What the hell-ementary, my dear Watson?

I don't know why I keep torturing myself by reading Sherlock Holmes pastiches and hoping they'll be good. If there were kinks in the reading world (and I'm not saying there aren't, I'm just not into it...or aware of it, thankfully), I'd definitely be some kind of Sherlock Holmes masochist. 

No, but honestly, I just keep hoping I'll stumble upon a book that makes me feel like I'm reading some of Doily's Doyle's work. 

This was not that book.

So basically, this is some author's imagining of 13 year old Sherlock Holmes's first case. Which sounded cool, and it was a good premise (a slash-and-hack murder in Whitechapel, so of course I thought this was going to involve Jack the Ripper. Disappointingly, it didn't.), so I thought I'd give it a try.

Overall, it was a silly book. Crows literally solve the case. I'm not even joking. Like, the black birds. They SOLVE THE CASE. That's the kind of silliness that would've maybe come up in the original stories, but then Holmes would've explained it away and solved the mystery using, I don't know, CLUES, or EVIDENCE, or HIS BRAIN.

I felt like this Holmes was extremely out of character, which I guess you can get away with when it's the young, formative years of a someone. But with a character as iconic as Sherlock Holmes, I don't know...I've always felt that he was born Sherlock Holmes, and didn't grow into him. We hear, once or twice, in the original stories that he didn't have many friends in his school years, which I assumed was because he was a genius and was probably deducing the crap out of everyone, which was cool the first time but then just got annoying. In this book, he's all emotional (albeit, still friendless), and then it shows why he decides to shut off his emotions. Which I think is a little silly. 

Sherlock Holmes is also apparently Jewish, despite celebrating Christmas in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle." But I will give him this point as Holmes's religion is never expressly revealed (though he does make mention of his belief in prayer, morality, and a Creator in the original stories). 

We also have child-Irene Adler, which is extremely ridiculous to me, especially considering she was an AMERICAN and probably living in New Jersey at the time the story took place. 

Seriously, Mr. Peacock (terrible nom de plume, too)?? As a self-professed "Holmesian" did you ever actually READ any of the Holmes canon? 

I feel like there needs to be a society of people that are Sherlock Holmes experts who have to approve any knock-offs/pastiches before publication, because stuff like this just makes me mad. And if the author doesn't approve of the changes, then they have to delete x-amount of Holmes characteristics from their characters, give them a new name, and pretend none of this ever happened. 

"Pretend none of this ever happened," is, incidentally, what I'm doing now that I'm done reading this watery, disappointing, and highly forgetful book.