Tag Archives: reviews

Sherlock Season Four Reviews and Recommendations

BBC Sherlock looking dazed, confused and fearful with blurry John Watson and Mycroft Holmes in the background

First Brexit, then Trump and now Series 4. Will the nightmare never stop?

Not having seen all of BBC Sherlock Series 4 (life is too short, especially at my age, and we really should reduce the amount of bad and horrible images and trash we lock into our brains and fill it with good things) and having too many serious issues to focus on at the moment (You see, Humans, this is why we can’t have nice things! We forget Why we aren’t suffering from economic collapse, terrorizing regimes, world wars, and disfiguring, disabling diseases like polio and suddenly think “Oh, the Great Depression, WWII, the McCarthy Era and near nuclear annihilation during the Cold War sounded like jolly times of camaraderie (especially if you were a straight, white male), and weren’t Thatcher and Reagan such lovely parental figures taking such good care of all of us and creating perpetual homelessness to allow us to say at least we aren’t homeless?”). So instead I’m providing links to an excellent review of Sherlock Series/Season 4 by Vox (which brings up several points I’ve been making since S3 Episode 3 at the least (okay, I’ve been complaining since Irene Adler in series 2, but the series didn’t completely derail until S3 E3)) and a compilation of reviews by various press:
Continue reading →

You’re Missing the Point of NaNoWriMo, Sherlock

Benedict Cumberbatch as BBC Sherlock Holmes looking disapprovingly at a paper he's reading

Honestly, John’s NaNoWriMo project is worse than his email letters to his girlfriends. I do NOT have “tumbled locks of curling midnight”!

Yes, I’ve almost caught up on my NaNoWriMo project (and no, there are no “tumbled locks of curling midnight,” although I actually did come across that phrase in Google Books not long ago).

I’ll have MissSabre’s videos up tomorrow. Today I’d like to share the list of artists, writers,  and video makers who left a trail to their works at the Sherlock Seattle Convention.

The two lovely ladies from Pullman, WA who had the extremely popular pin and poster table can be found on Etsy. Check out pepperspins.etsy.com and unicornempireprints.etsy.com for all your fan button and fan print needs (including publicly hangable Johnlock).

Brief Review of Colin Fischer by Ashely Edward Miller

 

Thanks to the lovely folks at the Odyssey Bookshop (Port Angeles, WA) table, I was introduced to a terrific new book that I believe a lot of Sherlock fans will enjoy. Colin Fischer is a Young Adult (YA) novel about a 14-year old boy who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome embarking on his first year of high school. What does this have to do with Sherlock?


Well, there are definite Sherlock Holmes references in the book, like the poster of Basil Rathbone as the character in Colin’s bedroom, for starters. But there is also the character of Colin who, like Sherlock Holmes, notices things and make some rather amazingly accurate deductions that others find disconcerting. He also requires a “cheat sheet” of facial expressions labeled with the related emotion to discern what the faces of others are conveying about their emotional state. (“Not good. A bit not good.”) In this first book, in what will likely be a series, Colin deduces that the wrong person has been accused of bringing a gun to school that goes off during a scrum in the cafeteria and sets about to uncover the actual culprit. In the process, he makes an unlikely friend and begins taking major strides towards independence. He also has a brother (younger in this case) who resents the disruption Colin’s illness forces on the family and the special attention Colin receives from their parents.

What none of this conveys is the strength of the writing and the clever way Colin’s growth is developed through the story. A potentially unlikeable character (and who does that remind us Sherlockian’s of?) becomes sympathetic and rather heroic as he pushes past his own fears and vulnerabilities to solve the “mystery” and aid the innocent (who isn’t exactly innocent and we realize will eventually be Colin’s Watson, not so much in chronicling his exploits as in watching his back).

Stuck in bed with a stupid cold (look, just give in to them, stay in bed for a day pumping Vitamin C and fluids, and you’ll be able to get rid of a cold much quicker and spread it less), I finished the book in a few hours. It’s a quick but compelling read that makes you want to punch your fist into the air at the end and go “Yes!”

Thanks to Odyssey Bookshop, I’ll be doing a lot of catch-up reading of Sherlock Holmes pastiche and related titles. Let me know below if you’d like to see more reviews and suggestions for Sherlockian reading (I finished “The Art of Detection” during the Sherlock Seattle Convetion which is not a Mary Russell King title but definitely Sherlock Holmes related).