Tampa: The Most Wicked Thing On Your Shelf

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This is going to chill you a bit before you even get halfway through. You probably won't look down your own street the same way for a little while. Celeste Price is a 8th grade teacher and pedophile. Her appetite for 14-year-old boys is insatiable and her ability to hide her secret is borderline sociopathic. Not unlike hearing a broadcast of a school teacher who slept with a student in your neighborhood, Tampa will hang on your shoulder when you peer down your street, lined with otherwise unassuming households. You'll be sure to remind yourself that not only can you be unsure of what's taking place within those homes, you can also not be sure what kinds of thoughts and desires are spinning behind the eyes of your neighbors. Suddenly everyone has an invisible finger dipped in some kind of wickedness, and the really jarring part is that mixed in with the fear of potential secrets, you've got a budding curiosity.

I don't mean to make you paranoid. I want to make it clear that fear is no decent cage to lock yourself in--because really, it isn't a cage; it's a box. The only path outside of it is a hole just big enough to suck oxygen through, yet too small to peer out of. And you don't want that, do you? You would rather read about a murderer than protect your innocence from a frightening character. You read things like Tampa, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. You're probably trying like hell to catch up on Breaking Bad. This is because you know that wicked people make for good stories. When a good brain, like Oscar Wilde's, Fay Weldon's and Vince Gilligan's are put to the task of making that story into something we can sink our teeth and claws into, we get exactly what we want out of these villains, or rather, these anti-heroes. The reward is an exposure of wickedness that is so unabashed and honest that you can't help but revel in the quality of the work. The evilness in the character is not chaotic or randomly dangerous; it's deliberate, unwavering, and chillingly human. It's what Alissa Nutting has tapped into with this book.

Nutting writes like a psychologist who's been around forever. Celeste Price's observations of the people around her are so fluid and bright that you constantly find yourself at war with your distaste for her criminal activity. Since I mentioned cages earlier, I'll use an excerpt where Celeste contemplates the captivity of souls within the bodies of middle aged women while she's trying to spy on a student from her car:

Their silhouettes eclipsed my binocular view and I looked up to watch them saunter off, elbows out, rowing through the air like impotent wings. Were there souls left inside these women? It seemed doubtful. The soul had always struck me as being a tricky thing to keep with the body: an easily bored aristocrat with the means to leave whenever it wished. What temptations, what vistas were their lives of folding socks and online diet-plan message boards offering? The goosey (sic) flesh of their limbs was not in rhythm. What facile cages for a spirit hell-bent on sneaking out, the bodies of these women.

How wrong, or misguided is she? Is this the unusually bright, albeit superficial mind of a teenager, trapped in the body of an educated 27 year-old? Either way, what goes on in Celeste's head is not fit for polite society... obviously. We have to admit, however, that these thoughts are not reserved for women parked outside teenagers' houses with a pair of binoculars. For as long as women have been women, the societal gaze upon their bodies has been relentless, and often brutal. Nutting allows us to explore these observations as if Celeste is a vehicle for what we openly agree is wrong, but privately consider anyway.

And within this passage, this matter-of-fact consideration of the "soul" and of these women, is desperation, which might explain deviancy, if only in part. In order to keep her soul intact and within her body, she must avoid the monotonous life she sees many women living out in her neighborhood. She is afraid that others might observe her body and being as Nature's failed attempt to make something beautiful enough to be worth the lustful attention of those she desires. There is weakness in her cold assessment of these women, and weakness is a very natural thing. In the eyes of those women, Celeste is a gorgeous specimen either at subject to their envy, or indifference. Those who did get to know her, truly--those wise to her secret desires--would likely cut their descriptive powers down to one simple word, "monster." Where is the enlightenment, or dare I say it, fun in that?

Looking through eyes of the villain is a rare opportunity we get as readers, or even as movie goers and video game players for that matter. We are always with the good guy, the hero. We're with Harry Potter, and Superman on the side of righteousness and virtue; the side of nobility in the face of death and cruelty. This is all good--in life we want to bring harm to no one and be kind to all, ideally. However, as consumers of entertainment, we limit ourselves to a very cushioned experience as readers. We fool ourselves into thinking there are immoral books that, if read, will contaminate our minds and our desires. We are afraid of being won over by Celeste Price, and then possibly becoming her.

