Solve a Case While Making New Friends
When I saw James Ponti was starting a new series, I was all in. Especially since it was called The Sherlock Society. That was pretty much all I needed to know. While I did enjoy the book, it did have some flaws. I’m sure the target middle grade audience won’t care.
For this new series, we are heading to Miami Florida. The main character is Alex Sherlock, who attends middle school with his older sister, Zoe, and his friends Yadi and Lina. As the book opens, school is shutting down for the summer, and Zoe has a brilliant idea for a summer job - become detectives. While her plan doesn’t quite take off as they had envisioned, they are soon on an interesting case looking for a treasure. What will they find?
Right away, the book started out with one of my least favorite literary techniques - starting with exciting action and then flashing back to show us how the characters got there. It felt worse than normal this time to me for some reason.
Additionally, the plot seems to wander quite a bit. Yes, I get that we are setting up the characters and the premise for the series at the beginning, but even then, I felt like we took longer than we should have to get to the heart of the book.
Now, this isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty happening over the course of the book. I was intrigued by what the characters were finding. I also like the logical way they were taught to think about their cases. And the climax is great.
Quite often in middle grade fiction, the characters have inattentive parents. That’s not the case here, and I appreciated how realistic the family dynamic felt. Alex and Zoe’s grandfather, a former reporter, does get involved in the case, and he was a fun addition to the core cast. The characters also face realistic consequences to their actions, which was nice.
And the characters were fantastic. We get a feel for all of them, and one in particular got some nice growth. The story is narrated from Alex’s first-person point of view. As expected, the author once again creates a group of characters with a solid bond, and I enjoyed hanging out with them.
Plus there’s the humor. The characters made me laugh multiple times as I was reading.
To be clear, I suspect my issues with the plot are more of an adult’s viewpoint of how things should be. I suspect that kids will be hooked from page one of The Sherlock Society and look forward to the next in this series. I’ll definitely be back for more myself.
Flash backs in story telling sometimes work for me, sometimes not. In this case, it was too obvious a choice for the author.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of flashbacks, but I am a fan of exciting beginnings, because students love them. You are correct about middle grade parents, and I love that the mother set them up for a meeting. The grandfather was superb. It's so hard to read books as an adult and try to figure out what kids will like!
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