enne📚 reviewed The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
The Beekeeper's Apprentice
3 stars
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 …
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.