Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

A Study In Honor by Claire O'Dell

My first dis-recommendation of the year :(

Holmes and Watson as queer black women in sci-fi DC should be entirely up my alley, but I found this book resoundingly meh. But first, a disclaimer that I was surprised in the first few pages that the sci-fi is more twenty minutes into the future-style, complete with an ongoing war against the New Confederacy, and so I didn't expect to love it - my tastes in fiction with regard to current US politics is more in the optimistic fantasy/re-do camp. That might've biased me a little.

Anyway, I'm not sure why the characters I read about are called Watson and Holmes, because they're not them. Sara Holmes is at once both too intimate in her crossing of boundaries and too distant in her work. She calls Watson "my love" from the start, arranges parts of Watson's life at a whim, and fails to do any actual investigating/problem-solving in front of Watson. She is not a lone detective but has FBI bosses to report to. And my most petty complaint of all: she has futuristic implants to constantly receive and stream information from the net, or whatever. That's...not Holmes to me, the person's who goes IDGAF the Earth revolves around the Sun, whose strength as a detective is deduction, not retrieval of information.

(Admittedly, it has been more than a decade since I've read a bunch of ACD Holmes. Yet I adore the Sherlocks in Elementary and Miss Sherlock, who are different in many ways but come off as lone intellectual wolves with their own senses of morality, brusque but willing to explain their conclusions as soon as they are able to. That's the kind of Sherlock I like.)

Watson is..I have a lot more leeway for Watson, right, other than having a better sense of propriety than their Holmes, and I could have been good with her if I hadn't completely not-bought her change in attitude towards Holmes halfway through the book. She has no reason to trust her! Holmes had done several sketchy things and only had her own word going for her!

So, that was disappointing. I will take recs for other Holmes and Watson stories where one/both of them is a woman.

Comments

[shadaras]

Ah, I'm really sad that one isn't good; I'd seen it on the library shelves during a period when I was really too busy to be reading much and it seemed intriguing. But those things about it not really being Holmes and Watson sound like they'd detract from what might otherwise be a cool story.

Have you read Aliette de Bodard's The Tea Master and the Detective? It's a sci-fi novella inspired by Holmes and Watson where both of them are women (or at least use she/her pronouns) and Watson is a spaceship. Also very influenced by Vietnamese culture, which is fun.

[jaggedwolf]

Yeah, I'd been pretty excited to read it too, so that was disappointing - the main mystery wasn't particularly compelling either, unfortunately.

Oooh, I haven't heard of that one, I'll have to add it to my list. Thanks for the rec!