Brittany Cavallaro

At its best, A Study in Charlotte is a fun, modern take on the classic Sherlock Holmes stories that innovates just as much as it honors the original works. At its worst, it's little more than good ol' trashy fanfiction. The kind of thing that you binge-read in one night under the excuse that "at least I'm not reading straight-up smut." I've very much been there, done that when it comes to fanfiction, especially Sherlock Holmes fanfics. As a pseudo-expert, I was hyper-aware of all the Sherlock fanfic tropes littered throughout A Study in Charlotte. We've got the "Holmes pretends to cast Watson out because there's a death threat against Watson," the "Holmes and Watson get into a fight, and Holmes winds up falling back on a drug habit to soothe himself," and even the lesser-known but still popular "Holmes is a victim of sexual abuse which affects his ability to be affectionate with Watson." Codependent relationships, drugs, and sex crimes are serious topics and, while A Study in Charlotte handles them with a decent amount of care, the fact that I know them to be well-worn tropes in Sherlock fanfics made these themes seem particularly shallow.

On a different note, I want to touch on the one element of this book that completely took me out of the story again and again. This was the ridiculous contrivance of setting A Study in a universe just like ours except Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real people whose progeny have been working together in similar relationships for generations since.

Such a legacy might have lingered on past the original Holmes and Watson but there is no way, NO WAY that it could have continued into the 20th and 21st century. Nowadays, the average person is just too obsessed with developing their sense of individuality to care about what their great-great-grandparents did.

Worst of all was Watson's father, who is so obsessed with the role of a Watson that he encourages his teenaged son to single-handedly care for a Holmes friend who is coming down from a cocaine/oxy high without checking on either of them at any point. And then this same father has the audacity to actually express concern later on when that same son's life is endangered?! When did he decide to become a concerned father? Oh, only when "it's no longer just an adventure." As if a teenager using hard drugs isn't reason enough to worry...


All that being said, I did really enjoy the book. Like most fanfics, all its plot is curated, not for realism's sake, but for drama and payoff. This makes it addictive, even for someone like me who claims to know better. While I do worry a bit about the romantic delusions A Study In Charlotte might put into a teenage reader's head, I have to remind myself that I went through the same phase myself, and I turned out mostly fine in the end.… (meer)

Why has it been like 3 months since I've read a book I really enjoyed? :/
I'm just fully going with the Goodreads ranking on this, 2 stars being "It was okay". I thought the overall idea was cool: the modern day descendants of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson teaming up at their preppy boarding school to solve mysteries. But Jamie Watson, the narrator (save for one lone Charlotte Holmes chapter) is whiny and full of himself, and listening to him in audiobook format was ROUGH. Jamie constantly takes things that happen to other people (including a rape) and only views them through a lens of how it affects him. Seriously, at one point someone attemps to murder a student, and one of Jamie's immediate thoughts is along the lines of "Why do bad things keep happening to ME?"
The mystery was surpisingly lackluster. It felt uninspired, and manages to make the story seem like a badly written episode of a CW tv show.
I wish there had been more Charlotte Holmes POV! Because we only get to see her through Jamie's eyes most of the time, she is presented is such a flat, overly-glorifed way. But the solitary chapter from her head was really good! However, even with hearing books later in the series get more of her, I don't think I'll want to keep reading this series. There are just way better Holmes stories out there (ahem, "The Beekeeper's Apprentice"!) and I'd rather just enjoy those.… (meer)