Saturday, June 25, 2011

REVIEW: Sherlock Holmes: My Life

Title: Sherlock Holmes: My Life
Author: Sherlock Holmes/Lawrence Spencer
Genre: Mystery
Price: $2.99 (via Smashwords)
Reviewed by: Veinglory

"My Life" is a clever but very rambling ostensible autobiography by Sherlock Holmes.  The conceit of it is that Sherlock Holmes is not a fictional character that some people like to pretend is real, but a real person who is rendered fictional by a dastardly conspiracy.  Many other Victorian characters and authors get scraped into the faltering narrative from Alice in Wonderland to Gilbert and Sullivan

I predict that an enthusiast of the Sherlock Holmes stories will find this work interesting and irritating by turns, other readers will be pretty much bemused from the outset. The cover does not quite strike the right tone which is more whimsical and convoluted than dark and suspenseful.  The editing is strong sentence by sentence, but I feel heavy-handed editing would make for a far better book, and the formatting is a little erratic. 

Overall it is hard to say how this book will work for other readers, but I will give it a tentative 7/10 for entertainment value alone (even if it is of the 'I see what you did there' variety).

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