. Was it still consistently, constantly funny? Oh, of course – from the appearance of a classic demon friend to the jokes about Brett’s published novel, there was a lot of fun here. But it never brought about the depth and richness that the show was capable of…

…until the second half, as Team Cockroach scrambled to save the human race and just maybe rewrite the moral code of the universe. That’s no small goal for a ridiculous sitcom to set for itself, and yet somehow The Good Place pulled it off, giving us a conclusion to its story that both felt right for the characters and for the show itself. No other show I can think of could simultaneously grapple with the idea of how mortality inherently transforms the concept of life AND give you a glorious payoff to a long-running joke about celebrity crushes, but somehow, The Good Place did it. And in doing so, it constantly reminded me why I fell in love with the show – not just because it was funny (it was), not just because of its imagination and willingness to go for broke (though that helped) – it was because of its heart and soul. In an era full of irony and snark, The Good Place managed to be about human decency and our capability for good – qualities that it’s easy to forget about sometimes.

And none of that even touches on the actual finale, which left the show time to focus not on its story (which was essentially concluded) and instead on giving its characters the endings they deserved. Did I tear up more than once? Just maybe. But I also laughed a lot, and loved the beauty of a show ending in a way that so perfectly fit the standards it had set for itself.

I could go on and on about this show – about the incredible performances from every cast member, about the glorious food puns, about the imagination on display at all times, about the brilliant writing – but I’ve done that now for a few years, and I don’t know what new I have to say. The Good Place was something special, warts and all – and it had some warts! It stumbled with telling me about a relationship when one scene showing that relationship worked better than all the dialogue in the world; it spun its wheels a lot at times, making me wondering why we spent so long on Earth or with this second experiment. And yet, the show around it is so good and strong that you don’t think about the flaws; they might detract as you go week to week, but as a whole, the show itself is something better than any of those individual parts. I’ll miss it a lot.

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