This is book 16 of The Dresden Files, and we all know that I will read this book. While I didn't read it immediately when I received it, I did read it all in one day (I know, I know, quelle surprise).

To say I am disappointed in this book is an understatement. To say I am not the only person who feels this way is to scream the truth. This book is, after some consideration, the worst book of the series, and that's lower than the first two books. So let's talk about them, because they are clearly good enough to hook me on the series, yet I'm less of a fan of them than when I originally read them. In the first two books, Butcher hadn't quite found his writing style, found Dresden's voice. As such, the first two books read less well, are more cheesy. Which isn't to say they are bad, they are not, but they are at the bottom of good. The first two books are the Nickelback of Urban Fantasy, the crap of the cream.

So, how could this book be worse than those books? Well...

This book is entirely setup for the next book, Battle Ground, book 17 of The Dresden Files. The plot lacks tension. The characters lack development, no one matures, ponders, overcomes, questions, or decides really to do anything. The one big plot point, an assassination attempt, is so out of character than the first question ANYONE would ask should be, "Why?" Start there, figure out why, and work backwards. But no, no one bothers to ask, let's just blow straight through the thinking part into the panic rescue, and how clever to figure out how to do this without blowing shit up. -ish.

And what the f--- is up with Ebenezer? Hint, hint, hint, rage, rage, rage. Oh, look, this does appear to be Dresden's first rodeo. I mean, come on, no, you don't become the Black Staff by being unable to control your rage. Just doesn't happen.

Yeah, again, this book is all setup. It is unexciting, uneventful, uninspiring. It is the first half of the "oops, I wrote too much, better split the book in half" book, which has the second half arriving at the end of September. If you're reading the Dresden Files, wait until the next book is out before reading this one, and read them both in one go. Don't read this one if you're not reading the series. And if you're listening to the audiobook, forgive Marster's his Mab voice. It is awful.

He shook his head. "Humans are scared of just about everything. Problem is, their first reaction to being scared—"

“Is to kill it,” I said, nodding. I considered my super-nice suit and decided that I didn’t much like suits anyway. I sat down on the ground next to River. “I’m familiar with the problem.”
Location: 3,121

“Old woman,” Corb taunted. “I remember you as a bawling brat. I remember your pimply face when you rode with the Conqueror. I remember how you wept when Merlin cast you out."
...
“Tell me,” Corb purred. “If he was yet among the living, do you think he would still love you? Would he be so proud of what you’ve become?”
Location: 4,251

Okay, when your tribe recommends a book, and an Internet Personality™ who has not failed in his book recommendations for you recommends the same book, well, you kinda have to read said recommendation. This book is that recommendation. This book is worth that recommendation.

Here's the thing, when you are the odd one out, when you are the weird one, your life is more difficult than the lives of those who fit in, who make friends easily, who aren't teased for being who they are, who don't stand out. Khazan understands, having been the weird one. She goes through how it feels to be weird, retells her journey, reviews many others' journeys with being weird, tells us there is strength in our weirdness, and lets us know it gets better. It does.

There's a cadence to this book that is welcoming, like sitting with a friend you've known for decades at a quiet cafe in a small European city and talking for hours. It's a nice feeling. During that conversation, Khazan tells us about the inverse correlations between societies' conformity and freedoms, about how different opinions lead to better decisions, about how being outside is a strength, and about how you have the choice to confirm or stay weird.

I enjoyed this book, and likely would have devoured this when I was 11 years old and crying that I just wanted to be normal, why wasn't I normal? I've found peace in my gracelessness, in my dorkitude, in my being the only girl in a group of "hey guys!" but it took a long, long time to find that peace. I would argue this book many years ago might have helped me accept myself faster. For that, I recommend this book to anyone who is even just a little bit weird. I'd tell them, "It's okay. Here, read this one, and Grit and let's talk."