This is an unfounded fear. No book is going to singlehandedly make you into a sex offender. If you somehow become a sex offender after reading this, I guarantee no sensible judge is going to let you go and throw her behind bars. You'll be changed after this book, like with any good book, but you won't be unrecognizable from your old self. I give Nutting a lot of credit for her writing, but she's not a witch; she's an author. A really good one who just doesn't have the face of someone who wants you to sleep with the members of One Direction (see book jacket for image).

4 out of 5 stars.

What The Family Needed: A Family Of Heroes You Won't Believe Aren't Real

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I'm all in for this one.

Before we even meet the family, they've cracked. A mother and her two children are already moving away to a sister’s house in paradisiac suburbia. Instantly, we realize this book’s universe did not begin on page one. Readers will find themselves bursting with curiosity, and eager to get to the next page already. We don’t even see the mother, Ruth, pile her children into her blue hatchback, and leave her husband looking down (or not looking at all) at them as they take off. By they time they arrive at her sister's "peaceful" home, we’ve only been racing along the blue hatchback for the last sliver of that fateful car ride. In less than two pages, we’re informed of this pre-existing universe. A lesser writer would have taken longer.

Speaking of temporality and our collective need to hurry the hell up and enjoy ourselves, Steven Amsterdam wastes no ink. The first chapter follows Giordana, who acquires the ability to render herself invisible. The source of the power isn’t revealed. Giordana has her suspicions of the source, and where they lie create the potential for a delightful unfolding later on in the story. An economically wise decision, which successfully keeps our curiosity as readers on a steady tap.

Delightful might be the wrong term, considering the amount of contained dysfunction amidst our heroes. And I say heroes because we are treated to the perspectives of every main character—all seven—over different periods of time, separated by decades. Amsterdam seems to understand the reader’s intrinsic taste for gossip and drama with the way this book is structured. The characters that barely speak, or don’t even make an appearance in one chapter, are cracked wide open in their respective chapters. The gift of perspective he treats us to is truly a privilege.

Not only that, but Amsterdam’s talents for description and clarity are unrivaled. The revelation of each superpower is not a saccharine, operatic ascension to the super-hero’s pedestal. With humility, and simplicity he guides his characters through these sudden developments that are so believable, it’s nearly breathtaking. Take Giordana’s disappearing:

From the veranda, she could see that the street was still. A few cars sat in driveways and not even a breeze through the evenly spaced trees. Giordana went back inside to make a quick round of the house without the house knowing. She lessened herself. Looked down: no legs, no arms. Ace, She trusted her senses to know she was not just a floating head. Proprioception, the feeling of your body in space. What was it called when your body was there but not there? She took the stairs with her hands up, as if it was a balancing act.

Giordana is not placed in—brace for irony—an invisible realm reserved for beings with super ability. There isn’t a spot reserved for her on Olympus from where she can observe weaker beings. She’s hardly even made into the quintessential, and exhausted portrait of the girl who’s "not like other girls." Her human curiosity and lack of assurance in the face of new power are very much there. In this regard, Amsterdam's approach to a girl feeling empowered by her invisibility is as refreshing as it is enticing.

What won’t surprise you is the link between the characters' humanity and their super-ness. The powers reflect their desires and their flaws, which are the main ingredients to personality. And although the connections between super power and personality is a method old as time, Amsterdam doesn’t lose steam and neither will you as you read. Each hero is illustrated brilliantly; they each, within the space of a single chapter, read as more than figments of Amsterdam's remarkable imagination. This comes from a kind of story-telling that is unabashedly honest, and composed with dedication to each word.

As I stood reading a borrowed copy of this book, I decided I needed my own before I got to page five. When I eventually arrived at it's ending, I went right back to page one.

5 out of 5 stars.