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3.81 AVERAGE
3.81 AVERAGE
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
my review of The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison.
this book was written as Sherlock Holmes (BBC) fan fiction & it’s super obvious. I just wish it had taken itself more seriously. it had so many things I really liked about it, but every time I thought “ok now we’re getting somewhere with the plot/character development/world building” it would just never be talked about. it’s more like a series of short stories. it felt like no effort was put into making this a cohesive, well rounded book. ideas would be picked up just to never be brought up again.
if it weren’t for Addison’s impeccable writing, & a few of the elements that I loved, this would be a 2 star, maybe even 1 star, book. I don’t recommend it to anyone, to be honest. just disappointing all around. & that hurts because if push came to shove, The Goblin Emperor might be my favorite book of all time.
to put it very vulgarly: it honestly kind of feels like I got edged for the 8 hours of reading it, just to not be allowed to climax 😅😂🫠
🐦⬛historical fiction paranormal, sort of gaslamp fantasy
🪽Sherlock Holmes fan fiction & not trying to hide it
🐦⬛murder mystery
🪽angels & demons & vampires, oh my
🐦⬛Supernatural meets Sherlock Holmes
🪽disappointingly disjointed storytelling
🐦⬛Jack the Ripper subplot
🪽so much going for it, just for it to fizzle & ☠️
this book was written as Sherlock Holmes (BBC) fan fiction & it’s super obvious. I just wish it had taken itself more seriously. it had so many things I really liked about it, but every time I thought “ok now we’re getting somewhere with the plot/character development/world building” it would just never be talked about. it’s more like a series of short stories. it felt like no effort was put into making this a cohesive, well rounded book. ideas would be picked up just to never be brought up again.
if it weren’t for Addison’s impeccable writing, & a few of the elements that I loved, this would be a 2 star, maybe even 1 star, book. I don’t recommend it to anyone, to be honest. just disappointing all around. & that hurts because if push came to shove, The Goblin Emperor might be my favorite book of all time.
to put it very vulgarly: it honestly kind of feels like I got edged for the 8 hours of reading it, just to not be allowed to climax 😅😂🫠
🐦⬛historical fiction paranormal, sort of gaslamp fantasy
🪽Sherlock Holmes fan fiction & not trying to hide it
🐦⬛murder mystery
🪽angels & demons & vampires, oh my
🐦⬛Supernatural meets Sherlock Holmes
🪽disappointingly disjointed storytelling
🐦⬛Jack the Ripper subplot
🪽so much going for it, just for it to fizzle & ☠️
Addison is an author I would be willing to follow just about anywhere. She works hard to make her characters psychologically real, her worldbuilding tends to be carefully thought through and often she geeks out over the same things I do - language, mysteries, deconstructing genre tropes.
"The Angel of the Crows" doesn't so much deconstruct tropes. This book is a cat that calmly knocks down fifteen tropes off the shelf and watches them all ooze into each other. Angels! Vampires! Secret identities! Jack the Ripper! It's an odd beast.
Let me be clear: I am recommending this book! - at least to a specific audience. This is for the reader who is game for a version of Sherlock Holmes with supernatural beings all over the place, in which Sherlock takes a back seat in favor of Watson. It's for a reader who enjoys weird.
And yet, the part about making her characters psychologically real? She still pulls that off.
The Watson character - here called D.H. Doyle - is the primary beneficiary of that. As you'd expect in a Holmes story, Doyle is the narrator, a former army medic wounded in Afghanistan. But rather than recording the adventures of his brilliant friend (here called Crow), this doctor stays front and center. Addison never makes Doyle look dumb in order to show off the great detective's genius (not necessarily a Conan Doyle flaw, but certainly a feature of many adaptations). Doyle's competence, and Crow's trust and reliance in that competence, lead to a dynamic that, delightfully, is much more equal and balanced than many Holmes-and-Watson pairs.
I don't love the worldbuilding here as much as I do in [b:The Goblin Emperor|17910048|The Goblin Emperor (The Goblin Emperor, #1)|Katherine Addison|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373039517l/17910048._SX50_.jpg|24241248] or her Doctrine of Labyrinths series (published as [a:Sarah Monette|128570|Sarah Monette|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1416683160p2/128570.jpg]). The things she does with vampires and werewolves and angels are all novel and interesting, but I never felt deeply embedded enough in this world to truly get a sense for what it would be like to just live in it.
I think that's partly because Doyle and Crow are both, to a degree, outcasts, and partly a result of choosing to use Holmes stories as her structure: because you know the source material, it doesn't feel as organic. Doyle and Crow feel alive, but the world they inhabit creaks a little. For me, that's not a deal breaker - I was still curious to see what twist she would bring to the various Holmes stories and how that would impact Doyle's journey - but this book would have a tough time standing on its own without 130+ years of Sherlock Holmes stories in the background.
"The Angel of the Crows" doesn't so much deconstruct tropes. This book is a cat that calmly knocks down fifteen tropes off the shelf and watches them all ooze into each other. Angels! Vampires! Secret identities! Jack the Ripper! It's an odd beast.
Let me be clear: I am recommending this book! - at least to a specific audience. This is for the reader who is game for a version of Sherlock Holmes with supernatural beings all over the place, in which Sherlock takes a back seat in favor of Watson. It's for a reader who enjoys weird.
And yet, the part about making her characters psychologically real? She still pulls that off.
The Watson character - here called D.H. Doyle - is the primary beneficiary of that. As you'd expect in a Holmes story, Doyle is the narrator, a former army medic wounded in Afghanistan. But rather than recording the adventures of his brilliant friend (here called Crow), this doctor stays front and center. Addison never makes Doyle look dumb in order to show off the great detective's genius (not necessarily a Conan Doyle flaw, but certainly a feature of many adaptations). Doyle's competence, and Crow's trust and reliance in that competence, lead to a dynamic that, delightfully, is much more equal and balanced than many Holmes-and-Watson pairs.
