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victorian221bI have been reading a number of pastiches lately, several of which feature female Holmes relatives, and it seems a good moment to make some quick comparisons and contrasts.
Colleen Gleason's The Clockwork Scarab is the first of five YA novels featuring MIna (never "Avermina") Holmes and Evalina Stoker. Mina is Sherlock's niece and Mycroft's daughter (!); she gets along better with Sherlock, and has inherited and honed the family deductive acumen. Evalina is Bram Stoker's daughter, here given a family lineage and minor superpowers essentially replicating those of television's Buffy. "Here" is an alternate steampunk England in which electricity has been found too dangerous to use and thus outlawed as an energy source, and Mina and Evalina subsequently find themselves invited to work for a covert royally chartered investigative service overseen by Irene Adler (!!) out of an office in the British Museum (!!!), and drawn into the schemes of the Ankh, a mysterious figure determined to resurrect the goddess Sekhmet and thereby establish dominion over England (at least).
The Disappearance of Alistair Ainsworth is the third in a series by Leonard Goldberg featuring Joanna, Sherlock Holmes' daughter via Irene Adler (never seen and virtually unmentioned in this volume). Holmes himself has been deceased for some years, and by now Joanna is the widow of a Dr. Blalock, the mother of his precocious son (here visiting from Eton), and the wife of Dr. John Watson Jr. (!). Watson Sr. is still living, Joanna and her family reside at 221b, and the group's present case involves a brilliant cryptanalyst kidnapped by German agents, from whom they are tasked to find and rescue him.
The Enola Holmes series by Nancy Springer postulates a younger sister for Sherlock and Mycroft, raised at home by her mother until said mother disappears just as Enola turns fourteen. Over the course of six slim chapter books (Amazon calls this series YA, but these are shorter and pitched at a younger readership than the Gleason series), Enola runs away from her country home, establishes herself in London, solves several moderately complex mysteries -- including the kidnapping of Dr. Watson -- and effectively runs rings around both Sherlock's and Mycroft's attempts to find her and pack her off to boarding school...a fate which Springer and her heroine persuasively argue would have been almost literally worse than death.
****
I bounced hard off of the Enola Holmes books on the first pass, some years ago -- as I recall, I thought the tone a bit too sermon-like, the pacing slow, and Enola too clever to be believable. On a second, much more recent encounter, I almost completely changed my mind. There's definitely an educational agenda here, but it's one that's both worthwhile and more effectively presented than I gave it credit for the first time around. [It may well also be true that the series was published a few years ahead of its time; Enola's brand of feminism is far less strident now than it may have seemed then.] And Springer does a superb job of developing her characters -- not excluding Mycroft and Sherlock, who are very much their canonical selves and not (as often happens in alternative Holmesiana) reduced in intellect to allow the author's protagonist to shine more brightly.
By rights, I ought to have bounced off the Gleason series, which is very much alt-Holmesiana and fashionably steam-powered. But Gleason makes no apologies for the novelty, the world-building is sketched very lightly but logically, and the plotting is admirably brisk. Not even the introduction of a time-traveling teen from non-steampunk 2016 (!!!!) seriously derails the overall credibility. This is more action-adventure than deductive exercise (though Mina does pretty well at the latter art), but it's fun in the right ways, and the two leads are excellent foils for one another.
I did bounce off the Goldberg novel, which I cannot recommend (and I am faintly astonished that this series has survived and evidently prospered). Goldberg is not a bad prose-mimic -- or perhaps he's too skilled a mimic for his own good. But there is no extrapolation here at all; this is a plain Holmes case through and through, and Goldberg does the absolute minimum in terms of changing the template, to the extent that it complicates the narration considerably. Joanna is always "Joanna", never "Holmes", and in making Watson's son (and fellow doctor) narrator, Goldberg forces far too many references to "my father" and other circumlocutions in order for readers to keep all the characters straight. Worse still, Joanna's son is also named "Johnny" despite not being a Watson, and to make matters even stranger, Joanna herself is the namesake of one Joanna Blalock, series protagonist in an unrelated series of modern medical thrillers also written by Goldberg. Almost everyone talks in the same general voice, there's much too much conversation and not enough deduction, and aspects of the central mystery take Joanna herself much too long to solve. This is cardboard Holmes -- and would have been better used as the basis for a straight Holmes pastiche rather than a next-generation yarn.
