Today's title tells the story of Sherlock's younger sister Enola, who is prone to running into trouble and who is very good at solving puzzles.
Nancy Stringer
Fiction
Ages 10 and up
Penguin, 2007,
When Enola’s mother
disappears on Enola’s fourteen birthday, Enola doesn’t know what to think. Why
would her mother do such a thing? What is Enola supposed to do now? After the
initial shock wears off, Enola contacts her brothers Mycroft and Sherlock
Holmes. After they arrive, Enola discovers why the brothers stayed away from
the family home and she begins to wish that she hadn’t called for them at all.
Mycroft announces that Enola is to be sent to a girl’s finishing school and
that she will have to start wearing clothes befitting a young lady of her
class. The idea of having to live in a corseted world where she will have to learn
how to be an ornament rather than a thinking and reasoning individual horrifies
Enola. There is no way that she is going to accept this.
So, like her mother
before her, and for very much the same reason, Enola runs away from home.
Thankfully, before she leaves, Enola discovers that her mother did in fact
leave messages and money for Enola. Enola realizes that her mother knew exactly
what she was doing and that she gave Enola all the tools that the girl would
need to make it in the world by herself if she had to.
Enola has barely
started her adventure when she stumbles across what everyone is calling a
kidnapping. Having many of the skills of her famous detective brother, Enola
soon discovers that this is no kidnapping and that the child, a Marquess, has
in fact run away from home. Little does Enola know that she and the young
Marquess are going to cross paths in London and that they are both going to be
running for their lives in the not too distant future.
Nancy Springer
presents a very compelling picture of Victorian England, helping her readers to
see that it was not always the warm comforting world that one sees on the
covers of Christmas cards. It had a dark side too. It was a world where the
poor had little hope, where women and children died in the streets by the
hundreds. It was also a world where women could not own property and where they
were expected to live in a narrow confined world without many of the freedoms
that men took for granted. It was a world where, of you were female and wanted
to be yourself, you had to find a way around the system through subterfuge and careful
planning. The author presents this world in its true and stark colors and yet
she leaves us with the hope that Enola will indeed find what she is looking
for.
This is the first
book in what promises to be a gripping and superbly written series about a girl
sleuth who tries to make her way in a man’s world.
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