★★★★☆ Enola is looking for a friend

The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan

Nancy Springer

I just finished three weighty novels. If you care, and there is no reason I know that you should, they were City of Miracles, The Running Grave, and Starling House, good novels all, but no light fare. Therefore, I told myself wisely, "Self! What you want now is something light and sweet and crunchy! You want an Enola Holmes novel!" Thus I gobbled down Book 4, The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan.

It was just the thing! Pink Fan is the best Enola Holmes book so far, in my opinion.

Enola is not OK. Despite her mother's frequently repeated mantra, "You will do very well on your own", Enola is not doing great on her own. Abandoned at the age of fourteen by her mother, hunted by her formidable brothers Sherlock and Mycroft, who want to take her freedom away, and without friends, Enola longs for affection. To be sure, plenty remains of the funds her mother embezzled from Mycroft and left to Enola, and Enola's lightly fraudulent business as "Dr Ragostin, Scientific Perditorian" is thriving. But there are hungers of the heart.

It is in this state of mind that Enola runs into Lady Cecily, the Left-Handed Lady whom she rescued in the book of that name. Lady Cecily, a teenage girl like Enola, recognizes Enola and, using a peculiar pink fan, secretly signals to her that she is in trouble.

Enola of course leaps into action, first to find out what kind of trouble Lady Cecily is in, then to extricate her from it. I very much enjoyed the way Enola solved this problem. Instead of the pretend-logical plans of Sherlock Holmes as invented by Conan Doyle, Enola investigates the way a real investigator does: with no detailed plan she goes to places where answers are to be found, then sniffs around and follows her nose until she learns what she needs to know. She is admirably clever.

I enjoyed Pink Fan not just because it's a good story in its own right, but because it builds out the characters of Enola and Sherlock and even Lady Cecily (a little) -- I felt that we were making progress towards Enola's bigger story.

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