Gosh, let’s see – reading them both was a while ago for me, too! The first book was one of those I just reacted to with intense, visceral love. I loved the characters, I loved their complicated friendship, I LOVED this brilliant, prickly, entirely feminist Charlotte Holmes. It had everything I look for in a YA book: smart dialogue, engaging characters, and so on. I actually went into the book being like, do we *really* need yet another Holmes adaptation? And I came out of it being like, YES! YES, WE DO! The book absolutely had some considerable flaws – namely, that the actual mystery plot didn’t make a whole lot of sense? (Which is a significant flaw, admittedly, in a *mystery* novel…) But the characters were so great that I could forgive some plot insufficiency.
And then the second book… It was even more of a plot mess; plus the author set it in Berlin and clearly had no idea what Berlin is like (which stands out a LOT since Berlin is my city!); but most importantly: it felt like a character assassination – and the characters were the one main thing that had made the first book work. But in the second book, their friendship/relationship/whatever-the-hell-it-is turns really toxic, Jamie’s behavior is awful, Charlotte’s probably is too (I don’t remember much at this point – I haven’t wanted to reread it!), you end up wanting them to get the hell away from each other and stop being so damaging to each other, instead of shipping them or even wanting them to be friends. And the ending of the book was a melodramatic mess, and…yeah. I was not impressed.
So, there’s the small hope that the author had a master plan all along, and the third book will reveal that the mess of the second was actually just set-up for that plan. The way second-books-of-a-trilogy often are. But at the moment my feeling is that Cavallaro had a cool idea but wasn’t able to execute it. Boo. :-(
So that’s my very long answer to your short question; and yes, I almost definitely will read the third book, just in case it redeems my feelings about the series. Like how I probably will watch if they create any more BBC Sherlock someday, despite how series 4 is dead to me. ;-)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-02-05 11:56 am (UTC)And then the second book… It was even more of a plot mess; plus the author set it in Berlin and clearly had no idea what Berlin is like (which stands out a LOT since Berlin is my city!); but most importantly: it felt like a character assassination – and the characters were the one main thing that had made the first book work. But in the second book, their friendship/relationship/whatever-the-hell-it-is turns really toxic, Jamie’s behavior is awful, Charlotte’s probably is too (I don’t remember much at this point – I haven’t wanted to reread it!), you end up wanting them to get the hell away from each other and stop being so damaging to each other, instead of shipping them or even wanting them to be friends. And the ending of the book was a melodramatic mess, and…yeah. I was not impressed.
So, there’s the small hope that the author had a master plan all along, and the third book will reveal that the mess of the second was actually just set-up for that plan. The way second-books-of-a-trilogy often are. But at the moment my feeling is that Cavallaro had a cool idea but wasn’t able to execute it. Boo. :-(
So that’s my very long answer to your short question; and yes, I almost definitely will read the third book, just in case it redeems my feelings about the series. Like how I probably will watch if they create any more BBC Sherlock someday, despite how series 4 is dead to me. ;-)