A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)

by Brittany Cavallaro

I felt like I was being pulled through a dark, dank wardrobe into some boozy Narnia.

rude that you don't think narnia is boozy AND that a small dark room is anything like travelling through the wardrobe. SURFACE LEVEL narnia comparison. we can go deeper. we MUST.

“He’s selling drugs. That’s Governor Schumer’s son. He’s buying drugs.”

can i be real. i want this story.

This wasn’t important, I told myself. It wasn’t a big deal if she didn’t like me. So what if somewhere, back a hundred years and change and across the Atlantic Ocean, some other Watson made best friends with some other Holmes. People became best friends all the time. There were, surely, best friends at this school. Dozens. Hundreds.

oh it's certainly weird that we're in a world where not only does Sherlock Holmes exist, it's seems that he's REAL

at her feet, beg her to read me the phone book in that extravagant voice that had no business coming out of such a thin, angular girl.

this book literally does not have to be set in conneticut

Coming from my mother, that wasn’t a compliment. You’d think that after all this time, our families would have drifted apart, and in most ways I suppose we had. But my mother would run into the odd Holmes at Scotland Yard fund-raisers or the Edgar Awards dinners or, as in the case of Holmes’s aunt Araminta, an auction of my great-great-great-grandfather’s literary agent’s—Arthur Conan Doyle’s—things. I had always been enthralled with the idea of this girl, the only Holmes who was my age (as a kid, I thought we’d meet and the two of us would go on wild adventures), but my mother always discouraged me without saying why.

THIS IS AN INSANE CONCEPT

“acts of sudden and unreasonable aggression.” Or, as my father put it, snickering like it was some joke, “the way you get a little punchy sometimes.” Unlike him, I never looked back on them with anything like pride, the fights I got into at Highcombe and, before that, in my public school in Connecticut. I always felt disgusted with myself afterward, ashamed. Classmates I liked just fine the rest of the time would say something that would set me off, and immediately, my arm would cock back, ready to swing.

I AM GOING TO SCREAM "the way you get a little punchy sometimes" is so funny

along. “Listen to me,” she said rapidly. “Your parents are English, but you were raised in America; I know that from what my family has said about yours. Your accent isn’t very strong, but how you stress your sentences is very specifically London. And you love London; I could tell from the look on your face when you first heard me speak, like you’d had a glimpse of home. You must have lived there, and at a particularly impressionable time in your life. Add in the fact that you said ‘bathroom,’ not ‘toilet’ earlier—and other times, you’ve shied away from using any slang at all, rather than make a decision to be English or American about it—and so you must have moved to London around age eleven or twelve. Am I correct?”

I've watched my fair share of SH adaptations - why does it feels so unnatural

brother Milo.

I cannot believe there is a mycroft character wHAT is the point of this

When I described my right hook to Dobson’s chin, he took notes with a stifled grin. Really, with role models like him, it was surprising I wasn’t already in jail.

What a genuinely insane and harmful thing to think in the middle of a police interview

I wanted to shout at her. I couldn’t turn my feelings off like I was a machine, and as much as she pretended to be one—her spotless appearance, the precise way she spoke—I knew she couldn’t either. Her emotions had to be roiling somewhere, deep below the surface, and I wanted to demand that she pull them out for my inspection. As if it were my right.

Sciences 442,

I don't really see the point in just...multiplying 221 by 2...

The way we were with each other wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else if I’d tried to explain it. I had a habit of volleying any ridiculous statement she’d make back over the net with top spin, and we’d ramp ourselves up into fierce arguments that way about beetles and Christmas plays and the color of Dr. Watson’s eyes. We bickered over possible suspects: she was sure that our murderer had a Sherringford association, but I couldn’t imagine why he or she wouldn’t have acted the year before. I still couldn’t imagine why I’d be a target. When I found a nest of prescription bottles hidden in her violin case, we had a pitched battle over the fact that she was still using oxy. “It’s none of your business,”

this relationship is FAST moving...it ISN'T any of your business, you barely know her

I stormed from the lab to find, the next morning, that she’d brought in a folding chair. “For you,” she said, with an idle gesture; it was all we really had room for in that small space.

very agent fox mulder of her

When she regained her composure, she said, “Well, there’s August Moriarty,” as if that shouldn’t have been the first name out of her mouth. “What,” I asked her slowly, “were you doing picking fights with a Moriarty?” Professor James Moriarty was Sherlock Holmes’s greatest enemy. In some ways, he was almost as notorious as the Great Detective himself.

can i be real, every connection to the sherlock holmes stories that appears stretches this concept thinner and thinner

Not to mention the rest of his family actively attempting to live up to his legacy.” I drew a line under his name. August. I had never heard of an August Moriarty. “I mean, I know it’s been more than a hundred years, but—” “I’d prefer to think,” Holmes said, cutting me off, “that we aren’t all so mercilessly bound to our pasts.”

yeah, but then, like...why are YOU this way babe? like?

and the corkboard above boasted a single bright-blue Post-it that read luv u girlie xo Lena and had curled a bit with age.

hey, ya know what's nice - girls...

jumping around to some Top 40 song. It was easier to imagine a whale dancing, or Gandhi. Then I imagined some slow song, one that wasn’t complete shit, and the lights down low, and what it’d be like to have her in my arms, and I drank down my glass of water in one go.

while i'm sympathetic to like...hatred of the #popular #withit class of high school students, i'm also #overit

playing a game of ghost tag in

reasonably: ghost in the graveyard, the best game of tag

one, and he panicked.” I let that sink in. “All that was because your brother was trying to check up on you? Your brother. Who’s a good guy. It doesn’t add up.” “It’s likely that Milo wanted to assess you. Find out where your loyalties really lie. My friends . . . well, I haven’t ever really had one before.” “Oh,” I said.

me thinking about what is, imo, the only consistent emotional throughline of bbc sherlock and then screaming

Our track record proved that we were too volatile to survive that sort of shake-up.

you're WHAT

“You thought it,” she said. “I watched you think it. That I killed him.”

