A review by taliatiss
A Study in Honor by Claire O'Dell

1.0

What a letdown. I'm having trouble deciding what was worse: the hamfisted attempts at writing about racism, the lack of actual mystery, or the fact that it was incredibly boring.

I really loved the idea of queer, black, female Holmes and Watson. But no part of Janet Watson's intersecting identities feels real, save perhaps some elements of her disability and PTSD. At first, I liked how much time we were spending with Janet, getting to know her before she stepped into Sara Holmes' world. Except we never truly get to see Sara's world, we never even understand the mystery until it's over, and

Spoiler

Janet's in the hospital for all of that anyways!

Here's one of my favourite bad lines of dialogue, since I don't want to get any further into the purple writing:
Sara Holmes: We glide, like swans over a lake, our eyes cast discreetly toward the ground so that any chance light does not reflect from them.

Alright, let's get into the details:

Sloppy worldbuilding
I'm never really convinced of the civil war aspect. Everyone's waging old-timey war with skirmishes between soldiers... meanwhile Sara can show Watson the footage from drones... and if you lose an arm you can get a metal replacement that picks up your brain waves and can detach whenever you want. It doesn't feel like a war is going on at all, and certainly not a modern one. It's unclear exactly how the civil war started, as politics in this book are reduced to "she's the good leftist one" and "he's the bad white centrist one" and so on. What do voters in this world actually care about, other than race? And even then, why is the racism in this book only the blatant kind, where Watson would narrate things like "angry black woman" and "don't touch my hair" like the author is playing racism bingo. Oh, and the

Spoiler

super soldiers

feel tacked on. Actually, that brings me to my next point.

The mystery is tacked on
There arguably isn't a mystery in this book at all. Holmes is a spy, not a detective. There isn't a clear mystery to solve, just a series of possibly connected events, and "almost" inciting incidents that don't incite much.

Spoiler

We never get a moment where it all comes together and the villain is revealed.

I suppose that's a plot spoiler, but it's difficult to say when there's so little plot.

Sara Holmes
While Watson feels like a person with goals and fears and flaws, Sara Holmes is none of those things. She's distanced throughout the story. Like Holmes and Watson physically do not spend enough time together. Nor do they accomplish much together. It's often a case of Sara filling Janet in about something. Oh and she's a terrible person. As many other reviewers have pointed out,

Spoiler

she drugs Watson twice, she lies all the time, she calls Watson "my love" all the time despite repeatedly being asked not to, and she kisses Watson without her consent

. Also, she isn't convincingly intelligent. She's supposed to me a master of deduction, but she gets all her intel from her

Spoiler

spy tech. Watson says that Holmes has always thought about the next dozen possibilities and accounted for every variation, but she also forgets to account for Watson's needs, and can't even remember to tell Watson to bring her gloves in one scene.

So she isn't convincingly a genius, though she is convincingly an asshole.

How the author thinks black women think
So I mentioned that this book feels like woke bingo. And while I'm not American or black, I am a queer woman of colour and this book really lacked a sense of intersectionality for me. Is the military not homophobic at all? Watson mentions she

Spoiler

left the church when she started questioning her identity

but otherwise, her queerness rarely seems to factor into her oppression. Which would be fine, if so much of this book wasn't about oppression. Sometimes she's black, and sometimes she's queer, but is she ever really both at the same time? There are so many interesting ideas to explore: being visibly black while only occasionally being visibly queer, how black people treat her differently for being queer and queer people treat her differently for being black, and so on. There's some very surface-level commentary on class differences between black people, but it's stuff like Watson seeing a rich black character as "a young Barack Obama" and being upset with him for being rich while she has to hold all the pain of war. I think there are good ideas buried in there. But the author lost me at the idea that a real-life black person would equate a rich black man with Obama just for existing as a rich black man. Yikes. Let's not forget that Watson thinks she looks homeless at another point because she's wearing a hoodie and baggy pants. Good job being classist, author, I truly do not know how privileged you have to be to assume that's all it takes to "look homeless" when Watson grew up poor and her internalized classism probably wouldn't look like that.

Alright, I've given far too much of my time to this review, and to this book. On to better, I hope