Abandoned by Booklikes

Please note that this book discusses rape.

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Give me another take at Sherlock Holmes and I thought it would be a fantastic book. Unfortunately this book had a terrible character in Jamie Watson (seriously, I couldn't stand him) a convoluted plot, and terrible pacing.

"A Study in Charlotte" takes a look at the descendants of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. The "Holmes" in this book is Charlotte Holmes and the "Watson" is Jamie Watson. Both are teens by way of England who are going to prep school in Connecticut.

Told in the first person by Jamie Watson, we find out that he is now enrolled at Sherringford and is not happy going to school so far away from home. On a rugby scholarship, Jamie has felt out of sorts until he found out that Charlotte Holmes is a student as well. Jamie starts trying to seek her out because in her he believes he is going to find out what he has been missing. But when a student who harassed Charlotte that Jamie beat up because of it is found dead, Jamie and Charlotte start investigating in order to clear both of their names.

I really wish this book had done a better job of fleshing out the whole backstory to these two families. Just saying these are relatives of the famous Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes really doesn't help. I lost count of the number of relatives on both sides and I hated the book showed them both as real people, though with Dr. Watson writing books about Holmes famous cases and then including Arthur Conan Doyle in there just made no sense to me at all. And the way that somehow the families knew each other and of each other and did not interact also didn't make any sense and than the author tries to reverse the backstory a little bit.

I did not like Jamie. At all. I really can't with alpha males as it is in romance novels, and reading a young adult novel with a guy who in this instance pushes his way into Charlotte's life and gets angry at her for not revealing every little thing about herself five seconds after he met her was maddening to me. Jamie even manages to make an incident that involved Charlotte and the dead boy about him as well continuously throughout the book. In fact, anytime a guy was anywhere near Charlotte, prepare yourself for Jamie to angst about it. I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs that guess what Jamie, not everything is about you.

I can't say much about Charlotte because everything with her is slowly revealed. I liked her, but she seems seriously flawed. And I don't know, I think I had a huge problem with the way that the author depicted certain events surrounding Charlotte. Because in this case, I wasn't getting a Sherlock Holmes vibe from her. I was definitely getting a drug addicted liar though. The final reveal about Charlotte's past I was disappointed in 100 percent. Because it is setting it up for further nonsense from Jamie and I don't want to read another book about Jamie and his feelings.

There were secondary characters here, but the only one that stuck out at all to me was Charlotte's roommate Lena.

The plot was a mess and when you get to why the villain of the piece did what they did...and an event that they made sure happened to Charlotte, ugh. I don't want to get into it because it would be spoiling something.

The writing was okay, but that was all it was for me. I really wish that the flow had been improved because there was way too much happening in this story. We kept getting huge hunks of information revealed to us along with Charlotte and Jamie trying to solve the murder of their fellow student. If you are planning a series the way that this author appears to be, there's no need to throw everything out there in book one. Do some basic world building (or elaborate) but keep the pace moving. My eyes started to glaze over at the half way point. It also could have been because Jamie was whining again about Charlotte not telling him everything about her past though.

The setting of Connecticut was weird. Besides it being a prep school, I had a hard time believing that the school would have gone along (let alone the police) with Jamie and Charlotte running around unsupervised like they were.

The ending reveal (mess) and the subsequent set up of a forthcoming book at the further adventures of Charlotte and Jamie was a let down to me.