Moving right along with five more mini-reviews! And with this post, I am (nearly) halfway through.

Book #7 in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series wasn’t my favorite, but I still found it intriguing as a mystery. And I was interested in the setting as well. King is very good at immersing the reader into various places and situations in time and place.

I do think I might have liked this one better if I had read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, or had any familiarity with it at all, really. I also was bugged again by the fact that Mary and Holmes are not together for most of the book, but again, that’s pretty common in the series. But overall it was a fun read with good twists and turns.

This was my monthly book club book, and it really just did not grab me. It was all right, and definitely had some good moments, but I was never sucked in by the characters or their journey and the ending didn’t really feel completely satisfying to me.

I was also just bugged by the representation of God and Christianity. I read plenty of secular fiction and I don’t require a Christian message to enjoy a story, but in this case since the book tackled questions of faith and God, I was bugged by the faulty conclusions it came to by the end.

I enjoyed this one more than I expected! After reading through the rest of the series, I wasn’t sure how interested I would be in a book that just explored Benedict’s past without any of the child characters I’d grown to love from the other installments. But in some ways, I think I liked this one even better than the others.

There was just something sweet and charming about the character of Nicholas Benedict and his friendships and how he grows to see the world around him. We also got a better picture of how he eventually becomes who he is later, and how his upbringing and relationships shaped the perspective he later seeks to pass on to the children in the later stories.

I bought this one many, many years ago when all my friends were talking about it, then proceeded to not get around to it for a very long time. And I’ll be honest–while I enjoyed the book and found it deeply meaningful, I’m not sure it was good timing for me to read it. Sometimes, for whatever reason, I just have a harder time focusing on books and this was a book that required the kind of focus I didn’t quite have the capacity for at the time, so I’m not sure how well I imbibed it.

All that said, I have every intention of reading it again when I have more brain capacity, because I found it deeply beautiful and kept wishing I could get my brain to wake up and really internalize more of what I was reading. The message truly living our lives to the fullest, of embracing all that God has for us with open arms, resonated with me. I will be revisiting this book sometime soon.

Book #8 in the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series was enjoyable, and it was very satisfying to get more of a peek into Mary’s past and uncover some of what really happened in her obviously traumatic childhood. The mystery is interesting, and as usual the sense of time and place is communicated well.

I’ll sound like a broken record at this point, but I was still annoyed that Holmes is not much a part of this one as I would like. And the book is a bit slow in places, which is another common complaint I have for the entire series. But overall, an enjoyable addition.

I’ll be back very soon for five more! As always, tell me what you think in the comments–have you read any of these? If so, what are your thoughts? If not, are there any you’re interested in?