I don't love the worldbuilding here as much as I do in [b:The Goblin Emperor|17910048|The Goblin Emperor (The Goblin Emperor, #1)|Katherine Addison|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373039517l/17910048._SX50_.jpg|24241248] or her Doctrine of Labyrinths series (published as [a:Sarah Monette|128570|Sarah Monette|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1416683160p2/128570.jpg]). The things she does with vampires and werewolves and angels are all novel and interesting, but I never felt deeply embedded enough in this world to truly get a sense for what it would be like to just live in it.
I think that's partly because Doyle and Crow are both, to a degree, outcasts, and partly a result of choosing to use Holmes stories as her structure: because you know the source material, it doesn't feel as organic. Doyle and Crow feel alive, but the world they inhabit creaks a little. For me, that's not a deal breaker - I was still curious to see what twist she would bring to the various Holmes stories and how that would impact Doyle's journey - but this book would have a tough time standing on its own without 130+ years of Sherlock Holmes stories in the background.
Right, so I didn't know this book started as a Sherlock Wingfic.
I also never heard of the term Wingfic before
I also never heard of the term Wingfic before
I requested this book on Netgalley and I'm glad I did!
Okay, so I really loved this book. A very shadowy London in the 1880s that’s different from the city we know in one main way: it has angels crawling over it. Some fall and become evil while others are like guardian angels for the buildings. We follow an angel who is neither and both — think Holmes but with wings, which is also how the author said this story came into being, i.e., as wingfic. The angel meets the other protagonist in just the way Holmes met Watson — but this character is named Doyle after the author, instead of Watson. Together, they discover much about each other as they solve cases.
I didn’t mind that the author put a supernatural spin on Holmes’s classic cases. But I would have liked more backstory about why this version of London was the way it was. I mean, why angels? And there were shifters too, so why them? Aside from that, I found this to be an entertaining and interesting read.
A solid 4. Devoured it in a single sitting. Great retelling of classic material, with enough world building thrown in to keep things fresh. Would have loved to see more details of the fallen. The stories are old, but one of the ways in which this stays fresh is that the details of the (older) mysteries are always laid out clearly, with extra nuggets of character building thrown in. Though in the course of my chequered reading history I am aware of some fanfics (mostly anime/manga related), I honestly never heard of wingfics before.
A stellar recommendation from @Amrita Goswami.
A stellar recommendation from @Amrita Goswami.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
The way Addison writes intense character friendship and sequence of blended mystery is truly some of the most beautiful and gripping that I've ever experienced. And in this case, it was on a topic I wasn't initially interested in but that I felt compelled into anyway — a notable feat!
Now that I've made my way through quite a number of Addison's books, I've definitely come to identify her story fingerprints. Many are excellent authorial qualities, focused on complexity of narrative and language choices that make events memorable and grasp onto the reader readily and continuously. But I've also come to realize that I, fairly consistently, do not jive with the way her queer characters are explained. And I really do mean explained. When they are just presenting on the page, I find them compelling, realistic, and so deep that I physically feel their emotional connections. Then, when the same characters speak to each other about those emotions I think I've witness on the page, I find myself completely baffled by the discussion. I do love reading experiences that are different from my own as much as I appreciate finding a mirror, but in these cases I'm often left pretty unsatisfied with how I've come to understand the presented worldview. It's something I've been having a difficult time articulating for myself and reconciling with the deftness of everything else; maybe it's just me.
Structurally, I think the sort of short story -esque nature of the the intertwined adventures was very well done. It had a daily life feel, paired with adventure, and a sense of wondering when different mystery elements and characters were going to overlap. I would have liked a longer tail to the end, and I think two parts back to back with the main protagonists separated was a bit too much for how excellent their interplay is when together (especially as we drive toward the finale where we could be seeing them fully in their element together). In an earlier part of the book there is one instance where both are separated but what they do individually is so exciting and interesting that the feelings and vibrancy from it are supremely heightened once they do reunite, with everything building in a really excellent way. That distance making a strong rubber band kind of snap back, which was fully propulsive and invigorating. The kind of thing that's the best to witness!
Now that I've made my way through quite a number of Addison's books, I've definitely come to identify her story fingerprints. Many are excellent authorial qualities, focused on complexity of narrative and language choices that make events memorable and grasp onto the reader readily and continuously. But I've also come to realize that I, fairly consistently, do not jive with the way her queer characters are explained. And I really do mean explained. When they are just presenting on the page, I find them compelling, realistic, and so deep that I physically feel their emotional connections. Then, when the same characters speak to each other about those emotions I think I've witness on the page, I find myself completely baffled by the discussion. I do love reading experiences that are different from my own as much as I appreciate finding a mirror, but in these cases I'm often left pretty unsatisfied with how I've come to understand the presented worldview. It's something I've been having a difficult time articulating for myself and reconciling with the deftness of everything else; maybe it's just me.
Structurally, I think the sort of short story -esque nature of the the intertwined adventures was very well done. It had a daily life feel, paired with adventure, and a sense of wondering when different mystery elements and characters were going to overlap. I would have liked a longer tail to the end, and I think two parts back to back with the main protagonists separated was a bit too much for how excellent their interplay is when together (especially as we drive toward the finale where we could be seeing them fully in their element together). In an earlier part of the book there is one instance where both are separated but what they do individually is so exciting and interesting that the feelings and vibrancy from it are supremely heightened once they do reunite, with everything building in a really excellent way. That distance making a strong rubber band kind of snap back, which was fully propulsive and invigorating. The kind of thing that's the best to witness!
adventurous
dark
mysterious
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Yes