When you’re locked outside something, it’s hard to know whether it’s because of something about you.
Chapter 1: Weird

One researcher found that lacking social connections is as harmful as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Loneliness is deadlier than obesity, and it increases the risk of dementia.
Chapter 1: Weird

I realized that sometimes my weirdness was someone else’s fault, but sometimes it was actually mine. Sometimes it was no one’s fault, but the wound from all the previous times was still so raw that I reacted three or four or forty times as strongly as I needed to. Later, experts would tell me this is called “inflammation.”
Chapter 1: Weird

There are systemic, horrific problems in our society that the tools of psychology are not equipped to address. The fact that marginalized people have learned to cope with some of them does not mean the fight for equality should ebb.
Chapter 1: Weird

Before the 1800s, weird was more likely to mean supernatural, or fantastical. Shakespeare, for instance, called the witches in Macbeth the “weyard sisters.” Wyrd is the Old English word for “fate,” and by the eighth century, a form of it, wyrde, was used to refer to the three Roman mythical, goddess-like Fates. The first one, Nona, spun the thread of life; the second, Decima, measured it; and the third, Morta, cut it as she saw fit. The three Fates represented the idea that our futures are determined, in part, by our circumstances. In that case, wyrde—weird—could be considered a kind of prediction, a destiny. Much like what psychology suggests, your unusualness is a fabric woven from the thread of your life. Your identity, your environment, and your experiences all combine to make you who you are. But your weirdness is also a hint at what you might live to see and do, at what hidden powers you possess. “Weird,” then, is your potential.
Chapter 1: Weird

All these findings point to roughly the same conclusion: we like to fit in with the group; we like people who fit in with the group; we dislike those who don’t. These norms, or unwritten rules about what we “ought” to be doing, determine what’s weird or isn’t.
Chapter 2: The Realization

In a 2014 study, the psychologist Shinobu Kitayama found the degree to which we uphold cultural norms is related to the type of variation we have on one gene, the dopamine D4 receptor gene. The gene doesn’t change how we behave; instead, it influences how much we endorse the prevailing norms of our environments.
Chapter 2: The Realization

People with borderline personality disorder and certain other conditions, such as autism, have trouble comprehending social norms. People with borderline, or BPD, as it’s abbreviated, struggle with mentalizing, or guessing what other people are thinking. They tend to be hypermentalizers—they interpret people’s intentions in the worst way possible, and they don’t react, well, normally.
Chapter 2: The Realization

social norms can change without people changing their actual attitudes—toward naked butts, in this case. It’s enough simply to plant the idea that something is normal and suggest that it’s the right thing to do. How you, personally, feel about it doesn’t matter; you’ll do it anyway.
Chapter 2: The Realization

Research has consistently shown that instead, in both friendships and romantic relationships, people seek out people who are almost exactly like themselves. Spouses and friends may very well become more similar to each other over time, but they start out resembling each other, too.
Chapter 2: The Realization

Russia’s anti-gay law is an interesting example of the psychological phenomenon in which, when our self-esteem is threatened, we start to desire surroundings that are more homogeneous. The idea is that when all else fails to give us a self-esteem boost, we can shore up our identity through sameness. (In fact, just doing the opposite, reminding people of their own self-worth, can make them more tolerant toward difference. One study found that after people wrote essays about their own positive traits, they were more likely to offer concessions to people who disagreed with them about abortion.)
Chapter 2: The Realization

Within each country, tightness can vary depending on the situation. Privacy is an important value in the U.S., so the normally loose Americans tighten up in that realm—they don’t drop by each other’s homes unannounced. Meanwhile, in the more culturally tight Japan, people crowd into bars after work to let loose—literally.
Chapter 2: The Realization

In psychology, “wanting things to be the way they’ve always been” is called “system justification,”
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

Norms trap us in the status quo, even when the status quo is irrational.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

“Most of the time that people do that kind of thing, it’s because they’re afraid, because they don’t understand, they don’t know me, and I’m different, and different scares people,” she told me.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

