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moonflower75's review against another edition
5.0
I have learned by now that Narrelle Harris' books are sure to be well written, cleverly plotted and charming to boot. This one is no exception, and it also has the two added bonuses of Caroline Jennings' drawings (so precious!) and of being written entirely in ficlets of 221 words, the last one beginning always with a B. Fanfic-loving folks like myself love 221b fics and we know well how tricky they can be, and I applaud Narrelle, because developing the complete arc of the book in 100 of those must have been particularly tricky.
ghostbasil's review
this is the third and probably last book i will read from improbable press. it's my least favourite of the three i read so far; every choice made is absolutely baffling to me. some chapters were told from sherlock's point of view, some were told from john's point of view, some from mycroft's, some were told from random side-characters' points of view, all with no explanation or justification. some were like free indirect discourse kind of? like there was a chapter where john's daughter comes to visit and the narration was in third person, but also seemed to be kind of mimicing how she would think and talk? what does that add to the story, especially with less than a quarter of the book left at that point. a lot of famous cases (irene adler, red-headed league, sign of four, among others) were jumbled up in here but there was also an overarching plot so these individual vignettes (like the irene adler one) took away from the main narrative. also, does someone want to explain to me also why there were slight tweaks to the story/mythos that made me feel like i was going crazy? like lestrade was a woman, but that didn't factor into the story at all, and then irene adler's husband was named norton godfrey instead of godfrey norton ... i think this was supposed to be a joke about how inconsistent the details are in the original story, but if so, please indicate this in a more obvious way than simply changing some things and not others. was going to DNF but there's something about reading on my e-reader that feels gameified so i am more dedicated to finishing books even if i don't enjoy them. and boy did i not enjoy this one. i'm kinda disappointed to be honest, i thought this would be better. also, the 221b format absolutely detracted in every way from the story. i don't understand why you would choose to tell a novel-length story in such a constraining format because the chapters were so short and the timeline and characters so confusing and tangled it legitimately took me about 10 chapters to realize that the story was linear and it was all continuous. :(
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