Female Holmes

First off, my apologies to my baby sis, I know we have already discussed this book, but you still love me right?!?  Ok on to the book, which is The Bee Keepers Apprentice the first book in the Mary Russell series. This book was a recommendation by baby sis and she loved it, as we usually have similar taste in books I was excited to finally read it.

Mary Russell is a young woman whom after losing her entire family in a automobile accident moves to her mothers old farm with a stern and bitter aunt as her guardian.  Ms. Russell is unique in the fact that she would rather have her nose in a book then just about anything else (which seems perfectly normal to me :-) ).  While escaping her aunt one day Mary wanders around the fields and meadows lost in her current book when she stumbles into a stranger.  The man turns out to be the famous Sherlock Holmes and Mary impresses him by deducing his activities (bee tracking) and the solution to his problem (he needs a new bee colony).  The two quickly become fast friends.  Holmes sees much of himself in this gangly, witty, intelligent girl and promptly

starts teaching her all the tricks of his trade. WWI has erupted in Europe during this time, making it possible for Mary to enjoy many opportunities that were previously denied to females.  Holmes and Mary solve a couple of minor cases together, testing out Ms. Russlle' new taught abilities and then she is off to school in London.  While in London, Holmes continues to test her and teach her when she comes home on her breaks.  The two of them start their first major case, tracking down the kidnapped daughter of an American Senator. During this case, Mary takes the lead on several occasions, showing her teacher that she has become a very capable young woman.  After the child is recovered, several incidents occur, putting the life of Holmes, Russell and everybody they love in danger.  They start to track this mysterious criminal who appears to want to play games with the pair.  Eventually it gets to dangerous and the two of them decide the best way to throw the criminal off her (yep the villain is a woman, kinda awesome) game is to quit playing it.  Holmes and Russell head to what was then called Palestine and come up with a plan to defeat their foe.  Sherlock and Mary decide to appear to be at odds
with one another, hoping to catch the villianess unbalanced as she can no longer use their partnership against them. Eventually the woman is revealed to be SPOILER ALERT!...Moriarty's daughter, she has been plotting her revenge against Holmes ever since he apparently caused his death many years ago.  As in all good stories the villain is defeated and they all live happily ever after until the next book.
I have mixed feelings about this book, I know that the reviews are mostly glowing, and that the character of Mary Russell speaks to a very great amount of people and that makes me happy.  The mark of a good book is its ability to grab something in a person and attach itself to them, that being said, I am one of those people it did not grab.  Now before the 98% of people who love this book get up in arms I would like to refer you to my previous post No Apologies and remind you that not everybody is going to love/hate everything you do.

Here is what I liked a lot about the book.  I like how the author did her best to make the character of Mary Russell and her situation plausible.  The era in which it is set (1910s-1920s) was a time that very much gave European females opportunities that they never had before (this would come later in America for much of the same reason in the 1940's)  Most of England's young men had been sent off to a horrific war, and the ones that did return were usually injured either in body or mind or both.  This void in jobs, schools, and even to some degree society was filled by young women who saw an opportunity to have a different life from their mother's and grandmothers, and Mary Russell took that opportunity with both hands.  The author quickly established parameters in which Ms. Russell was around Mr. Holmes as to be acceptable in the rumor happy, chaperon prone time period.  She even gave Ms. Russell a way to access her money through loans against her inheritance from Holmes.  Even the way she grew up with an American father and a Jewish/English mother who imparted their heritage, background, and an unusual freedom to learn, gave plausible reason for her superior intellect.  I liked watching Mary grow up, from an unsure 15 year old girl, to a head-strong young woman who has discovered who she is.  My favorite parts would be the cases they solved, especially the two earlier ones that are the reasons I love the original Sherlock Holmes in the first place.

Here is what made me just like the book instead of love it.  First of all the voice in which it was written (first person narrative) rarely works for me, I know that the original Sherlock Holmes stories were written this way with Watson as the narrator, but it did not work for me here.  The character of Mary was inside her head to much and came across as to angsty and repetitive for me, again this is a personal style thing, I know this is the reason a lot of people identified with her, it just got very old, very quickly for me.  I wanted more mystery and deduction, the author tried to put in a couple of cases in the idea of a short story type form like most of the original stories, but again, for me there was to much teenage girl rambling and not enough detective work.  The end of the book felt especially abrupt to me, like we did not have quit all of the clues needed to solve it on our own. The writing style was to descriptive for my taste, on more than one occasion the author took more than a paragraph to
describe Holmes lighting his pipe...seriously, at least three or four times...paragraphs.  My biggest beef if you will with this book is what she did to my favorite Holmes characters.  Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft Holmes were fine and fairly well written.  Holmes himself came across as much more emotional and soft then I have ever read him to be, the fatherlyness he displays toward Russell is a very tender sort, instead of the gruff approval I would have expected from a Holmes character.  The biggest character I had an issue with was the way the author portrayed Watson.  Watson in this book was said to be no better than a bumbling idiot, whom Holmes kept around for his child like naivete.  The stories Watson wrote are described by Mary Russell as trite and dumbed down as Watson supposed his readers were all slow like himself, that the stories were huge exaggerations of a man so in awe of his friend that he wrote him with an unrealistic hero's spin.  This just pissed me off, because one, this pretty much demeans the original source work from which the author is getting her ideas/starting point from, she is essentially saying she thinks the original Holmes stories are bad.  Two, Watson always seemed to be the more stable of the two friends, a smart, steady, reliable friend on whom Holmes could always rely on to be a solid sounding board for his more outlandish idea's and plans.  Watson on several occasions proved his bravery and his own brand of deductive reasoning, for goodness sakes the man was a war hero with his own (aside from Holmes) successful medical practice, hardly the bumbling man-child portrayed in this book.

Wow this post has gotten out of control long (this is why I call them ramblings) so I will end it here with this summation, you should read this book.  I know I have some issues with it, but a lot of people seem to love it and that right there is a reason to at least check it out.  Although I did not find it as fascinating as some people, I will most definitely be picking up the next book, just to see where they go from here.  I give this book 6 out of 10 dark chocolate covered salted carmel's.