The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

This one wins the award for the logest post title ever. The title will probably end up being longer than the review of the book! The story is an early story of the brothers Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. As Mycroft is facing health issues and love interest issues, brother Sherlock gets kicked out of school (on purpose) to pursue a serial murderer. The tale highlights the brothers relationship, setting the background for later tales of Sherlock Holmes.

I have to start off my comments with a few caveats. First, I have never read the original Sherlock. I have it sitting on the shelf, I have fully intended to read it for quite some time now. I intend to have the 14yo read it before he graduates. We just haven’t made it there yet. I am not sure how much of my perception of this book would change if I had read it first. All of my Sherlock perceptions were created by hollywood’s retelling of the tale, so it will be interesting when I finally get around to reading the original. I imagine it is much like Frankenstein and Dracula, very different.

Second caveat, I was just trying to do too much the last few weeks and my reading of my A-Z quest suffered. This may or may not color my perception of this book. I have been trying to get myself motivated and back into writing book studies for homeschoolers, we had T-day, life is just terribly busy… No excuses though! The alphabet must be done!

The Good – Set aside the story aspect for a second, this was a well written book. By well written, I mean the sentence structure and flow were good. It was easily digestible. I don’t think this is brought up enough. Much of our modern literature is just not digestible. A lot of modern readers find old literature to be hard to digest. There is a lack of well written (and I mean sentence structure and flow) books. This book was digestible!

Also good was that it was clean. There was no issue with language. There were no issues with graphic sex. In fact, I would say that Mycroft demonstrated a high level of morality in his dealings with the woman he was in love with but who was marrying another. I would not hesitate to let my 14yo read the book. I don’t think the subject would be interesting to younger kids though.

The Bad – While the writing (sentence structure/flow) was good, the story itself seemed to be stagnant until the very end. Apparently this is the new formula for writing a book. Have the characters wander around poking at the edges of the story and then put all the information and action at the very end. While it alleviates the problem of readers solving the crime partway through the novel, it is really tedious. It feels like they don’t want us to think anymore, just float along. It was a pleasant read, it was a good story. It is nothing I will remember in six months.

Since my Sherlock knowledge is limited to hollywood, I did feel like this Sherlock was a bit emotional. I could be way off base here, but my hollywood mind version of Sherlock is very dry, methodical and uncaring. I found this Sherlock very high strung and impetuous. When I get around to reading real Sherlock, I may come back and footnote this.

The Ugly – Nothing ugly here. To have ugly would mean it evoked a lot of feeling, albeit bad. It didn’t evoke a lot one way or another. This may be my lack of Sherlocky-ness, not understanding it should evoke a lot!