Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
Rating: worthy!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.
p262 "His mouth twitch with ire." should be "His mouth twitched with ire."
I reviewed A Study in Darkness, the second novel in this series, here.
I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.
Evelina Cooper is a niece of Sherlock Holmes. I had thought this must be through his older brother Mycroft, but it was a case of identity: Holloway has invented a non-existent sister called Marianne, who ran away to the circus! Now Evelina is an orphan with an overbearing grandmother. I was not impressed by this. I have to ask, Holloway my dear, What's on? I chose this novel and its two sequels (so I can review all three in a row) because it sounded like a great idea for a series, and I really loved the opening few pages: it really got hold of me and pulled me in, but I was led to expect a Holmes-esque novel and did not get one.
There's a wood sprite which appeared when Evelina was escaping from an attic by climbing out of the window and into a nearby tree. Yes, I was expecting elementary and got an elemental! Clearly the publicist is the man with the twisted lip - or is he the crooked man? So I'm thinking: did I just get duped by a freight and ditch? This was not at all what I come looking for when I'm told by a book blurb that this is a novel about Sherlock Holmes's niece! So we have Holmes, magic, fantasy, paranormal, automatons, demons, detectives, and steam-punk. Hmm. Why make her a relation of Sherlock Holmes and then leave me Strand-ed, betraying everything Arthur Doyle stood for in his delivery of the Holmes adventures? This Baker Street irregular made no sense to me, especially since there's really nothing in this novel, not even the appearance of Holmes himself, which reflects anything of the Doyle novels. Should I give it the five orange pips?
After getting past the beginning with no issues, I quickly started having some really mixed feelings about it. Okay, so we finally get a murder and Evelina is really doing a cracking job of sussing-out the clues, but no sooner do we have what I actually came looking for in this novel than I get handed the second stain: Holloway tosses in a completely gratuitous and appallingly tropish love triangle between her and a high-born heir to a lordship and also a lowlife from the circus. Honestly? Why in hell do women of all genders, aspire to write novels about strong female characters, and then hobble these same women with a crippling need for, and attendant dependency upon, the validation of not one but two, count 'em, two dancing men? And iffy men at that: these men are such clichés as to be truly, seriously, painfully pathetic.
I have to confess that she does make an effort with these two - to try and give them some substance - but at that point she'd already lost my good faith and wasn't making enough of an effort to regain it! I committed to reading and reviewing three of these novels (the first three in what is evidently an ongoing series), so I found myself dearly hoping this would improve, and Holloway started to come through for me as I read on, but she was too inconsistent, making me first enjoy what I read and then making me regret it by turns! For example, she made me fall in love with her for this one sentence on p123: "Silence resounded with all the majesty of an oriental gong." I have no idea why, but that just hit me right where my pleasure nodes are. Unfortunately, she came around one hundred eighty degrees right after that and saddened me.
She has now presented Evelina as secretly wanting marriage all along, and only deflected from that course by her impoverished circumstances. That seems unnecessarily genderist even in these circumstances. I know that Victorian women were raised this way, and all-too-many girls still are today, but even in reality not all Victorian women felt that way, nor traveled that path. There is no reason at all to present a fictional woman as being brain-washed by that idea unless your plot demands it. In this case, Holloway's plot does no such thing as far as I can tell; quite the opposite in fact, so why sell her main character down this particular river? I was very disappointed with this approach. However, as much as Holloway toys with my affections, addicting me one minute, and repelling me the next, I decided it was worth it, on balance, continue to read this. I pretty much have to if I'm going to proceed to volume two, and thence to three, anyway!
Here's another reason to love Holloway: "Even a stupid servant was more versatile and cost a fraction of the price." (p153). I am so glad she's smart enough to see the impracticality of a lot of the steam-punk stuff, favoring servants over automatons (although morally, it ought to be the other way around!) - so why can't she apply those obvious smarts to relationships and love triangles?! It's a bigger mystery than was Boscombe Valley, but that's not a patch on this howler exactly one third the way in describing an interaction between Evelina and one of her two male interests, Tobias, the wealthy son of a lord: "Her palms brushed the front of his jacket, feeling the soft, expensive fabric and the swell of firm, young muscle beneath. An ache throbbed deep in her body, blotting out common sense." Seriously? Evelina loves her a firm young muscle...!
