From School Library Journal
Grade 5–9—Fourteen-year-old Enola Holmes is intelligent, sassy, and a woman before her time, living incognito in Victorian London and working as a Perditorian. She is on the run from her famous older brothers, Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, who feel she belongs in a boarding school learning to be a lady. Using various aliases, disguises, and ciphers, Enola is on the case to find the missing teenage daughter of Sir Eustance Austair while trying to elude "capture" by her siblings. She finds herself in the back alleys of London, using her wits to locate the missing Lady Cecily while also trying to keep herself out of mortal peril. Though readers' interest will be piqued by the references to Enola's first adventure,
The Case of the Missing Marquess (Philomel, 2006), this title stands alone. Fans of Blue Balliet's
Chasing Vermeer (2004) and
The Wright 3 (2006, both Scholastic) and Ellen Raskin's
The Westing Game (Dutton, 1978) will surely enjoy the suspense and the fresh voice of this young sleuth.—
Angela M. Boccuzzi-Reichert, Merton Williams Middle School, Hilton, NY Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
The second installment of Nancy Springers series finds 14-year-old Enola Holmes, the much younger sister of Sherlock, living an independent life while continuing to evade her brothers. Using well-honed skills of observation and disguise, plus a talent for unlocking cryptic clues, she establishes herself as assistant to a bogus scientific perditorian and succeeds in finding the missing Lady Cecily. Katherine Kellgren brings the precocious Holmes sibling to life. As Enola (her name is alone spelled backwards) moves from assistant to street vendor to mute Sister of Mercy ministering to the street people of nineteenth-century London, Kellgren effortlessly manipulates her voice, bringing the setting and characters alive. She even brings sense to the visual cryptic clues as they are presented in audio. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine