I just re-read Nancy Springer's story featuring Enola Holmes, the fictional, much younger, sister of (the also fictional) English private detective, Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Homes was the creation of the 19th- century surgeon and author, Arthur Conan-Doyle. (Talk about noticing things, Conan-Doyle was one of the earliest people to bring the idea of crime scene investigation to the forefront of public interest in crime drama.) He was, for his time, sort of like Carl Sagan in the 70's, Neil DeGrasse Tyson today, more interested in the application of logic to combat sensationalism, in the news, and in popular culture of that time.
Now Nancy Springer, writing at the present time, has created this baby sister, Enola Holmes, roughly 20 years younger than Sherlock. Enola just has to be a genius in her own way. While Conan-Doyle had to write so as to capture the imagination of men of his time—since women were much less of an economic force at that time—in contrast, the engine that energizes Nancy Springer's writing is: feminism, as well as many other matters of social justice. (Nancy represents in graphic detail not only the paralyzing restrictions on women and girls, but the squalor—and even the violence—that the poor of London struggled to endure.)
Not only does she succeed in making the gruesome facts somewhat tolerable to readers (especially young readers who can't be expected to stomach this sort of stuff as a matter of course), she has made Enola extremely relatable, from a 21st century point of view. Accomplishing all these goals at the same time is no mean feat.
The book I read was the first in the series, which has the job of describing how Enola leaves home, and immediately gets involved in the search for a missing aristocratic child. It also pitches us headfirst into Enola's love of codes and ciphers, which is how she eventually reconnects with her missing mother. An excellent piece of fiction.
Kay
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