When the extent of the Nazis’ atrocities was revealed, it was thought that it would take a nation of very disturbed personalities to commit such violence.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

Seeing our group win matters, even if the group itself doesn’t matter at all.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

So if this was our past, when did we become so hateful toward outsiders? How did we get from whale party to fascism? Apparently, it was when we started farming, about ten thousand years ago. Farming involved settling on patches of land and interacting less with outside groups
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

Women, in particular, were expected to mold themselves to fit their husbands’ expectations, and those who had marriage trouble were asked by therapists if they were keeping themselves attractive enough.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

“Remember your most important job is to build up and maintain his ego,” Edward Podolsky advises wives in his 1943 book, Sex Today in Wedded Life. “Don’t bother your husband with petty troubles and complaints when he comes home from work…Be a good listener. Let him tell you his troubles; yours will seem trivial in comparison.”
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

Multiple studies and surveys have now shown that it was a fear of losing status to other groups—like immigrants and people of color—that motivated many white Americans’ support for Trump.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

It’s commonly thought that the main reason behind opposition to immigration is a fear that immigrants will take Americans’ jobs, but research on anti-immigrant sentiment suggests that’s not quite true. Instead, what seems most important is how culturally different the immigrants are from the native population. Specifically, what matters is if the immigrants speak English. To wit: more than 90 percent of Americans believe a person “must speak English” to be an American.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

It turns out we don’t want to safeguard our jobs so much as our norms.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

The reason a heavy disease burden dampened the kind of creative thinking required to win a Nobel, Murray found, was because worrying about biological threats made people in those nations more conformist. A history of infectious diseases didn’t make people in those nations dim-witted. But, according to this theory, it helped make them more traditional and avoidant of other people, and thus, less likely to come up with new and interesting ideas.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

Our behavioral immune systems predispose us to avoid people who break our social norms because we, subconsciously, fear they might harbor illnesses we are not equipped to fight off.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

Several studies have now shown that when people are more worried about disease, they react more negatively toward foreigners and norm violators.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

One study found that states and countries that are more plagued by infectious diseases tend to have stronger family ties and greater levels of religiosity; the authors interpreted these measures as indicating a preference for sticking with your own kind of people.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

People who are more careful about germs—who, say, open the bathroom door with a paper towel—have less inflammation, which is the way our body typically protects us from pathogens. When you’re taking pains to avoid germs—when your behavioral immune system is revved up—your body realizes there’s less of a need for it to fight infections below the skin, so it turns down the inflammatory activity.
Chapter 3: The Exclusion

“All this freedom” is something we heard a lot. Aren’t you enjoying all this freedom? Texans felt they had given us something that was so dear to them—freedom—and seemed hurt it was not more transformational for us,
Chapter 4: The Sting

But more often than not, people who are expected to feel persistently grateful instead wind up feeling subtly inferior.
Chapter 4: The Sting

Loneliness is not simply introversion. It isn’t the same as preferring to be alone. Rather, it’s a gap between the amount of social interaction a person would like to have and the amount they experience.
Chapter 4: The Sting

But that’s easier said than done: lonely humans have an overactive sense of social threat—a fear that they’ll be rejected if they try to reach out and socialize. Lonely people want to be around others, but they are afraid that if they try, they will be rejected.
Chapter 4: The Sting

People who are chronically lonely tend to withdraw socially because they start to feel like other people aren’t trustworthy. Socially isolated people view their interactions with others more negatively, so they keep their distance, perpetuating a cycle of loneliness.
Chapter 4: The Sting

The problem is that loneliness is not an actual, physical wound, so this inflammatory response is pointless. You could be lonely for days, weeks, months. The entire time, the immune system is gearing up to fight off bacteria that aren’t really there, pumping you full of inflammatory chemicals in the process.
Chapter 4: The Sting

Feeling excluded can be so painful, in fact, that people will turn to terrible alternatives to avoid it. Researchers are increasingly finding that the roots of various kinds of terrorism and radicalization lie in the rather banal sensation of feeling cut off from your social circle.
Chapter 4: The Sting

