Publisher's description: "In the months following the breakup with her longtime boyfriend, Victoria Loustalot crossed paths with multiple psychics eager to impart their vision. Persistent and prescient, each one slightly chipped away at Victoria’s innate skepticism. She had to admit that what they knew about her past was eerily accurate. As for her future? She couldn’t shake the feeling that some powerful force in the universe was trying to tell her something and, for once, she ought to listen. Or at least investigate.

"In Future Perfect, Victoria draws on her own personal experience to launch a broader inquiry into the phenomena of psychics, shamans, astrologers, and their fans. Through historical documents and interviews with clairvoyants, seers, and their believers, Victoria opens herself up to the modern mystical complex in cultures and cities around the globe. She pays close attention to what they have to tell us about how we choose to live, what we might be missing out on in the process, and what in the world we’re supposed to do with all that information."

So until now, I have read exactly two memoirs in my 50+ years: Arthur Ashe's "Days of Grace" and "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls. I am not usually drawn to memoirs. I read Ashe's shortly before his death, and I read Walls' at the recommendation of a friend. Each book covered a literal and very substantive lifetime. Victoria Loustalot's "Future Perfect" felt like a lifetime but was only about 20 months out of her 30+ years on the planet. It was not meaningful. It was not insightful. And it certainly was not "a skeptic's search for an honest mystic" as the tagline implies. This is the story of a woman who broke up with her boyfriend and went to a psychic on a girl's trip looking for insight into when she would find love. I guess by the purest definition this is a memoir, but it felt to me like the unstructured ramblings of a 30-something who is not sure how to navigate her life...and not doing a very good job of it.

I read this because it sounded interesting. I think almost everyone at some time or another has talked to a "psychic," whether it was during a night out drinking, a traveling carnival, even somewhere in their 20s as an experiment or something fun. Do I believe that there are people who are more in touch with the spiritual universe? Sure. Do I believe that every psychic who hangs a sign in a window is truly more in touch? Heck no!

From this book, I expected a lot of information about the psychics and mystics and shamans, etc., that the author was supposed to have interviewed. I expected comparisons and examples, descriptions of her experiences. What I got was a handful of chapters that talked about the people she spoke with and who offered her readings (which she mostly declined) and some ramblings about her astrology teacher, but the majority of the book was anecdotes about other things that never tied together. This was really just the detail of her relationship with "M." Ironically, there is a part in the book where the author searches online for information about how you know if you're living with a narcissist, when she should have been searching for information about how you know if YOU are a narcissist.

This was absolutely not the book the description portrays it to be, which in an of itself would not have been an issue if it were at least interesting. But unless you're looking for the day-to-day rants of a 30-something New Yorker, skip this one. I struggled to finish it, and it pains me that I spent so much time on it.

I received a free copy of this title from NetGalley and Little A in exchange for an honest review.

I was expecting a book about mysticism and got a memoir. Not badly written but surely not the book I was expecting.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC