Review: Lock and Mori by Heather W. Petty - Transcending a fanfiction premise
It shouldn't have worked.
I picked up this book at the local library based purely on a striking cover and an interesting title. "Lock & Mori" is unique. It sticks out. But once I realized what this book was about, part of me couldn't help but roll my eyes.
Let me put it this way. Imagine you are on faction.net or AO3 and browsing some Sherlock Holmes fanfiction when you come across a synopsis that looked something like this.
High School AU. James "Mori" Moriarty is a brilliant high school student living in abusive home. Her life changes when she meets a strange student named Sherlock proposes a challenge she can't resist. But can Mori solve a mystery without revealing some dark secrets of her own?
I don't have anything against fanfiction. I've written some back in high school, and I've beta-ed plenty of fanfics my friends wrote. But High School AU is one of the hoariest of the hoary fanfiction cliches. I know why it exists - a lot of fanfiction writers are high school students or younger, and resting their favorite show in an environment they live in every day has an obvious appeal. But it happened so often, in seemingly every fandom, that it does kind of get old.
Now, people might complain that calling it "fanfiction" isn't fair. And they wouldn't be wrong. There have been plenty of works written about the world's most famous detective - especially since most of Arthur Conan Doyle's original novels lapsed into public domain. This is hardly the first time we've seen Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty in the modern-day world - there is not one, but two television shows airing right no
w that have this premise. And I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if someone else wrote a novel featuring a young Sherlock. But the set-up still screamed that old fanfiction cliche... And if you look at the bare bones of the plot, you find a lot of those cliches. An abusive parent. A dead parent. Characters that were enemies in the source material falling in love. Dark family secrets.
But here is the thing. The reason why "published fanfiction" gets such a bad rep isn't so much because certain tropes, it's because of the way they are executed. A lot of teen fanfiction writers (and I was definitely not exempt from that) try to write about complicated issues without quite grasping the full implications. It isn't necessarily their fault - they just didn't have the experience to pull it off well.
As I kept reading, I realized that Heather heatherwpetty Petty actually thought through what she was talking about. I may not have lost a parent, but I lost family members, and Mori's grief over the losing her mother feels real. It's not a rational thing, and it takes you to weird places, and it gives you good days and bad days. If the book dedication is anything to go by, Petty drew from personal experience, but that doesn't diminish the novel in the slightest.
Actually, a lot of emotions in Lock & Mori felt real. They way Mori and her best friend, Sadie, didn't have a huge argument so much as drifted apart before the events of the novel, and the way they wound up reconciling. The way Mori's father's physical and psychological abuse was handled, and the way she and her siblings responded to it. And the way the father didn't just become abusive because of grief. If you read Mori's recollections, it's clear that the signs were there - she just didn't notice them at the time, or, at least, didn't realize exactly what they mean.
Another thing I liked about the book is the way Petty handled the characters. There are obvious echoes of the source characters in our teen protagonists. Like Doyle!Moriarty, Mori is a math prodigy, and has a knack for deduction, planning complex schemes and not just lying on the spot, but lying well. But she is also a character in her own right, in her caring about Sadie and her brothers, and the fact that does have other hobbies and interested.
The book's Sherlock is an interesting interpretation. Doyle's Sherlock[Note](the only person who calls him "Lock" is Mori, so I'm going to use the full name)had his eccentricities, and tendency to focus on the challenges at hand and become listless when there is nothing to stimulate his mind. Most of the recent portrayals suggested that he is on the autism spectrum somewhere, whether it's Sherlock's "high-functioning sociopath" or Elementary's more Asperger's syndrome(ish) depiction. Petty's depiction of Sherlock goes into a similar direction. He is awkward, he tends to focus on his interests in the expense of everything else and he does the " too caught up in doing something to realize how it will affect somebody else" thing I devoted so many LJ posts to. But, at the same time, he isn't quite like either the Sherlock or Elementary versions. He is unique, both as a character and as a Sherlock.
Speaking of Sherlock's habits, there are two things I liked about the way Petty handled his deductions. First of all, I liked that Mori finds it annoying - because, when you think about it, she is kind of right that it comes across as judgy. And second, I like that Sherlock has blind spots - like how (without spoiling anything) he didn't realize that a girl on the train was dealing with an unexpected pregnancy, while Mori was able to catch on pretty quickly. Ultimately, ability to make deductions is based on knowledge and perceptions, and our perceptions are shaped by biases. And one of those biases are implicit gender-based assumptions that we absorb as we grow up.
