This book was pretty short. I think it was about a five hour audiobook. I liked the narrator though and the story moved along. If you’ve seen the Enola Holmes movie, you know the general plot of this book. The movie was not fully true to the book, but I could understand why the movie changed the parts that it did. I pictured Millie Bobby Brown as Enola the whole time though. Watching the movie first doesn’t actually spoil the book either, which was fun.
Enola is basically abandoned by her mother on her sixteenth birthday. Her brothers (one of which is Sherlock Holmes) come to take her to boarding school. She never actually makes it to boarding school, unlike in the movie. There are definitely some scarier elements in the book than the movie, but her mom comes out much cooler in the movie.
Enola has to make her way to London to find her mom, but on the way gets caught up in a missing persons case (the Marquess). She uses her natural abilities and some deciphering skills her mom taught her to figure things out and takes a good guess at where the missing boy is.
She’s surprisingly good at making it on her own for a teenager. She’s also very smart for someone who didn’t actually go to school and was “home schooled” (loosely) by her mother.
There’s a lot of old timey misogyny, but it’s par for the course for the time in London. This is a whole series, and I’m going to keep reading them from my library!