Colleen Gleason's The Clockwork Scarab is the first of five YA novels featuring MIna (never "Avermina") Holmes and Evalina Stoker. Mina is Sherlock's niece and Mycroft's daughter (!); she gets along better with Sherlock, and has inherited and honed the family deductive acumen. Evalina is Bram Stoker's daughter, here given a family lineage and minor superpowers essentially replicating those of television's Buffy. "Here" is an alternate steampunk England in which electricity has been found too dangerous to use and thus outlawed as an energy source, and Mina and Evalina subsequently find themselves invited to work for a covert royally chartered investigative service overseen by Irene Adler (!!) out of an office in the British Museum (!!!), and drawn into the schemes of the Ankh, a mysterious figure determined to resurrect the goddess Sekhmet and thereby establish dominion over England (at least).
The Disappearance of Alistair Ainsworth is the third in a series by Leonard Goldberg featuring Joanna, Sherlock Holmes' daughter via Irene Adler (never seen and virtually unmentioned in this volume). Holmes himself has been deceased for some years, and by now Joanna is the widow of a Dr. Blalock, the mother of his precocious son (here visiting from Eton), and the wife of Dr. John Watson Jr. (!). Watson Sr. is still living, Joanna and her family reside at 221b, and the group's present case involves a brilliant cryptanalyst kidnapped by German agents, from whom they are tasked to find and rescue him.
The Enola Holmes series by Nancy Springer postulates a younger sister for Sherlock and Mycroft, raised at home by her mother until said mother disappears just as Enola turns fourteen. Over the course of six slim chapter books (Amazon calls this series YA, but these are shorter and pitched at a younger readership than the Gleason series), Enola runs away from her country home, establishes herself in London, solves several moderately complex mysteries -- including the kidnapping of Dr. Watson -- and effectively runs rings around both Sherlock's and Mycroft's attempts to find her and pack her off to boarding school...a fate which Springer and her heroine persuasively argue would have been almost literally worse than death.
****
I bounced hard off of the Enola Holmes books on the first pass, some years ago -- as I recall, I thought the tone a bit too sermon-like, the pacing slow, and Enola too clever to be believable. On a second, much more recent encounter, I almost completely changed my mind. There's definitely an educational agenda here, but it's one that's both worthwhile and more effectively presented than I gave it credit for the first time around. [It may well also be true that the series was published a few years ahead of its time; Enola's brand of feminism is far less strident now than it may have seemed then.] And Springer does a superb job of developing her characters -- not excluding Mycroft and Sherlock, who are very much their canonical selves and not (as often happens in alternative Holmesiana) reduced in intellect to allow the author's protagonist to shine more brightly.
By rights, I ought to have bounced off the Gleason series, which is very much alt-Holmesiana and fashionably steam-powered. But Gleason makes no apologies for the novelty, the world-building is sketched very lightly but logically, and the plotting is admirably brisk. Not even the introduction of a time-traveling teen from non-steampunk 2016 (!!!!) seriously derails the overall credibility. This is more action-adventure than deductive exercise (though Mina does pretty well at the latter art), but it's fun in the right ways, and the two leads are excellent foils for one another.
I did bounce off the Goldberg novel, which I cannot recommend (and I am faintly astonished that this series has survived and evidently prospered). Goldberg is not a bad prose-mimic -- or perhaps he's too skilled a mimic for his own good. But there is no extrapolation here at all; this is a plain Holmes case through and through, and Goldberg does the absolute minimum in terms of changing the template, to the extent that it complicates the narration considerably. Joanna is always "Joanna", never "Holmes", and in making Watson's son (and fellow doctor) narrator, Goldberg forces far too many references to "my father" and other circumlocutions in order for readers to keep all the characters straight. Worse still, Joanna's son is also named "Johnny" despite not being a Watson, and to make matters even stranger, Joanna herself is the namesake of one Joanna Blalock, series protagonist in an unrelated series of modern medical thrillers also written by Goldberg. Almost everyone talks in the same general voice, there's much too much conversation and not enough deduction, and aspects of the central mystery take Joanna herself much too long to solve. This is cardboard Holmes -- and would have been better used as the basis for a straight Holmes pastiche rather than a next-generation yarn.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-12 03:26 pm (UTC)I keep trying to force myself to pick up the Goldberg novels, but every time I find literally anything else to read.
And, of course, I adore the Enola series. :-)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-12 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 08:31 pm (UTC)