Another thing I quite like is the way Petty depicted contemporary London. She is an American living in Nevada, so it was the kind of thing she would have to look into. I will leave it to people who've actually been to the city to tell me how accurate it is, but it seems that she had at least done her homework.As far as contemporary British teen culture and slang - again, I defer to the actual Brits to tell me how well it worked, but based on what I gleamed from TV shows, movies, books and radio dramas, no blatant Americanisms stuck out. And, as far as I could tell, there weren't any gratuitous references to this fact that these are British People Living in Britain, either.
(It's the sort of thing that's a bane of even some professional writers, and as someone who isn't an American, I live to see American writers doing foreign cultures justice)
It helps that Petty's London is ethnically diverse. Speaking of which - while Sadie is a self-proclaimed Southern belle (who, thankfully, doesn't fit many of the stereotypes), the fact that she's a black southern belle is a neat touch.
One thing I found interesting about the book is that... Whenever your work uses some version of pre-existing characters, there is always a question of would the story have worked if they were all original characters. The Great Detective and the Criminal Mastermind are archetypes that have been ingrained in the popular culture. If you simply take away all references to Doyle's works, would the story lose anything?
I don't think the plot would change a whole lot. But at the same time, knowing that we are dealing with alternative versions of Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty does add a certain tension that the novel wouldn't have otherwise had. We expect Mori and Sherlock to eventually become enemies. And we expect Mori to eventually become a criminal mastermind. Since the story is told from Mori's perspective, you look for signs of what's to come, the seeds of transformation. And this does change the way you interpret certain scenes.[Spoiler (click to open)]Like how Mori only decides to kill her father after he hit her (before that, he only hit her brothers). It's not that she decides that he is out of control it has to be stop - it's that she takes personal offense to the fact that he hit her. With an original character, it could go in several different ways, but with an alternative version of Moriarty, it's hard not to interpret it as the first sign of her budding villany.
For better or for worse, having the leads based on existing characters does affect the story. And what Petty does is actually more subtle than a lot of other writers would do.
Speaking of tension... There is a trope that shows up in a lot of works. It's common in YA, but other categories aren't immune to it, either - characters who supposedly trust each other keeping secrets from each other, secrets that, if revealed, would resolve whatever problem they're facing much quicker. I've become pretty annoyed with this trope, and while it rears its ugly head in Lock & Mori, at least Mori has reasons for keeping certain things secret. It may not be the best thing to do, but you get where she's coming from. Which is refreshing.
The novel does have its weaknesses. The mystery isn't solved right away, but once it is, it's pretty straightforward. I am willing to forgive that, since the novel is as much about Mori and Sherlock's character developments and the development of their relationship as it is about solving mysteries. But that brings me to another weakness... While I buy their romantic relationship working and developing once it got off the ground, I am not sure I quite buy how it started. Mori is attracted to Sherlock more or less from the get-go (even if she tries to deny it), and it's not really clear why. It isn't as if she found him endearing. Of course, plenty of real life teen relationships started from nothing but physical attraction, but I'm not sure how much of a factor it is here.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that, when we have a romantic relationship in fiction, we want to see the characters drawn together, and we want them drawn together for some kind of reason (even if that reason is something as superficial as "oh he/she is pretty") and I wasn't sure that really came through in the book.
There are also some things that might have been flaws under normal circumstances. If this was a stand-alone book, I would complaining that John Watson's apperance was a little more than a cameo that barely served the plot, and several plot threads are left open-ended. But by the middle of the book, I realized that, like so many YA books, it's planned as a first book of the trilogy, and I'm more forgiving of a book that's, technically speaking, just Part 1 of a greater story.
Personally, I still think that the first book of a trilogy needs to be able to work as a complete story in its own right. Look at the first book of Dresden Files series, or even the first book of jimbutcher's newest series. Both of them have some loose ends and open-ended plot threads and teasers for books to come, but the characters' conflicts are largely resolved, and if the rest of the books in the series get cancelled, you still feel like you got a complete reading experience. Lock & Mori end on more of a cliffhanger.
Like I said, it isn't really a flaw per se. It's not the way I would have done it, but I understand why Petty did it the way she did, and I can judge the book accordingly.
Ultimately, I think the book has a lot going for it. I found myself genuinely getting involved with the story and the characters, far more than I expected to. If you are looking for a good mystery, this may not be the right book for you. But if you are looking for an emotional roller-coaster of a story with interesting teen characters who (mostly) interact realistically, a story that gets pretty good mileage out of some pretty tired tropes... I would at least check it out from your local library.
I know I will probably read the next book, just to see where the story goes.
----
Lock & Mori is available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble and in book stores and libraries near you. To find out more Heather W. Perry, check out her website. The review copy of the book came from the Niles Public Library.
