My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 Stars
Quotes to Remember:
“I tended to spend too much time with my favorite things, loved them too hard until I wore them down. After a while, they became more like a shorthand for who I was and less like things I actually enjoyed.”
“It’s strange to grieve for your former self, and still I think it’s something that any girl understands. I’ve shed so many skins, I hardly know what I am now—muscle, maybe, or just memory. Perhaps just the will to keep going.”
“Maybe this is what happened when you built a friendship on a foundation of mutual disaster. It collapsed the second things righted themselves, left you desperate for the next earthquake.”
“There’s not a lot you can control, you know. Where you’re born. Who your family is. What people want from you, and what you are, underneath it all. When you have so little say in it all, I think it’s important to exercise a measure of control when given the opportunity.”
“Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood.”
"That was it. I was going to pass a law against people making deductions before lunch.”
My Review:
Okay. So if you read my review of A Study in Charlotte you'll know that I adored that book. I loved the dynamic between Watson and Holmes and the mystery was really intriguing to me. I definitely didn't love The Last of August as much. It shouldn't be a surprise that my least favorite trope is a love triangle and the one in this book just really took the story down a notch. The love triangle wasn't even really a thing in this book and was complete mental freak out on the part of one of the characters.
With my love triangle hatred out of the way, let's talk about the next thing that annoyed me to no end. The petty arguments. Plain and simple, these were not justified arguments, they were based off of jealousy and an inability to communicate with each other. Another of my least favorite things in books is when the main characters can't just get over themselves and communicate. If they would just talk there would be a lot less teen angst and I would have liked the book a whole lot better. I will say that the first book did also have petty arguments but they were never malicious in the way that this book's were.
Other than that, I still love the characters. I loved watching Watson try to figure out his place not only in the world, but in the Watson-Holmes dynamic, and the crime solving world. He is really growing as a character and I really appreciated that. I also love how Holmes may never actually admit it but she is totally falling for Watson, but before she can act on that she needs to figure out some things about herself and deal with some of the psychological trauma she's got going on.
I also really loved the setting of this book and the main mystery. It isn't very often that you see a YA book set in Berlin and I really enjoyed getting to see a unique real-world setting. I also really liked that the mystery revolved around art forgery because I thought that was really unique as well and it was super interesting.
I also found myself very confused at the end of the book. I understood what was happening through most of it but there was a twist at the very end that really confused me.
Publisher's Description:
Watson and Holmes: A match made in disaster.
Jamie Watson and Charlotte Holmes are looking for a winter-break reprieve after a fall semester that almost got them killed. But Charlotte isn’t the only Holmes with secrets, and the mood at her family’s Sussex estate is palpably tense. On top of everything else, Holmes and Watson could be becoming more than friends—but still, the darkness in Charlotte’s past is a wall between them.
A distraction arises soon enough, because Charlotte’s beloved uncle Leander goes missing from the estate—after being oddly private about his latest assignment in a German art forgery ring. The game is afoot once again, and Charlotte is single-minded in her pursuit.
Their first stop? Berlin. Their first contact? August Moriarty (formerly Charlotte’s obsession, currently believed by most to be dead), whose powerful family has been ripping off famous paintings for the last hundred years. But as they follow the gritty underground scene in Berlin to glittering art houses in Prague, Holmes and Watson begin to realize that this is a much more complicated case than a disappearance. Much more dangerous, too.
What they learn might change everything they know about their families, themselves, and each other.
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