The Beekeeper's Apprentice

I read the Beekeeper's Apprentice after seeing it on a list of Malka Older's comfort reads: www.tor.com/2023/03/22/malka-older-chooses-her-top-5-comfort-reads

It's a mystery book originally published way back in the ancient times of 1994. The plot could be roughly described as: what if Sherlock Holmes was a teenage girl and met up with aging half-retired actual Sherlock Holmes, who trains her until she grows over time to be an equal detective partner while they solve mysteries together.

Overall, this was a fun romp told in a style that felt reminiscent of a Sherlock mystery, and I enjoyed the mysteries large and small. I am a sucker for coming of age stories too. I think it's a more interesting pairing to have Sherlock with an equal in deduction to play off of. I also appreciated here that King deliberately posits in-universe this Holmes as being not the same as Doyle's fictionalized version, and so can portray her own (kinder) version.

Content warnings for mild violence, mild misogyny, suicide mentions, police violence, police portrayed sympathetically; there's also an extended romani disguise section with pejorative g-word and theft trope.

Also, this is a minor spoiler for the introduction of the book, but Mary Russell the protagonist and "author" signs it M.R.H. strongly implying that she marries Holmes at some point in later books which is...also a thing.  Look, I understand that they are the only two in their own world of deduction and so it's not implausible and I'm also certainly not here to police fictional age gaps. And yet. It is just a creepy vibe for me, personally speaking, and so I will stop after this first book so I can pretend they are just partners in detectivery forever and will find my own comfort reads somewhere else.

Yeah. So, I feel bad not liking this, because I borrowed it from a friend who really likes it, but I spent most of my time wanting to slowly walk away.

People are mad about the character assassination of Dr. John Watson -- and don't get me wrong, me too -- but the fatal flaw is the character assassination of Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps all the more pernicious because King actually does get Holmes' voice pretty dead-on. But his actions... The very idea that it's OK for any 50-something year old man to carry on flirtatious conversations with a 15 year old is already pretty obnoxious; the idea that a 19 year old referring to her 58 year old "surrogate father" as her "near-lover" in literally the same sentence is egregious. But at the idea of this middle-aged Romeo being Sherlock Holmes causes words to fail me. Yes, I realize that the author herself married a man 30 years her senior when she was in her early 20's and therefore might mistake grooming for romance, but there's no excuse for it to have been published that way.

One star for a semi-decent mystery when I ignored that drivel, but the pacing was poor and there were multiple details lacking (especially the Hebrew: Mary "translates" Armageddon as "Ar Megido" as...I don't know, evidence of her Hebraic superiority. It's "Har Megido." "Har" means mountain.) But it's not worth nitpicking something that has a glaring flaw. Wikipedia tells me Mary grows up and marries Holmes: I'm out.