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3.52 AVERAGE
3.52 AVERAGE
my first thought: "Omg woman dressed as a man outsmarting Sherlock Holmes!!!This is the book i didn't know i wanted!"
my second thought: "Oh god tragic backstory, complete with rape-really???"
my third thought: "Oh god UNNECESSARY HETERO ROMANCE SUB-PLOT"
last thought: "wait what did this book really just end? with zero closure??"
REALly??? why give me such an incredible strong, cross-dressing!! female character and have her fall in love with a male character who is like 90% confirmed gay bachelor?????
JUST GIVE ANNA A WOMAN LOVE INTEREST THAT"S ALL I WANTED IN THIS BOOK??!!
my second thought: "Oh god tragic backstory, complete with rape-really???"
my third thought: "Oh god UNNECESSARY HETERO ROMANCE SUB-PLOT"
last thought: "wait what did this book really just end? with zero closure??"
REALly??? why give me such an incredible strong, cross-dressing!! female character and have her fall in love with a male character who is like 90% confirmed gay bachelor?????
JUST GIVE ANNA A WOMAN LOVE INTEREST THAT"S ALL I WANTED IN THIS BOOK??!!
I can't even remember what made me buy this book for my Kindle but it was wanting to read something short and easy that made me turn to it.
I'm a fan of books that mash-up people and places that we are familiar with from literature and having a female lead who is as incisive and closed as Sherlock is a fun read.
I really enjoyed this foray into the world of Victorian medicine and murder and am looking forward to reading the other books in the seres.
I'm a fan of books that mash-up people and places that we are familiar with from literature and having a female lead who is as incisive and closed as Sherlock is a fun read.
I really enjoyed this foray into the world of Victorian medicine and murder and am looking forward to reading the other books in the seres.
[Hörbuch]
Esther Schweins liest angenehm aber die Geschichte langweilt mich leider total. Breche das Hörbuch daher nach knapp 50 % ab um meine kostbare Zeit mit einem hoffentlich interessanteren Buch zu verbringen.
Esther Schweins liest angenehm aber die Geschichte langweilt mich leider total. Breche das Hörbuch daher nach knapp 50 % ab um meine kostbare Zeit mit einem hoffentlich interessanteren Buch zu verbringen.
I enjoyed this book and it was fast paced and I like the era. The interweaving of Sherlock Holmes was excellent. For some reason though I wasn't over-awed by it. I can't quite put my finger on why but perhaps because I was a little let down by the ending. I was half expecting more mystery and more twists and turns but they never came. Still, it was a really good read and I will probably read the next in the series.
This was an interesting book, and I got it cheap! The story is told from the perspective of a doctor/bacteriologist who works with Sherlock Holmes to solve a string of mysteries. It was very easy to read, I felt it was well-written, and I enjoyed the story. It was not long, but worth the quick read.
This was a really fun read. If you like Sherlock Holmes you'll get a kick out of this.
HELLA content warnings for basically everything except language. Discussions of sexual assault, gore/violence, uhhh probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. It's not gratuitous but it is pretty explicit sometimes.
Weird book. I feel like this would have been a lower rating if I had just read it. I... sort of liked the narrator, even though her Englishness didn't get along with Anna's German accent. She gave pretty stilted writing some sense of life.
Things I expected to hate, and kind of did hate: the par-for-the-course, never-ending narratorial worship of everything Anna did. It makes sense for Anna to be brilliant, because of how hard she's worked and just because she's smart, and my complaint isn't that Anna is brilliant, it's just that Wendeberg belabors the point so much. It's like, I get it. Anna's super smart and super good at everything. Chill.
Things I expected to hate and... weirdly didn't?: the inevitable Annalock romance. This was, for no gleanable reason whatsoever, the thing I looked forward to most each time I turned on the audiobook. I liked their dynamic. I'm the last person to judge the quality of a Holmes insert because I have very little experience in or affection for the ACD stories, and I'm That Basic Bitch who's still really only into the first two seasons of the BBC version. So I'm not gonna judge the quality of Wendeberg's Holmes. I, personally, found this rather Byronic version of him to be entertaining in a trashy paperback way, which is a way I respect.
