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One looks very much like another...

Were you ever going to tell me?

“I remember telling you that I planned on changing my name to Felix and going somewhere where neither you nor Lucien could drag me back into things. I just..left out the middle bit.”

This is cruel, and August knows it. Maybe a part of him still resents Charlotte for insisting that he be there in the first place, with Hadrian and Phillipa and her family. Maybe he still resents himself for not being able to fix things for the thousandth time. He hates Milo’s methods, but he envies his certainty, the total sense that with the right tools one could settle any problem, be it a family squabble or an international incident. Or both. Maybe that’s why he left Greystone in the first place.

“Possibly,” he admits. “With enough distance and perspective, and the possibility of seeing things without thinking in terms of lists or training.”

OOC: I wasn’t sure about the last book focusing on a new case with new characters, since so much of the previous three books were about high energy, over-the-top family disasters. But I definitely appreciated the focus on how Charlotte (and, to some extent, Araminta, Jamie, and August) deals with moving forward.

I have shipped Moriarty/Mycroft in a variety of Holmes adaptations forever, but Milo admitting that he and August were actually friends makes me want all of the fic where part of the reason August isn’t moving around and changing his name as frequently as Jamie suggests is because Milo is smoothing things over keeping tabs on him in the hope of an eventual reconciliation. (I also want August’s thoughts on Milo’s Manbun of Sadness.)

Also, I need to know more about Phillipa’s antiques show. There was a whole book’s worth of orchid-adjacent crime going on!

He's not lying; he did, in fact, tell her those exact things. She just never took them literally. Rather, she thought about them the way parents think about their children declaring that they're running away to join the circus. Or become a street artist in Prague. It was a fantasy. Nothing more. Because like it or not, their pasts would always follow them. As would their names.

"Possibly? Possibly???? Do you have any idea what your death did to me? To my life? My family? Jamie? Do you even care?"

[OOC: It was a very odd choice and one I felt wasn't even carried out all that well. I'm still not sure whether I liked this book or not. It felt rushed, was shorter than the others. And to an extent I get it. She was trying to wrap things up. But in wrapping them up she just threw Jamie and Charlotte into more uncertainty.

When the orchids were first mentioned I thought for sure Dr. Larkin was going to be revealed to be Philipa. Or that the girl's secret would be she was her daughter or something like that. It seemed to weird to have all that and then not bring her in to the plot.]

“Because the first time I died was completely without consequences and easy for everyone.”

August blinks. He does care, really. Which is probably part of the problem. In his experience, both caring too much and not caring enough have led to the same awful result.

“I am sorry. For Jamie and you. And Milo. And possibly even Hadrian. I didn’t think you would be so—-.”

He catches himself, knowing how much of a cliche he sounds.

“I thought it would be better this way.”

OOC: I feel like I liked it better than A Case for Jamie, but not as much as A Study in Charlotte, which you can definitely tell was originally sold as a standalone. And it felt better plotted to me than Last of August, which really rushed in the last third—my love of August, Milo, and art heist shenanigans aside.

The thing I’m not sure how to feel about it is the back-and-forth between the Holmeses (and Moriartys and Watsons) as dysfunctional in the “unrealistic OTT spy teen adventures” sense and dysfunctional in the “realistic family drama with realistic, sometimes abusive consequences” sense. But maybe that’s a function of it trying to do too much in a YA series, especially given how much Caballaro talked about wanting to explore how girls’ stories are told in her poetry? Or maybe a function of me maybe not so much being in the intended YA audience anymore? IDK. In some ways, I feel like Study in Charlotte and Question of Holmes felt like a pairing and the middle two felt like something out of a very different series.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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Have you read the last book?

Re: Just finished it today!

I have mixed feelings

Re: I hear you.