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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
I feel like the author strayed from the point of the book a lot, I'm not quite sure what she was trying to say here. It was a bit rambling and there was very little about why Robert Coombes committed the murder apart from what the author presumes was the reason!
Interesting in the first half of the book or so. Ended up skimming quite a bit of the text.
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
sad
medium-paced
This book just wasn't good. It is a very slow and rambling biography of a single boy who murdered his mother. It takes a very long time to get anywhere and makes a point of going into painful detail about even the most mundane points (I am pretty sure at one point every police officer was introduced by telling you their marital status and how many children they had despite this having absolutely no bearing on the story) and then randomly gave a blow by blow story of the first world war. This was just an infuriatingly dull book and I am so mad that I got sucked in by what sounded like a really interesting premise.
An interesting story of a boy in late Victorian England who murdered his mother. The story is taken up immediately after the murder and details the bizarre period in which the matricidal 13 year old and his 12 year old brother live in the house with their mother's corpse for nearly two weeks. The boy’s trial and time served in an insane asylum are well documented. The story ends with his adult life after release.
The subject of the book is intriguing and the glimpse at life at the turn of the century is fascinating. However the tangential information is often too heavily detailed and distracting. The story of the subject's later life is dull and sheds no light on why he killed his mother. Though morbid curiosity carries the reader into the story, a lack of conclusion makes for a disappointing end to the book.
The subject of the book is intriguing and the glimpse at life at the turn of the century is fascinating. However the tangential information is often too heavily detailed and distracting. The story of the subject's later life is dull and sheds no light on why he killed his mother. Though morbid curiosity carries the reader into the story, a lack of conclusion makes for a disappointing end to the book.
dark
informative
mysterious
fast-paced
The case of a young boy killing his mother in Victorian England is examined with forensic detail. Summerscale is an amazing researcher - and uses recorded facts to lay out the crime, the aftermath and society's response. I appreciate the fact there is no filling in the gaps of what isn't recorded fact.The book runs at a fast pace - connecting together the events in what feels like real time. That does leave the story rather cold - Summerscale doesn't project or speculate - but neither does she suggest or bring in hindsight, so the telling, whilst compelling, can feel rather clinical.
dark
informative
medium-paced
The Wicked Boy is the story of a Victorian murder. A boy kills his mother for seemingly unknown reasons and afterwards appears cool and collected on the courtroom. Is he a psychopath? Or did he actually have a strong motive to commit the murder, say to protect his younger brother's life and his own? Or should we blame the gory literature he was consuming to escape his harsh reality (the "penny dreadfuls" as they were called by the sensationalist press of the time)? The author had conducted research on this case and presented them all in this book in a clear and concise way, subtly inferring her own opinions here and there, but mostly leaving the facts out for interpretation of the reader.
I have to confess: it's been a long time since I've read true crime books (looking back at my adolescence, I know now that I did in fact read them, but I did not recognize the genre staple at the time), so I am not used to them. I went into this book a little wary, but curious anyway. What would it be about? Would it offer insights on the psychiatry of crime? Or would it discuss the abuse imposed on children in the 19th century, when it was legal for a parent to abuse their child to violent extremes without being questioned about it in any court of law?
Some bits from here on might contain spoilers.
I enjoyed the pursuit of these ideas, and so in the beginning of the book I was very engaged by it. Towards the middle, however, after the trial period had passed, I found myself rather bored by the endeavor. I did not care about Robert Coombes' time at the hospice Broadmoore, and cared even less about his time in the army and about the time after that when he lived as a farmer. I should blame my self, however, for not liking these parts. I hate reading about anything military. It is what it is.
In the end, I was left feeling a bit disappointed. Those insights I went it searching for seemed lacking in the book. I have reached the end and still have not understood the point the author was trying to make with this story. I understood it as a story of redemption and it that aspect, it seems like a powerful message: we are not defined by a single action in our lives, no matter how significant. We should be defined by the whole course of our lives and by the good we choose to do onto others even if we have done wrong in the past. However, it seems like there should have been more to it.
Robert lived a quietly life and dedicated himself to work (first in the army, then with his music, then in his farm) and I am sure he helped plenty of people (such as when he was carrying the war-injured on the battlefields), but if that was the story the author was trying to tell, it seemed like she should have set up for it from the beginning.
At first, based on the descriptions of Robert in court and his declarations in the murder trial, it is hard to say whether he was abused or whether he was a psychopath. Having reached the end, I believe now that he was abused by his mother, both physically and emotionally, and seeing no other way out of it he had decided to kill her. Remember, that he lived in a time when parents had every right over a child and children had close to no rights. Judges were disinclined to persecute a parent for abuse. His father, which seemed to be a source of comfort at sometimes for him, was gone from the house. His brother was also being threatened and in danger of being seriously hurt by their mother. He did not see her as the benevolent figure who had given him life anymore, but as a monster akin to the ones he had been reading about on his stories (stories which were not the source or the blame for Robert's violence as the press was inclined to believe, but merely a reflection of the reality he was leaving and which he was trying to escape from).