The mystery was fine, or whatever. It kind of dragged on, which is unfortunate since the book is only 200 pages or so/six hours of audiobook time anyway. I'm still counting it as my Medical Thriller for the Goodreads Around the World reading challenge, because man I hate the prospect of reading a thriller on purpose, but Devil's Grin wasn't particularly thrilling. Most of the thrills came from the inspections of corpses who had died with gruesome 19th-century illnesses.
One last thing that I liked: in a lot of "woman dresses as man to do what she loves" kind of stories, the idea of gender is something that the woman doesn't care about a whole lot; usually she tends to like male clothes more than female clothes. All well and good, fine, whatever. Anna was interesting, though, because she still had a kind of visceral attachment to being/presenting as a woman. She didn't like dressing up as a man, interacting with society as a man. Being able to be her true female self was important to her - not just health-wise, which it was, but emotionally. I think it was a pretty cool choice to make, in terms of her character. Fictional women not caring about how they "present" to other people is cool but it made Anna a little more real to me that her double life was a source of discomfort and anxiety for her, not just something to be hand-waved.
Weird book. I feel like this would have been a lower rating if I had just read it. I... sort of liked the narrator, even though her Englishness didn't get along with Anna's German accent. She gave pretty stilted writing some sense of life.
Things I expected to hate, and kind of did hate: the par-for-the-course, never-ending narratorial worship of everything Anna did. It makes sense for Anna to be brilliant, because of how hard she's worked and just because she's smart, and my complaint isn't that Anna is brilliant, it's just that Wendeberg belabors the point so much. It's like, I get it. Anna's super smart and super good at everything. Chill.
Things I expected to hate and... weirdly didn't?: the inevitable Annalock romance. This was, for no gleanable reason whatsoever, the thing I looked forward to most each time I turned on the audiobook. I liked their dynamic. I'm the last person to judge the quality of a Holmes insert because I have very little experience in or affection for the ACD stories, and I'm That Basic Bitch who's still really only into the first two seasons of the BBC version. So I'm not gonna judge the quality of Wendeberg's Holmes. I, personally, found this rather Byronic version of him to be entertaining in a trashy paperback way, which is a way I respect.
The mystery was fine, or whatever. It kind of dragged on, which is unfortunate since the book is only 200 pages or so/six hours of audiobook time anyway. I'm still counting it as my Medical Thriller for the Goodreads Around the World reading challenge, because man I hate the prospect of reading a thriller on purpose, but Devil's Grin wasn't particularly thrilling. Most of the thrills came from the inspections of corpses who had died with gruesome 19th-century illnesses.
One last thing that I liked: in a lot of "woman dresses as man to do what she loves" kind of stories, the idea of gender is something that the woman doesn't care about a whole lot; usually she tends to like male clothes more than female clothes. All well and good, fine, whatever. Anna was interesting, though, because she still had a kind of visceral attachment to being/presenting as a woman. She didn't like dressing up as a man, interacting with society as a man. Being able to be her true female self was important to her - not just health-wise, which it was, but emotionally. I think it was a pretty cool choice to make, in terms of her character. Fictional women not caring about how they "present" to other people is cool but it made Anna a little more real to me that her double life was a source of discomfort and anxiety for her, not just something to be hand-waved.
Not bad at all! I won this book as a giveaway from goodreads. I read it all in one day it was that good. I found some parts of the end a little inconsistent, but the book as a whole has made me interested in reading more!
Thank you for a introducing us to such a wonderfully strong and smart female character. This book was very well written and held my attention. I was entertained. I am definitely Team Mary Russell, but I think I could see myself cheering for Dr. Anna also. It's a bit difficult to see Holmes "involved" with another woman, but so far, I like where this going.