This is a spoiler filled book review. Please be aware that if you keep reading there will be information that you may not want to know if you have not read the book. For a spoiler free review of The Last of August click here.
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.”
“She smiled at me, that one particular smile I hardly ever saw, the one that could open padlocks, Yale locks, bank vaults, the one that was a trapdoor down into everything.”
“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.”
"...and like a miracle, he laughed again. Oftentimes, I withhold information from Watson for this very reason. He resents this, I think. My 'magic tricks'. I don't know if he's understood yet who the reveals are really for."
"That was it. I was going to pass a law against people making deductions before lunch.”
*This is your final spoiler warning*
*Continue with Caution*
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 Watson. There was literally no threat from August. He didn't want to be with Holmes and she wasn't interested in him. Watson was just being jealous and petty and it was stupid.
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. Every argument in this book seemed to be for the express purpose of just hurting the other person and it wasn't fair to either of them.
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. He really struggled in this book because he didn't think that he belonged with Holmes or fighting crime. He really idolizes his great-great-great grandfather's stories and neither him or Holmes are their ancestors. He needs to figure out what his place is without comparing himself to his grandfather and I think he started to do that in the end but then Holmes messed everything up.
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 loved getting her point of view in this book because we not only get to see into her mind as a detective but we get to see how she thinks about Watson. And she talks about him with such love. I quoted it up above but when she talks about the reveals being for him, to make him smile, it really melted my heart.
I also think though that Holmes is trying to push herself too hard. Watson doesn't seem to be pushing her romantically besides kissing her a couple of times. But when she says no he listens. He understands that she has trauma she needs to work through and Holmes was completely unfair to him when she pushed him away for that.
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. Having art students make forgeries as part of a class assignment is brilliant. I loved that.
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. I don't really understand what was going on with Leander or Holmes's mom. I was just confused by it and then Milo killed August and I feel like I didn't really get to mourn the character because I didn't know what was happening or why. I know that Holmes said that Watson was going to be mad at her but I don't understand what she did that was so bad.
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.
Comments