She also yearns for connection with her brother Sherlock, whom she recognizes to be a melancholy, singular figure. She misses her mother, yearns for her love and, although she knows why her mother left, often wonders how she could have left HER. However, Enola has the emotional depth that Nancy Drew lacks. Like Nancy, by the end of the first book in the series, Enola, with copious financial aid from her AWOL mother, finds herself a domicile and sets herself up as a Scientific Perditorian and thus is a fourteen year old child living as an adult with adult freedoms. I have no idea why young girls are interested in her aside from misguided nostalgia on the part of parents and the fact that most kids love any book that is a series these days. On top of that, Nancy is practically an adult with the freedoms of one. The Nancy Drew books are lackluster, dry a a bone mysteries that are completely lacking in imagination and totally unsolvable before reaching the ending. The biography was actually very interesting. I read Nancy Drew: Girl Sleuth and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak as well as re-reading an old Nancy Drew to refresh my memory.

I read her as a kid, which was a time when the number of children's books in publication took up a few bookshelves rather than one third of the store like now. Also, as children's bookseller I am frequently asked to suggest a good mystery, whether it is for a book report or a reader who has exhausted (or been exhausted by) Nancy Drew. While I have never been a fan of mysteries and nor have I ever read any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books, I am fascinated by Victorian England and was drawn to this series because of the time period and, the intriguing cover art (which I know hides a clue I have yet to decipher) by Peter Ferguson, the genius who also brings visual life to Daphne, Sabrina and the rest of the engaging characters who populate Michael Buckley's brilliant series of fairy-tale mysteries, Sisters Grimm.

Enola holmes and the marquess