Exclusion is one of the things that can trigger what the psychologist Arie Kruglanski calls a “significance quest”—a plot to restore your place in society by becoming “somebody” again. You can restore your significance constructively—by, say, volunteering at your mosque, or destructively, by volunteering for ISIS. It all depends on what paths you see available to you, and who your friends are.
Chapter 4: The Sting

This is how social exclusion can become so perverse: it can insert ideas into your head that you don’t even possess. You might not be unusually hateful, but you’re lonely, and that can be enough.
Chapter 4: The Sting

I wanted a past that when I explained it to people, no one asked “why?” about any part of it.
Chapter 5: Creativity

There are a million little signals we get that suggest difference is inherently bad. “Living in interesting times” is supposed to be a curse. Interestingness, according to this bit of apocrypha, is inferior to normalcy. Boringness is tranquility, and divergence will inevitably hurt. For people who are considered interesting, that is often the case. But probe a little deeper, and you find that being weird isn’t always difficult. Even when it is, there are moments of glory amid the turmoil.
Chapter 5: Creativity

But believing that your weirdness is your superpower can also be hugely beneficial. There is evidence that thinking about your circumstances in a different way—a process called cognitive reappraisal—can help you cope with challenges. Perceiving what makes you weird as being what gives you strength can, ultimately, make you happier.
Chapter 5: Creativity

It occurred to me that the rest of my life hinged on performing well the following day. I didn’t have time to be depressed
Chapter 5: Creativity

So there was a relationship between rejection and creativity. But this advantage was only seen among the participants who considered themselves unique—who had an “independent self-concept.” Those who felt like they already weren’t part of any particular group were more creative when they were rejected by an arbitrary collective. There appears to be something about being a weirdo that uncorks your mind and allows new ideas to flow.
Chapter 5: Creativity

Creativity is defined scientifically as a process that results in a “new and useful” product. It doesn’t have to be art—a new assembly-line procedure can be as creative as a painting. And its usefulness doesn’t have to be physical—joy can be as useful as productivity.
Chapter 5: Creativity

people who are on the periphery of all sorts of groups are often freer to innovate and change social norms.
Chapter 5: Creativity

Outsiders are already not concerned with what the in-crowd thinks of them, so they have more leeway to experiment and come up with the next iThing or bestseller.
Chapter 5: Creativity

“The idea behind this is that once you’ve experienced things that violate norms and rules and expectations, you’re more open to more things like that,” Damian told me. “You experienced that the world doesn’t have to work by your rules, so you can break the rules.”
Chapter 5: Creativity

If something too jarring or traumatizing happens to you, just coping with it might use up all your mental capacity.
Chapter 5: Creativity

Your weirdness is attached to you. But rather than a millstone around your neck, it can be a jet pack.
Chapter 5: Creativity

Being unusual doesn’t just make you, yourself, more creative. Dissenting voices can also boost the creativity and decision-making power of the broader group you’re a part of.
Chapter 5: Creativity

Among the more democratic teams, in which all the workers took part in the decisions, the teams that had dissenting opinions in their midst came up with more innovative solutions than the teams in which everyone agreed.
Chapter 5: Creativity

The presence of a person who voices a competing perspective to the predominant one of the group has also been found to reduce our tendency to throw good money after bad. In a phenomenon called the sunk-cost fallacy, people are tempted to see a terrible idea through to the end once they’ve committed to doing it, even if it seems less and less brilliant as the problems pile up. (Those who have stuck with a terrible TV show or relationship because of the time they’ve already invested know this phenomenon well.)
Chapter 5: Creativity

This liberating element of alternate viewpoints has been replicated in other studies, and it underscores the value of having a diverse array of people around to poke holes in the prevailing idea.
Chapter 5: Creativity

