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weirdow's review
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced
1.0
Not really sure why this was a book. The writing felt like poor rephrasing of source material/interviews with very little point and A LOT of filler.
wyvernfriend's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting story but I wasn't caught by the storytelling.
Starts in the Victorian era, when a boy of 13, Robert Coombes and his 12 year old brother Nattie have 10 days of freedom until the smell from their house causes someone to investigate only to find that their mother is dead, their father is off at sea and they have recruited a family friend to help take care of them.
When the mother's body is examined they discover that she has been stabbed and Robert admits that he's the one who did it. The trial ends with him in Broadmoor, convicted. After many years he's declared sane and discharged and he goes to Australia. Then he enlists and becomes a stretcher bearer and musician for the Australian Army and lives into old age, showing compassion to a young boy who is beaten by his father, becoming a read father to him.
It's an interesting story of redemption and complicated life that made me think, though the writing style somehow left me cold.
Starts in the Victorian era, when a boy of 13, Robert Coombes and his 12 year old brother Nattie have 10 days of freedom until the smell from their house causes someone to investigate only to find that their mother is dead, their father is off at sea and they have recruited a family friend to help take care of them.
When the mother's body is examined they discover that she has been stabbed and Robert admits that he's the one who did it. The trial ends with him in Broadmoor, convicted. After many years he's declared sane and discharged and he goes to Australia. Then he enlists and becomes a stretcher bearer and musician for the Australian Army and lives into old age, showing compassion to a young boy who is beaten by his father, becoming a read father to him.
It's an interesting story of redemption and complicated life that made me think, though the writing style somehow left me cold.
unsolvedmysteries1's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
4.5
I couldn’t put this book down! Tragic, sad, extremely informative and interesting, this book tells of a murder of a mother by her 13 year old son in 1895 London. This true story is very complex and the book well researched.
meglee856's review
The author was writing too much background and setting. I wanted to know more about the individuals and their thought process.
mackle13's review
informative
slow-paced
2.5
My thoughts on finishing this book were, "Well, that was interesting, but <i>so</i> boring."
First off, it's not a "mystery". Or, rather, I suppose the mystery is why Robert killed his mother, but that mystery is never <i>really</i> answered. The trial didn't go deeply into motive. There was some suggestion that the mother was abusive, but because there are no diaries or anything written by Robert, we never get any real insight into his thoughts and feelings, aside from little gleaning we get from the trials, which are never explored in depth.
Also, it just went on for so long.
Here's the first paragraph of the blurb:
<quote>In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. </quote>
The telling of this in the book takes at least 30 pages, filling in some "slice of life" of what it was like to live in England at the time, far too many details about cricket, some asides into the politics of the time, etc.
It's all facts, without any <i>ambience</i>. (Going back to the blurb it calls the book atmospheric, but I would highly disagree with that. I never felt like I knew the people involved, and never really felt "present" in any of the moments.)
Anyway - so after the initial 30 or so pages we get to the trial, which continues to be well-researched but dry. Lots of repeating of what's in trial transcripts or newspapers at the time.
The most interesting this in this section, to me, was the way they tried to blame the murder on Robert's fascination with penny-dreadfuls. Lots of correlation with our continuing desire to blame music, D&D, games, etc. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Also some interesting asides into the (paraphrasing) the dangers of educating the poor and middle-classes, as, apparently, their brains just aren't capable of that much learning and will explode into insanity. (Not at all something that the rich would come up with just to keep the poor uneducated and easily lead. I mean, it's not like there are any rich people who "love the uneducated" for reasons...)
Anyway -
Then we go to Broadmoor, which, as described in this book, is much better than I imagined based on other stories of the time. Though I am more familiar with the horrible stories of Bedlam, and we do mostly see "Block 2", which is where the more affluent prisoners were held.
But, again, there aren't much details about Robert during this time period, aside from a few instances which are mentioned, so, mostly, we just divert into this history of Broadmoor, in general, and the doctors who lead it, and the different blocks, and the activities, and how people saw it as too lenient and not enough punishment... and if I were interested in just reading about a general history of Broadmoor, I'd pick up a Wikipedia article instead, 'cause it would be less than 50 pages of meandering.
Robert gets out, spends some time at the Salvation Army halfway house type thing - insert history of Salvation Army.
Robert goes to war - insert history of war.
Robert settles in Australia - instead history of Australia.
You get the point.
The epilogue, which is told from the memories of people who at least knew him instead of just impersonal records, was probably the closest the getting a sense of the actual person behind the 'story'. If the book was more of that, maybe it wouldn't gotten to a three star...
But there's just not enough information to make up for the length of the book, and felt like it just rambled and meandered without tying it back to Robert at times. Would've been better at novella length, I think.
First off, it's not a "mystery". Or, rather, I suppose the mystery is why Robert killed his mother, but that mystery is never <i>really</i> answered. The trial didn't go deeply into motive. There was some suggestion that the mother was abusive, but because there are no diaries or anything written by Robert, we never get any real insight into his thoughts and feelings, aside from little gleaning we get from the trials, which are never explored in depth.
Also, it just went on for so long.
Here's the first paragraph of the blurb:
<quote>In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. </quote>
The telling of this in the book takes at least 30 pages, filling in some "slice of life" of what it was like to live in England at the time, far too many details about cricket, some asides into the politics of the time, etc.
It's all facts, without any <i>ambience</i>. (Going back to the blurb it calls the book atmospheric, but I would highly disagree with that. I never felt like I knew the people involved, and never really felt "present" in any of the moments.)
Anyway - so after the initial 30 or so pages we get to the trial, which continues to be well-researched but dry. Lots of repeating of what's in trial transcripts or newspapers at the time.
The most interesting this in this section, to me, was the way they tried to blame the murder on Robert's fascination with penny-dreadfuls. Lots of correlation with our continuing desire to blame music, D&D, games, etc. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Also some interesting asides into the (paraphrasing) the dangers of educating the poor and middle-classes, as, apparently, their brains just aren't capable of that much learning and will explode into insanity. (Not at all something that the rich would come up with just to keep the poor uneducated and easily lead. I mean, it's not like there are any rich people who "love the uneducated" for reasons...)
Anyway -
Then we go to Broadmoor, which, as described in this book, is much better than I imagined based on other stories of the time. Though I am more familiar with the horrible stories of Bedlam, and we do mostly see "Block 2", which is where the more affluent prisoners were held.
But, again, there aren't much details about Robert during this time period, aside from a few instances which are mentioned, so, mostly, we just divert into this history of Broadmoor, in general, and the doctors who lead it, and the different blocks, and the activities, and how people saw it as too lenient and not enough punishment... and if I were interested in just reading about a general history of Broadmoor, I'd pick up a Wikipedia article instead, 'cause it would be less than 50 pages of meandering.
Robert gets out, spends some time at the Salvation Army halfway house type thing - insert history of Salvation Army.
Robert goes to war - insert history of war.
Robert settles in Australia - instead history of Australia.
You get the point.
The epilogue, which is told from the memories of people who at least knew him instead of just impersonal records, was probably the closest the getting a sense of the actual person behind the 'story'. If the book was more of that, maybe it wouldn't gotten to a three star...
But there's just not enough information to make up for the length of the book, and felt like it just rambled and meandered without tying it back to Robert at times. Would've been better at novella length, I think.