Alas, the more I read, the more flaws I found.
Mina is a willing recluse, Evaline an unwilling socialite. While Mina becomes winded during strenuous action and feels abandoned by her parents, Evaline becomes paralyzed before spilled blood and has to deal with Bram's wife wanting to marry her to some man who will take care of her. Tall and gawky Mina is a true Holmes, a girl of observation, deduction, and planning, while petite and pretty Evaline is her family's vampire hunter, a girl of action endowed with superhuman strength, speed, and healing ability. This leads to some amusing culture shock, as Mina encounters iPhones, Nikes, and slang like "cool" and "hot." At first I liked the independent and spunky 17-year-old Mina and Evaline, trying to solve a macabre mystery while chafing at the restrictions, dismissals, and ignominies of their patriarchal culture. Did I forget the airships? As if all that weren't enough, Gleason tosses in time travel and alternate worlds in the person of Dylan Eckhert, an American from 2016 who believes that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character and asserts that electricity has never been illegal. Steam-London is a city of sky-scrapers, the tops of the swaying buildings held in place by helium-filled balloon-like sky-anchors.
Thus the city hisses with myriad "cognoggin" gadgets of every size and purpose, including self-propelled Refuse-Agitators and Night-Illuminators, steam-powered lifts and trolleys, mechanized Tome-Selectors and corset removers, Steam-Stream guns and finger-sized steam throwers, and clockwork hairclips and dragonfly pins. The story is set in a steampunk 1889 London, for Parliament has passed an act banning electricity and promoting steam power. And the girls quickly find themselves investigating a deadly scheme to bring the Egyptian goddess of death Sekhmet back to life.
What a promising premise to Colleen Gleason's first "Stoker and Holmes" novel, The Clockwork Scarab (2013)! Irene Adler, AKA "the woman," the American opera singer who got the best of Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" and is now the keeper of British Museum antiquities, recruits Alvermina (Mina) Holmes, the great detective's niece, and Evaline Stoker, Bram Stoker's younger sister, to be secret agent/detectives discretely risking "life and limb for their queen, their countrymen, and the Empire," just as many young men but no other young women do.
0 kommentar(er)