The reason why minority views are so potent, according to research on persuasion, is that in certain circumstances, people tend to scrutinize a minority viewpoint more carefully. When we hear a dissenting view, we think more critically about what we’re hearing. Listening to a minority viewpoint prompts, in the listener, a consideration of information about different sides of an issue. Majorities, meanwhile, spur us to think only about data that supports the majority perspective.
Chapter 5: Creativity

Unfortunately, though, when people stop being weird, these benefits go away. When people who were once in the minority become the majority, research shows they become more closed-minded.
Chapter 5: Creativity

The idea was pioneered by the psychologist Edwin Hollander in the 1950s. By studying the way people interact in groups, Hollander theorized that newcomers to a group are better accepted if they first pay homage to its established values and goals, then start to deviate in small ways. At first, conform; then innovate.
Chapter 8: Comfort with Discomfort

Another way my interviewees combated the social anxiety that can arise from standing out was, frankly, by simply not giving a hoot what people thought of them.
Chapter 8: Comfort with Discomfort

As much as research tells us that it’s painful not to conform, some studies also hint at a way out: you can, like Asma has, change the way you think about your own nonconformity.
Chapter 8: Comfort with Discomfort

“People’s discomfort is theirs and not mine,” she said. The way she sees it, if someone judges you for your choices, it implies they’re the ones who aren’t okay.
Chapter 8: Comfort with Discomfort

Impostor syndrome can manifest in a variety of ways, including procrastination or an inability to accept compliments
Chapter 9: Better Than the Rest

The more Daniel learned about the theories behind societal stereotypes, the easier it seemed to be for him to process people’s mistrust of him. When a suspicious mom treats him unfairly, he could chalk it up to psychological phenomena, rather than making it about himself.
Chapter 10: The Big Picture

Daniel has stumbled on a technique psychologists commonly employ to help people maneuver through painful situations: they advise people to view their problems from an outside perspective. It’s a theory called Solomon’s Paradox, after the biblical king of Israel.
Chapter 10: The Big Picture

Other studies show it can be beneficial, when thinking about our problems, to refer to ourselves in the third person, rather than using “I.”
Chapter 10: The Big Picture

A major trait that helps in such grueling circumstances, Barrett and Martin write, is “hardiness,” which they define as a commitment to seeing life as meaningful and interesting; a belief that you can influence events; and a tendency to view even negative events as an opportunity to grow.
Chapter 10: The Big Picture

Research shows that greater well-being and self-confidence tend to come with these so-called “redemptive” narratives, which are a way of telling yourself more edifying stories about what’s happening to you.
Chapter 10: The Big Picture

the kinds of stories you tell yourself matter. There are narratives about yourself in which your life can still get better, and there are those in which it will keep getting worse.
Chapter 10: The Big Picture

Many researchers have now found that adults can change the five traits that make up personality: extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Changing a trait primarily requires acting in ways that embody that trait, just as Curt did, rather than simply thinking about it.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

He thinks it might be that when a person reaches their nadir and realizes they want to change, there’s something beneficial about having a warm, comforting presence there to support them.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

One way to revamp your social life is to simply make more friends.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

“Dunbar’s number” is the amount of individuals that can realistically make up a social group—about 150, in the view of its namesake, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. That’s roughly how many casual friends, whom you see at least once a year, a person can maintain. But within that are concentric circles of bros, homies, and confidants. The innermost circle is a pack of three to five very best friends and family members. Then there’s a “sympathy group” of about twelve to fifteen, who wouldn’t necessarily give you a kidney, but would give you a lift to the airport.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

For example, if you invited someone to do something one time, and they don’t invite you back for a while, it’s okay to invite them again. In other words, just because you don’t alternate the role of initiator doesn’t mean you aren’t really friends.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

But friendship can be so difficult, and so time-consuming, that maybe this is just what the initial stage looks like: admitting human connection is something you need, like vegetables and water, because it’s good for you. Eventually, you come to like it. Or maybe even to crave it.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

