Review: A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas
A Study in Scarlet Women is a gender-swapped Sherlock retelling that is the origin story of how Charlotte Holmes, after her plans to escape marriage goes awry and she is publically disgraced, is led on the path to the life of a detective. The mystery in question involves three suspicious deaths that no one by Charlotte has connected; using her alias of Sherlock, she published a letter connecting the murders and stating they are not accidental. Solving these murders might be the only way to exonerate her own family, as well as being the only way to establish a life for herself away from her family home.
I really enjoyed reading this book. It was recommended to me, and I was skeptical at first; this lessened when the woman who was ringing up my books at the store was effusive in her praise of this book as well. I am now delighted that I read this book and am very much looking forward to continuing this series.
This book makes wonderful use of the premise and the Sherlock format of intricate storytelling. Charlotte does not originally have aspirations of being a detective, though obviously the reader knows that is where the story is heading due to it being Sherlock; she lacks these aspirations because there is no path available for women that leads to this use of her talents. We see her original desire to be a headmistress at a girls school, and throughout the book, we see her seek jobs that would not require the use of her brain much at all. It is really excellent to see the very thoughtful execution of not only how Sherlock would be a different detective if he was a woman but also of how her life would even manage to lead her to be a detective.
This is such a well-plotted mystery. I really loved the way Thomas tells this story. Charlotte is involved in the case at the beginning of the book, but it isn't until the middle that she is truly beginning to be consumed by the solving of mysteries. But this does not mean that the first half of the book isn't dedicated to the murder investigation. We jump around in different points of view, each person giving us insight into either the murder investigation or Charlotte's dire circumstance, or both. The clues needed to solve this mystery are all being laid out starting on page one.
As you progress throughout the book, you will begin the wonderful process of wildly conjecturing alongside the novel's characters. This mystery is multi-layered, and the book takes the reader down many plausible seeming pathways until finally arriving at the correct answer. This book had the exact combination of surprise and understanding you want from a mystery you were not able to solve before the book.
One of the few negatives of my reading experience was that I spent quite a bit of time being confused about who everyone was. I think this is partly due to my listening to this book and in part just because the cast of characters is so huge. Eventually, recall became a bit muddled, especially when people seem minor at first and then come in to play much later on in the story. There were just a few instances where I was muddled on what exactly was going on, but I was able to catch up eventually.
I do think going forward, I might switch to reading the books (with my eyes and not using an audiobook), but I am relatively confident that I now know enough of the core cast and dynamics that this would not prove an issue should I go forward listening to the audiobooks.
I really enjoyed the writing style of this book; Thomas is clearly an incredibly experiences writer and is able to convey so much information so quickly without making the novel dense or uninteresting. She writes in such a clear and engaging way that really worked for me. I think this was exceptionally helpful with such a large number of point-of-view characters.
Since finishing this book, I have found out that Sherry Thomas is also a romance novelist, and this makes so much sense. Partly because the very, very minor romance plotline is done so well that I literally exclaimed out "oh no! He's a ROUGE!" while reading one particular scene, though upon further reflection, he is a reformed rogue, and he did not reform in the way that would have made this novel a romance. But mostly, I saw in her writing my two very favorite things about romance, incredibly strong emotional storytelling and a deep exploration of women's power in society and in their personal lives.
Charlotte, at one point in the book thinks about her own lack of emotion, saying that she sees her own thought pattern as mostly devoid of emotion because the emotional side of memory is not the most important point of recall for her; this is so clearly not the case from the reader's point of view. Charlotte might not be very in touch with her emotions, constantly setting them aside to be pragmatic and logical, but she clearly has incredibly strong emotional attachments to people in her life. She is shown to be feeling emotions unbeknownst to her multiple times throughout this book in an absolutely beautifully done way.
I really loved the way this book showed the lack of power women held. Charlotte is backed into a corner by her family and general society, and she makes what is to her the only tolerable choice. When her behavior is revealed (very unexpectedly), she is immediately devoid of most of her social circle, and her prospects for the future immediately plummet. Throughout this book, we see different women experiencing different aspects of societal hurdles placed in their way. It is so thoughtful and well crafted, I could truly see the author's romance roots in the way she dealt with patriarchy's inextricable link to women's choices.
I am very much looking forward to continuing this series, something that I was not expecting at the moment but and excited about.