Holloway improves things as she continues the story of the relationship between Evelina and Tobias, and it starts to mature intelligently and does have a real surprise at the end, which I didn't expect, so I can tell you without giving too much away that this love triangle did not go the way I had feared it would when I first read of it. Nick OTOH, is unsavory at best and pretty much went exactly where I thought he ought to end up even as I feared he wouldn't go there! I can say that Evelina continued to impress and develop, and that was where my main interest lay. And the story did stay focused, more or less, on the thing which first attracted Evelina's attention before it side-tracked into the magical.
Page 271 was interesting from my own oddball writerly perspective. I felt I'd entered a time loop when I clicked back a page. I had clicked back because I thought I'd clicked two pages forward instead of one (I hadn't, but this is a problem with ebooks and the Kindle). This page starts with "At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." and ends with "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage." So what happened to me was that in clicking from that page to the same page, thinking it was the next, I read: "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage. At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." It flows perfectly and took me a second to realize what I’d done. Minor weirding-out there!
But that’s not an authorship problem; in my case, it was a clueless reader problem! Maybe it's also of interest to an author interested in writing one of those self-navigation stories. These used to be common at one time, but are rare now. They’re interactive in a limited way, because at each page, you choose which page to jump to next from a selection of options presented at the bottom of the page. You could have your reader weirded-out quite nicely with a page like this one!
P271 was also of interest in that it sported this sickening sentence: "His hand on her arm sent a pleasant shiver down the back of her legs." It was a bit much, especially after I'd been feeling better about the YA trope romance between Tobias and Evelina. The worst parts were offset somewhat by Holloway's detailing of how smart Evelina was, for example when she turned away from the crowd and whispered to Tobias in order to avoid being overheard or having her lips read. Some might call that paranoid, but in the context of the novel it was very smart and I loved Evelina for doing it and, in turn, Holloway for writing that bit! Yes, I'm a sap for that kind of thing and not ashamed to admit it into polite company!
But later, Holloway makes the mistake of having Tobias use this Americanism: "I've always known you came from someplace different..." No son of a British lord, and especially not one in Victorian times, would use 'someplace'. It's 'somewhere'! That's a minor faux pas, but I kept getting vertigo from getting to a high point where I really enjoyed the writing, and then having the text swoop down low for one reason or another, before climbing back up again with the next Evelina bounty. And rest assured Evelina was not the only character who was worth the reading. Her best friend Imogen was equally entertaining, and didn't get anywhere near enough air time for my money (not that I paid any actual money!). Her relationship with "Bucky" was charming and entertaining to a wonderfully high degree - but not enough!
I do not, however, love Nick. The the final problem is that he is the creeping man, and not at all the kind of person with whom I would wish for a young lady of Miss Cooper sensitivities to spend her time. Holloway needs to kill him off heroically (she doesn't!). He is nothing but a horn-dog who has little respect for Evelina, spends the bulk of his time lusting after her, and comes uncomfortably close to raping her at one point in the novel, when he's in the throes of a magical communion with her. It's actually rather sickening, and even scary given his penchant for stalking Evelina. I don't like him at all as a character or as a friend of hers, so I was glad that he went the way he did, but not at all happy to discover that he's featured in the second of this series, as, I assume, is Tobias, or Toby-ass as he now ought to be known.
So in summary, I am rating this novel a worthy read, even though I did have a few issues with it. I had hoped for no magic or steam-punk, no fantasy, and definitely no trope romance, so why Holloway went there, I don't know, and given that she obviously had decided to go there, I can't understand why she chose to have Evelina related to Sherlock Holmes, unless it was nothing more than a cheap ploy to try and pull in readers. I suspect Holmes fans will be as annoyed and resentful of this ploy as I was. It seemed underhand to me to talk the reader up one way and then pull the rug out and send them another. This is no Sherlock Holmes tale, not even in spirit (and he is the dying detective!). It is, however, an entertaining tale for the most part, and even some of the magical stuff, particularly, Evelina's robotic mouse and bird, was really entertaining. The novel would have stood by itself without the Holmes Crutch to lean on. I have to wonder why no editor advised Holloway thus. But I am still giving this the the engineer's thumb up and moving on to volume two to see what I can find there.