You can come to this conclusion from most of the facts throughout the book, but especially from the epilogue in which we seen adult Robert encounter a child victim of abuse and take the child into his care, to protect him from his abusive parent. It is possible that Robert had recognized (maybe consciously, maybe not) that this was a similar situation to what he had suffered, and he saw a way to help the child, so that his future could be a better than Robert's own.
All of those things are speculations and reflect my own opinions based on the facts in the book, however. We will never quite know for sure. I do appreciate that the author has left things mostly for the reader's own interpretation, but I do wish that the story had had more purpose than it did. I think the narrative was well written and informed, but it lacked direction and at some points it was too dry and slow and failed to engage.
Ultimately, if you enjoy reading about true crime and are curious about what the book might reveal, I would still recommend it, but I am not sure if it would be a good place to start if you are someone who is new to the genre.
I have to confess: it's been a long time since I've read true crime books (looking back at my adolescence, I know now that I did in fact read them, but I did not recognize the genre staple at the time), so I am not used to them. I went into this book a little wary, but curious anyway. What would it be about? Would it offer insights on the psychiatry of crime? Or would it discuss the abuse imposed on children in the 19th century, when it was legal for a parent to abuse their child to violent extremes without being questioned about it in any court of law?
Some bits from here on might contain spoilers.
I enjoyed the pursuit of these ideas, and so in the beginning of the book I was very engaged by it. Towards the middle, however, after the trial period had passed, I found myself rather bored by the endeavor. I did not care about Robert Coombes' time at the hospice Broadmoore, and cared even less about his time in the army and about the time after that when he lived as a farmer. I should blame my self, however, for not liking these parts. I hate reading about anything military. It is what it is.
In the end, I was left feeling a bit disappointed. Those insights I went it searching for seemed lacking in the book. I have reached the end and still have not understood the point the author was trying to make with this story. I understood it as a story of redemption and it that aspect, it seems like a powerful message: we are not defined by a single action in our lives, no matter how significant. We should be defined by the whole course of our lives and by the good we choose to do onto others even if we have done wrong in the past. However, it seems like there should have been more to it.
Robert lived a quietly life and dedicated himself to work (first in the army, then with his music, then in his farm) and I am sure he helped plenty of people (such as when he was carrying the war-injured on the battlefields), but if that was the story the author was trying to tell, it seemed like she should have set up for it from the beginning.
At first, based on the descriptions of Robert in court and his declarations in the murder trial, it is hard to say whether he was abused or whether he was a psychopath. Having reached the end, I believe now that he was abused by his mother, both physically and emotionally, and seeing no other way out of it he had decided to kill her. Remember, that he lived in a time when parents had every right over a child and children had close to no rights. Judges were disinclined to persecute a parent for abuse. His father, which seemed to be a source of comfort at sometimes for him, was gone from the house. His brother was also being threatened and in danger of being seriously hurt by their mother. He did not see her as the benevolent figure who had given him life anymore, but as a monster akin to the ones he had been reading about on his stories (stories which were not the source or the blame for Robert's violence as the press was inclined to believe, but merely a reflection of the reality he was leaving and which he was trying to escape from).
You can come to this conclusion from most of the facts throughout the book, but especially from the epilogue in which we seen adult Robert encounter a child victim of abuse and take the child into his care, to protect him from his abusive parent. It is possible that Robert had recognized (maybe consciously, maybe not) that this was a similar situation to what he had suffered, and he saw a way to help the child, so that his future could be a better than Robert's own.
All of those things are speculations and reflect my own opinions based on the facts in the book, however. We will never quite know for sure. I do appreciate that the author has left things mostly for the reader's own interpretation, but I do wish that the story had had more purpose than it did. I think the narrative was well written and informed, but it lacked direction and at some points it was too dry and slow and failed to engage.
Ultimately, if you enjoy reading about true crime and are curious about what the book might reveal, I would still recommend it, but I am not sure if it would be a good place to start if you are someone who is new to the genre.
Heavy on detail which at time made this book a chore and the temptation to skim parts of it was hard to resist. The epilogue, however, more than made up for this and made this a great story on the whole.
I enjoyed the first part of this book when it was actually about the murder of the title. I understand the idea of looking at the later life of the murderer but felt that the chapter on his life in the war was far too long and detailed. It felt like the author was unwilling to miss out on using everything that she’d researched.