I picked up this book at the local library based purely on a striking cover and an interesting title. "Lock & Mori" is unique. It sticks out. But once I realized what this book was about, part of me couldn't help but roll my eyes.
Let me put it this way. Imagine you are on faction.net or AO3 and browsing some Sherlock Holmes fanfiction when you come across a synopsis that looked something like this.
High School AU. James "Mori" Moriarty is a brilliant high school student living in abusive home. Her life changes when she meets a strange student named Sherlock proposes a challenge she can't resist. But can Mori solve a mystery without revealing some dark secrets of her own?
I don't have anything against fanfiction. I've written some back in high school, and I've beta-ed plenty of fanfics my friends wrote. But High School AU is one of the hoariest of the hoary fanfiction cliches. I know why it exists - a lot of fanfiction writers are high school students or younger, and resting their favorite show in an environment they live in every day has an obvious appeal. But it happened so often, in seemingly every fandom, that it does kind of get old.
Now, people might complain that calling it "fanfiction" isn't fair. And they wouldn't be wrong. There have been plenty of works written about the world's most famous detective - especially since most of Arthur Conan Doyle's original novels lapsed into public domain. This is hardly the first time we've seen Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty in the modern-day world - there is not one, but two television shows airing right no
w that have this premise. And I wouldn't be too terribly shocked if someone else wrote a novel featuring a young Sherlock. But the set-up still screamed that old fanfiction cliche... And if you look at the bare bones of the plot, you find a lot of those cliches. An abusive parent. A dead parent. Characters that were enemies in the source material falling in love. Dark family secrets.
But here is the thing. The reason why "published fanfiction" gets such a bad rep isn't so much because certain tropes, it's because of the way they are executed. A lot of teen fanfiction writers (and I was definitely not exempt from that) try to write about complicated issues without quite grasping the full implications. It isn't necessarily their fault - they just didn't have the experience to pull it off well.
As I kept reading, I realized that Heather heatherwpetty Petty actually thought through what she was talking about. I may not have lost a parent, but I lost family members, and Mori's grief over the losing her mother feels real. It's not a rational thing, and it takes you to weird places, and it gives you good days and bad days. If the book dedication is anything to go by, Petty drew from personal experience, but that doesn't diminish the novel in the slightest.
Actually, a lot of emotions in Lock & Mori felt real. They way Mori and her best friend, Sadie, didn't have a huge argument so much as drifted apart before the events of the novel, and the way they wound up reconciling. The way Mori's father's physical and psychological abuse was handled, and the way she and her siblings responded to it. And the way the father didn't just become abusive because of grief. If you read Mori's recollections, it's clear that the signs were there - she just didn't notice them at the time, or, at least, didn't realize exactly what they mean.
Another thing I liked about the book is the way Petty handled the characters. There are obvious echoes of the source characters in our teen protagonists. Like Doyle!Moriarty, Mori is a math prodigy, and has a knack for deduction, planning complex schemes and not just lying on the spot, but lying well. But she is also a character in her own right, in her caring about Sadie and her brothers, and the fact that does have other hobbies and interested.
The book's Sherlock is an interesting interpretation. Doyle's Sherlock[Note](the only person who calls him "Lock" is Mori, so I'm going to use the full name)had his eccentricities, and tendency to focus on the challenges at hand and become listless when there is nothing to stimulate his mind. Most of the recent portrayals suggested that he is on the autism spectrum somewhere, whether it's Sherlock's "high-functioning sociopath" or Elementary's more Asperger's syndrome(ish) depiction. Petty's depiction of Sherlock goes into a similar direction. He is awkward, he tends to focus on his interests in the expense of everything else and he does the " too caught up in doing something to realize how it will affect somebody else" thing I devoted so many LJ posts to. But, at the same time, he isn't quite like either the Sherlock or Elementary versions. He is unique, both as a character and as a Sherlock.
Speaking of Sherlock's habits, there are two things I liked about the way Petty handled his deductions. First of all, I liked that Mori finds it annoying - because, when you think about it, she is kind of right that it comes across as judgy. And second, I like that Sherlock has blind spots - like how (without spoiling anything) he didn't realize that a girl on the train was dealing with an unexpected pregnancy, while Mori was able to catch on pretty quickly. Ultimately, ability to make deductions is based on knowledge and perceptions, and our perceptions are shaped by biases. And one of those biases are implicit gender-based assumptions that we absorb as we grow up.
