Kate Reading
Narrator
9.15.2025
Chapters 11 thru 16 …
It’s strange. There are only 22 chapters in this book and I feel – how I felt with a lot of Sherlock Holmes mysteries that I read as a child – that absolutely nothing has happened except for a lot of unrelated things that seem to have no real point …
It seems strange that the mystery would be solved in the next few chapters but I guess given the amount of investigation going on it makes sense. I am just less interested in the mystery I guess … I think Charlotte and her life has been the thing I am focused on and while I understand there is a mystery being solved by her in a roundabout kind of way, it’s not being done in a way that holds my attention as much as she herself does.
I actually don’t care at all who killed a character I barely had any real awareness of. That is not the fault of the book at all. It’s because I tend to get fixated on things sometimes that other people don’t like, for example, Catherine in Stargate was the most interesting character to me and I wanted to know ALL about her life and really didn’t care much about anyone else. Her non-existent story seemed like such a missed opportunity for something truly amazing especially as far as telling a female focused/led story about a woman who clearly came quite far on her own in a profession generally dominated by men all while having to protect something that everyone and their grandfather probably wanted a piece of/tried to take from her.
But I digress …
Charlotte is the primary character and focus and because Sherry has done such an excellent job of making her story so funny, intriguing, dramatic, fun, and engaging … nothing else really matters to me.
Story this session: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
Narration: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
9.11.2025
Chapters 6 thru 11 …
I really have no words for how much I am loving this book.
And I will be honest and say I don’t normally like “feminist” takes on classic literature. Not because I prefer the classics or something, but I don’t like being beaten over the head by someone’s very specific agenda that isn’t really about the classics at all and more about just changing things to suit a specific point of view.
Writing is all about a specific point of view and if some old, crusty white man wrote a book back in the stone age when they hated women as much as they do now, I don’t see any kind of power in trying to take that story and remake it in the way that you want it to be. Just write whatever you want and make new classics. I’m all for the man hating and just writing them out of things because they don’t need to exist in things, but I want those things to be new things. I want to read new stories by amazing women with amazing, epic women characters and no men. I don’t want to turn male characters I never liked to begin with into women … that’s somehow worse and simply petty especially if the original is hateful and gross and the reboot is just as hateful and gross in an opposite direction.
That said … Sherry has done just that with A Study In Scarlet Women but she has done so in a way I approve because Sherlock was a shit character to begin with and I would have enjoyed the mysteries so much better if he was ANYONE else. Sherlock is about mysteries and mysteries could be solved in whatever kind of way by whomever. It doesn’t need to be any specific gender but changing the gender does make it a very different read. Doyle didn’t exactly hate women … in fact he was rather progressive all things considered, he just wrote a shit male character that was so unlikeable and uninteresting that it really turned me off.
Don’t get me wrong … Sherry is absolutely preaching HARD and HEAVY and doing so in a way that is not only incredibly enjoyable and brilliant, but it also has a loudness and a strength to it that is more about passion and brutal, snarky truths than slamming people over the head repeatedly with a baseball bat to force them to feel something you want them to feel. There’s ways of teaching lessons that are incredibly effective and ways that are just going to raise resistant shields and piss people off. Sherry has a beautiful way of clearly making you know exactly what she is doing and saying right from the brilliance of the title to the equally epic way she introduces Watson.
I adore Charlotte. I really genuinely do. Everything about her is something I understand, relate to, and deeply feel on a personal level that has a very little to do with being a woman. From a non-binary standpoint I can relate and have absolutely lived the kind of Hell on Earth prison sentence that comes with being woman, but it’s her neurodivergency that speaks to me. It’s her being alive and yet completely outside of everyone else’s reality but her own. I understand her loneliness. I understand her directness. I understand the way she sees the world; the logic and the unashamed view of the world how it actually is and how much people hate you when you point it out. The not being enough, not being good enough for her family, the betrayal from her family, all of it. Charlotte is a character I feel DEEPLY.
The book is BRILLIANT and it speaks to me on so many levels that no other book has.
Story this session: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
Narration: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
9.8.2025
Chapters 1 thru 6 …
Sherry Thomas has done the impossible and crafted a fresh, exciting new version of Sherlock Holmes. From the carefully plotted twists to the elegant turns of phrase, A Study in Scarlet Women is a splendid addition to Holmes’s world. This book is everything I hoped it would be, and the next adventure cannot come too soon!
Sherry Thomas’s A Study In Scarlet Women has been in my library for a while simply because I have always been a Sherlock Holmes fan and the one thing I always disliked about Sherlock Holmes was that he was a man.
I never liked his character, in fact I can say I hated his character, but I grew up loving the mysteries. When Young Sherlock Holmes came out I was obsessed with the film and not only did I fall MADLY in love with Sophie Ward from that, but I genuinely loved Nicolas Rowe as Sherlock. He had all the qualities I hated about the character but in a package that still had some youth and adventure to appeal to someone my age. It’s a movie I still love and while I don’t read Sherlock Holmes traditionally anymore, I’m always the first to dive into anything that gender bends or re imagines the character.
When I saw that Deanna Raybourn was a fan, my focus was put back into diving into it instead of letting it sit in my Kindle library while I suffered through books that were EXTREMELY disappointing. There is absolutely no reason, in this day and age, to force yourself to have media experiences that don’t bring you joy especially when it comes to reading. There are so many books out there and there is absolutely going to be a book that appeals to you … you just have to find it.
With everything going on in this world … finding moments of joy is important. I decided to stop forcing myself to listen to audiobooks that were making me unhappy, or worse, offending me in multiple ways. I am glad to decided to make Sherry’s book a priority these past few nights.
What an absolutely AMAZING experience the first 6 chapters have been.
Story this session: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
Narration: 5.0 out of 5.0 stars