This entire process is codified in what Joyable calls the “three Cs”—catch the thought that’s making you anxious, check that thought, and change the thought to something that’s “more accurate,” which is likely to be something less anxiety-inducing.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

I told Chloe that my boyfriend naturally takes criticism in the Joyable-approved way. “When you criticize him, he seems to say, ‘That’s interesting! I’ll assess your viewpoint along with all the other evidence,’” I said. She laughed again. “That’s rare, though,” she said.
Chapter 11: Change Yourself

This book is on the Best Books of 2020 so far, which is how it came into my awareness. Usually, I shrug off these lists, but this one caught my attention, I don't know why. I do know that it was available at the library and, despite being 7th on my to-read list, I read it over the following two days, zipping through it faster than even I expected.

The Book Riot description is: "Marin Machado had the kind of life other people envied…right up until it became a nightmare. While shopping at Pike Place Market, her son was abducted in the mere seconds it took for her to accept a phone call. A year later, a private investigator rocks Marin’s world with a devastating blow, but it’s not the one she expected: her husband has been cheating. Willing to do whatever it takes to salvage what’s left of her family, Marin goes to dark lengths she never realized she was capable of. Along the way, she discovers her husband might be keeping a bigger secret than his mistress: He might know what happened to their son."

What the description doesn't convey very well is just how well the anguish of losing a child is conveyed. Also not conveyed very well is just how well Hillier demonstrates the slippery slope any of us can slide down when we are in pain, when we are blinded by our biases, when each step isn't that much different than the last until you turn around and see just how far you've fallen.

The book is a fast, good read with a twist that makes you think, "Oh! Didn't see that coming." I was expecting a twist (that (spoiler) J.R. is Justin, he is not (sorry if you're reading this in an RSS feed and that spoiler displayed)), and was amused I was wrong, but delighted about the actual plot twist.

If you like psychological thrillers, this qualifies and is recommended. The suspension wasn't so bad that I skipped to the end, but it was close. If you want a beach book, grab this one. If you want some deep philosophical manifest, look elsewhere, this is brain candy.

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I can even get angry. We haven’t had sex in two years. Shit, maybe three, I can’t even remember the last time. If I bring it up, he’s gonna deny it. And we’re gonna fight. God, I am so sick of fighting.” “You’re married,” Frances says sharply. “Sex with someone else is never part of the deal, I don’t care how long it’s been.” “Men do have needs, though,” Simon says. “Don’t be a douche.” Frances reaches over and smacks him on the thigh. Marin’s glad she did, because she would have punched him.
Location: 390

Hope lasts only so long, can carry you only so far. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes it’s all you have. It keeps you going when there’s nothing else to hold on to. But hope can also be terrible. It keeps you wanting, waiting, wishing for something that might never happen. It’s like a glass wall between where you are and where you want to be. You can see the life you want, but you can’t have it. You’re a fish in a bowl.
Location: 479

Marin is not going to die today, no matter what this feels like.
Location: 659

Who would have thought that who you love and who you feel safe with might not be the same person?
Location: 1,227

In the beginning, Kenzie found it exciting. Affairs always are at first.
Location: 1,970

Married men are exhausting. They have a way of sucking all the oxygen out of the room when you’re with them. You’re always on their schedule, on guard for changes in locations and times to meet. There are only specific places you can go, and only for so long before there’s somewhere else they have to be. Their families are their priorities. And you’re not family. You’re the side piece. You’re the one who’s there to fill in the holes. Your voice is less than.
Location: 1,972

He understands better than any guy she’s ever known how to apologize properly, and that a good apology involves an acknowledgment of the shitty thing he did, along with a clear understanding of how said shitty thing affected the other person.
Location: 2,072

This is part of their pattern. He’s insensitive, which makes her feel bad, which then makes him feel bad, which then makes her feel worse, and then she’ll do anything to make him feel better. This is what they do, but she doesn’t know how not to do this with him.
Location: 2,083