BABE you can't lead him there by the hand and then get mad when he draws that conclusion BABE

had—someone had taken a shot of him across the quad with one of those paparazzi cameras, so sharp that you could see the bruises I’d given him.

so like it couldn't have been either of them...because they were part of the fight, and they couldn't have reasonably arranged it, because they couldn't count on dobson to say the things he said about charlotte...so her lair...jamie's lair...BOTH incredibly unlikely...read a detective novel once in a while, detectives in novels...

I sat in my desperately uncomfortable chair, jerking in and out of sleep, waiting for someone to come in and ask me to talk about what happened.

hey someone better be calling his father

“Will you please stop side-stepping the point? This isn’t about Holmes, it’s about the strings you pulled to get me here. God, you don’t even know me! I hadn’t seen you for years! How can you not understand that being bored isn’t an excuse to reach in and fuck with my life for fun?”

hey i think we should be FAR more concerned with the fact that you are being implicated for murder than your father orchestrating a situation to get closer to you - jamie pLEASE

“He gave it as John Smith.”

i'm sorry...and you BELIEVED him i'm for real going to scream. there are not THAT many john smith's in the united states who are you chasing the gd doctor

UPenn.

oh wow upenn...we know...we gonna develop this philly line or are we just gonna leave a girl hanging ?

You were flirting with Elizabeth Hartwell.

is that - that being straight up rejections - what we're calling it - it being flirting - these days

I thought about the piped-in interrogation in the police station. About the little notebook that still lay open between us on the table. About how my own doubts about Holmes’s innocence ran alongside my doubt that she could get us out of this mess.

hon you barely know this girl

to John Smith again.

i'm still losing my mind over this name lmao

“I need unfettered access to the campus, not to be rotting away in some cell.

She’d stopped battling me on August Moriarty. Every time I tried to learn something, anything, about what happened between them, she regarded me with a weary tilt of her head, like I was a fly she couldn’t quite get rid of. I was relatively sure she wasn’t eating or sleeping. But it wasn’t just her attitude. Her eyes were somehow both glassy and dry, and as she scratched absently at her scalp, going over her millionth passenger manifest, her hair made a crackling sound that hair really shouldn’t make. I kept stifling the urge to ask her if she was okay, to touch her forehead to see if she had a fever. To take care of her.

and why shouldn't you! hey!

I began wondering if there was some kind of Watsonian guide for the care and keeping of Holmeses.

i WILL cry, i'll do it, right here, in my office

“I’m so sorry to hear about your unfortunate telepathy,” I snapped.

“We’re starting in ten! Look alive!” he shouted. It was true, the team did seem dead. Our fly-half was actually sleeping, on his side, at midfield. Larson, our eight-man, trotted by and kicked him in the small of the back. Without a flicker of interest, Coach Q looked up from his director’s chair and then back down at his copy of Men’s Health.

oh no more than half way through the book and NOW i have to learn about rugby

“Talk to Nurse Bryony at the infirmary,”

grist

WEIRD that this word appears 2x in the last 5 pages...

“Trust me, if Milo were involved in a murder plot, I’d find it very difficult to assist him. It’s not heartlessness if it saves lives.”

what does this mean??

Don’t you mean to him?”

no i don't ? i guess people do use to but i can't see how it makes that much of a difference...if she answered his question and it was about kissing, she could say, oh you know romantic, and if she answered her question she would say ex...i can't see how the phrasing of this question makes any difference! at ! all!

She patted me on the shoulder. “If you hold on a sec, I’ll get a fitted sheet for that mattress.”

hey! can i just say! i think they should have moved out of this house! tbh! this is my worst nightmare, being a GUEST in my childhood home.

like a lump of pyrite nestled into all that gold, was from the Daily Mail.

DPhil

Oh, that asshole took advantage of an innocent young girl, but Charlotte Holmes wasn’t innocent. She was imperious, and demanding, with a self-destructive streak that ran as wide as the Atlantic.

oh yeah, anyone would, because it's definitely true dummy

And even if, somehow, she had (my stomach roiled again), she’d fucked him over in the end.

hey remember when you thought she might have killed him

blue-blooded

And maybe August really had encouraged her habits—maybe she was the innocent one. Then why was he trying to kill her?

because it wouldn't matter if she had exposed him or had found out...in the end...he still gave drugs to a Child, and he still! would! be! able! to! blame! charlotte! for! being! exposed! for! a! crime!

I had no intention of getting frostbite twice in two days. Gloves, I thought, climbing the porch steps, and then the car, and then Holmes—

when was the first time!!!

Jamie Watson. He didn’t.

Lucien ran, and August stayed to take the blame, as I suspected he would. After all, he felt responsible.

he still bought cocaine for a kid...which is still a crime, no matter how much a 14 yo manipulated you.

“I don’t make mistakes,” she said, and pulled away from me. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

anyway you complete fool, that's what mistakes are! things you do on purpose! that! you! regret!

Bryony Downs. Bryony Davis. She’d barely covered her tracks.

well yeah she didn't change her name to bryony