Tag Archives: Feminism

Enola Holmes: The Feminist Sister of Sherlock Holmes

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Cover-image-for-Enola-Holmes-and-The-Case-of-the-Missing-Marquess

Sherlock Holmes has a sister. I bet you didn’t know that. Well, at least he does in the imagination of the author Nancy Springer. In the tradition of the great feminist retellings — Wide Sargasso Sea, Circe, even Wicked — Springer imagines what it would be like for the famous and esteemed detective to have a little sister, forever in his shadow. Springer also imagines what kind of mother would have given birth to the Sherlock Holmes many of us know and love. Women are not the focus of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original series and its’ film and TV adaptations. There are a couple of exceptions to that, chief among them being Irene Adler in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” But, by and large, they are kept in the background. In the young adult series Enola Holmes Mysteries, Nancy Springer answers the question, ‘what if the intellect and observational skills of Sherlock Holmes were attributed to a young woman instead?’ What if a young woman got to go on adventures, skirt danger, solve mysteries, and save the day?

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Three Notable Novels from East Asia

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Travel is one of the most missed activities during the pandemic, and the lowering Covid positivity rate is certainly giving us hope to resume international travel – soon, not quite yet! For now, we can continue to quench our thirst with videos and travel guides, I suppose. And, if you haven’t, what about reading a few popular novels from the countries that you want to visit? I know, you may question how much fiction will actually tell us about the real world, but I would say fiction is arguably one of the best channels to immerse ourselves into a different culture. A well-researched novel can tell us the most intricate nuances of another culture: their people, their life, their ideologies, their desires, and their dreams – the hidden world that we can’t easily access when we do a two-week or three-week travel.

I will start with East Asia in this post. There are so many great books from this part of the world, and I wish I could include more titles, but let’s start with three that I know.

Book cover of The Three-Body Problem: by Liu, Cixin

China

The Three-body Problem by Cixin Liu

The three-body problem is unsolvable, “as the motion of the bodies quickly becomes chaotic” (Britannica). In this first installment of a trilogy, the Hugo Award winning author asks the most classic and unanswerable question in hard sci-fi: “What would it mean for the human race to come in contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence?”

Because of the elaborate world building, the novel is a bit slow to start, but once it gets up and running, the thrilling suspense grips readers all the way to the end. The work offers many interesting “lengthy passages of technical exposition about everything from quantum mechanics to artificial intelligence.” (NPR) While the unique historical backdrop (Cultural Revolution) requires some effort to chew on, Liu skillfully pushes the moral dilemmas beyond specific nationalities or abstract physics, and asks: “Is science truly objective and provable, or is it simply the best we can do given our limited understanding of four dimensions?” (Rick Riordan)

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Burn It Down

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Cover of book Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger, edited by Lilly DancygerThere’s been a flood of feminist titles being published in the past couple of years throughout 2018 & 2019, many of which have been fueled by so much anger accumulated over so many years that it has bubbled over and had to find an outlet, be written out and find an audience. A couple titles listed below are quite new (e.g. Burn It Down edited by Lilly Dancyger, Seven Necessary Sins for Girls and Women by Mona Eltahawy), and I wouldn’t be surprised if the floodgates remain open with more and more titles being published over the next year or two at least, but all these books about women’s anger, the reasons behind the anger, what we can do to make things better for this generation and the next – I can’t help but wonder what will come of reading these titles. There’s a part of me that remains cautious while reading through them. I’ve made my way through portions of some of them, and come away feeling incensed and frustrated, but not really feeling quite incendiary or powerful because of being fueled by anger, necessarily. Perhaps that comes at the end.

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