Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M.E. Thomas

Overall rating: 8/10

M.E. Thomas is a sociopath, but she’s never killed anyone. She’s also a law professor and a Sunday school teacher. Confessions of a Sociopath is both Thomas’ story of self-discovery and the introduction to a fascinating, mostly silent community. She investigates the development of the concept of sociopathy, from the first time a similar condition was described to brain scan studies of famously murderous families. She even touches on how she would recommend parenting a child sociopath, which is fascinating.

Thomas not entirely benign – her favorite hobby is “ruining people” which she explains in depth with fascinating candor and detail. Thomas’ bold, blunt voice and well-researched ideas are captivating; more than once I caught myself thinking wow, I wish I was a sociopath too. (Final verdict: no, I don’t.) Her written voice makes it easy to understand how seductive and powerful a presence she must be in person, when she’s concentrating all of her attention on you. A little frightening, really.

As soon as I saw this book mentioned on another blogger’s Twitter feed, I thought yes. I went straight to all of my sources and requested a copy. And it’s exactly as good as I’d hoped it would be.

My favorite part was when Thomas told the story of the time she came closest to vengeful murder. What was the one thing that nearly pushed her over the edge? The DC metro system.

My thanks to edelweiss and Crown for providing me with a copy of this book for review.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.

This book is: creative and haunting.
Other elements: peculiarity, mental health, family dynamics, sheep murderers, reality vs fantasy.
Read it: if you like the idea of fantasy and the real world colliding.
Overall rating: 6.5/10

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children revolves around a teenage boy named Jacob, who opens the novel by acting like an entitled brat in a drug store that his family owns. After Jacob’s his grandfather, a frequent teller of fanciful stories, dies in a suspicious way, Jacob starts to wonder if his grandfather’s fairy tales might have actually be more truth than fiction. This lands him swiftly in psychiatric care, but he doesn’t stop his subtle investigation into his grandfather’s life. He can’t stop thinking about a collection of photos his grandfather used to show him when he was young: very old photos of children that appear to have supernatural abilities. They’re the kind of photo that used to accompany old time advertisements for sideshow freaks, that kind of thing. Jacob always thought the photos were fake, but the more he investigates, the more he suspects there’s something real behind all of it. He begins to discover that not only is he right, but that he’s actually a part of it all.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: before and after. – Page 8

I still think this book has one of the best titles and covers I’ve ever seen. And the cover photograph (as well as the book itself) has a great story behind it. The author, Ransom Riggs, collected old photographs – photographs like the ones Jacob’s grandfather had, of people demonstrating unusual talents: floating girls, invisible boys; the sort of curiosity photos often made with costumes and double exposure. Riggs says in the Author’s Note that he’d originally planned to write a picture book, but that this story had evolved around the photos instead. I’m glad it did – I love that there’s a kernel of fact at the heart at this story, and I like thinking of the people in the photos and what they would think of the fact they their photos are inspiring creative work in future generations.

My main complaint I never really managed to like the main character. He wasn’t horrible, but he lacked insight and was generally non-fascinating. I was also unimpressed at the ease with which he decided to abandon his family. I found myself wishing I could hear Jacob’s grandfather’s story instead; he sounds like a more interesting guy. I liked the peripheral characters so much that I still enjoyed reading it, but I couldn’t help but feel that the real meat of the story was happening out of sight.

This is a weird thing to say about a book that I liked, but I was unhappy when I reached the end of this book and realized the author is planning to do a series. I thought the strength of the novel was in the quiet, fascinating mystery of the peculiar children and their world. I was disappointed to realize that they were going to leave their home and venture forth into the world to become entirely a known quantity. I think I would have preferred if the protagonist had gone home and let the little mystery live on. But that sort of disregards the entire plot.

Maybe I just felt so attached to the peculiar children that I’m upset that they have to leave their sanctuary and enter the normal world. Or maybe I’ve just read a lot of unfinished series lately and I’m tired of waiting for an ending.

Hopefully my instinct is wrong and the sequel will be unexpectedly great. Has anyone out there read this and felt the same way?

Astor Place Vintage by Stephanie Lehmann

This book is: a great concept that didn’t quite work out.
Other elements: vintage New York, small businesses, affairs, women in the workplace, vintage clothing.
Read it: maybe if you’re really into stories about old New York.
Overall rating: 4.5/10

Astor Place Vintage tells the stories of Amanda, a vintage clothing store owner who has discovered a diary in an antique fur muff, and Olive, the long-ago girl who once hid her diary in the lining of her muff for safekeeping. Amanda happens upon (and steals) Olive’s diary while one a clothing-buying outing for her store and begins to read it.

Amanda is a contemporary New Yorker who owns her own businesses, is afraid she’s too old to have children, and evaluates every man she meets for marriageability potential. Olive, her counterpart, is woman from a well-to-do family who finds herself penniless and alone in early 1900’s New York City after a family tragedy. Olive soldiers on through sexism, squalor, and seduction in pursuit of her dream: to support herself without depending on a man.

According to the book summary, reading Olive’s diary is supposed to teach Amanda valuable lessons about her own life. Olive’s life and Amanda’s life might have occasionally intersected in subject matter, but Amanda didn’t really seem to learn anything beyond some useful history. She does have a major turning point that coincides with when she reads about a major turning point in Olive’s life, but Amanda’s revelation is the direct result of something she learns from the present, not the past.

I grew to like Olive by the middle of the novel – when she became interestingly self-sufficient and stopped being such a cliché. Amanda was a constant disappointment. She suffers from a woe-is-me, I-wasted-my-youth-on-a-man-who-never-married-me attitude that is infinitely irritating. It’s boring, overplayed, and off-putting. Hasn’t fiction had enough 30-somethnig women who want to wallow in their failure to be married? Her inability to escape a long affair with her married lover and attendant despair could have been interesting and humanizing, but it’s just not.

The one plot point that really was Olive’s quest for accurate information about contraception in the early 1900’s; I found the variation of misinformation she encountered and the depth of the taboos she challenged fascinating. As a girl who grew up without a mother, Olive had never had anyone explain the facts of life to her. When she’s abruptly thrust into the lower echelons of New York society by her father’s death, these missing facts suddenly become vital rather than just interesting. Sadly, this plot line wasn’t a major focus.

This book is tied together by a number of unsurprising coincidences that shock the characters and bore the reader. Overall, this feels like two books that were chopped up and unsuccessfully mashed together. Astor Place Vintage is a fun concept that failed to put its money where its mouth is.

My thanks to edelweiss and Touchstone for providing me with a copy of this book for review.