Another thing I quite like is the way Petty depicted contemporary London. She is an American living in Nevada, so it was the kind of thing she would have to look into. I will leave it to people who've actually been to the city to tell me how accurate it is, but it seems that she had at least done her homework.As far as contemporary British teen culture and slang - again, I defer to the actual Brits to tell me how well it worked, but based on what I gleamed from TV shows, movies, books and radio dramas, no blatant Americanisms stuck out. And, as far as I could tell, there weren't any gratuitous references to this fact that these are British People Living in Britain, either.
(It's the sort of thing that's a bane of even some professional writers, and as someone who isn't an American, I live to see American writers doing foreign cultures justice)
It helps that Petty's London is ethnically diverse. Speaking of which - while Sadie is a self-proclaimed Southern belle (who, thankfully, doesn't fit many of the stereotypes), the fact that she's a black southern belle is a neat touch.
One thing I found interesting about the book is that... Whenever your work uses some version of pre-existing characters, there is always a question of would the story have worked if they were all original characters. The Great Detective and the Criminal Mastermind are archetypes that have been ingrained in the popular culture. If you simply take away all references to Doyle's works, would the story lose anything?
I don't think the plot would change a whole lot. But at the same time, knowing that we are dealing with alternative versions of Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty does add a certain tension that the novel wouldn't have otherwise had. We expect Mori and Sherlock to eventually become enemies. And we expect Mori to eventually become a criminal mastermind. Since the story is told from Mori's perspective, you look for signs of what's to come, the seeds of transformation. And this does change the way you interpret certain scenes.[Spoiler (click to open)]Like how Mori only decides to kill her father after he hit her (before that, he only hit her brothers). It's not that she decides that he is out of control it has to be stop - it's that she takes personal offense to the fact that he hit her. With an original character, it could go in several different ways, but with an alternative version of Moriarty, it's hard not to interpret it as the first sign of her budding villany.
For better or for worse, having the leads based on existing characters does affect the story. And what Petty does is actually more subtle than a lot of other writers would do.
Speaking of tension... There is a trope that shows up in a lot of works. It's common in YA, but other categories aren't immune to it, either - characters who supposedly trust each other keeping secrets from each other, secrets that, if revealed, would resolve whatever problem they're facing much quicker. I've become pretty annoyed with this trope, and while it rears its ugly head in Lock & Mori, at least Mori has reasons for keeping certain things secret. It may not be the best thing to do, but you get where she's coming from. Which is refreshing.
The novel does have its weaknesses. The mystery isn't solved right away, but once it is, it's pretty straightforward. I am willing to forgive that, since the novel is as much about Mori and Sherlock's character developments and the development of their relationship as it is about solving mysteries. But that brings me to another weakness... While I buy their romantic relationship working and developing once it got off the ground, I am not sure I quite buy how it started. Mori is attracted to Sherlock more or less from the get-go (even if she tries to deny it), and it's not really clear why. It isn't as if she found him endearing. Of course, plenty of real life teen relationships started from nothing but physical attraction, but I'm not sure how much of a factor it is here.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that, when we have a romantic relationship in fiction, we want to see the characters drawn together, and we want them drawn together for some kind of reason (even if that reason is something as superficial as "oh he/she is pretty") and I wasn't sure that really came through in the book.
There are also some things that might have been flaws under normal circumstances. If this was a stand-alone book, I would complaining that John Watson's apperance was a little more than a cameo that barely served the plot, and several plot threads are left open-ended. But by the middle of the book, I realized that, like so many YA books, it's planned as a first book of the trilogy, and I'm more forgiving of a book that's, technically speaking, just Part 1 of a greater story.
Personally, I still think that the first book of a trilogy needs to be able to work as a complete story in its own right. Look at the first book of Dresden Files series, or even the first book of jimbutcher's newest series. Both of them have some loose ends and open-ended plot threads and teasers for books to come, but the characters' conflicts are largely resolved, and if the rest of the books in the series get cancelled, you still feel like you got a complete reading experience. Lock & Mori end on more of a cliffhanger.
Like I said, it isn't really a flaw per se. It's not the way I would have done it, but I understand why Petty did it the way she did, and I can judge the book accordingly.
Ultimately, I think the book has a lot going for it. I found myself genuinely getting involved with the story and the characters, far more than I expected to. If you are looking for a good mystery, this may not be the right book for you. But if you are looking for an emotional roller-coaster of a story with interesting teen characters who (mostly) interact realistically, a story that gets pretty good mileage out of some pretty tired tropes... I would at least check it out from your local library.
I know I will probably read the next book, just to see where the story goes.
----
Lock & Mori is available on Amazon, at Barnes & Noble and in book stores and libraries near you. To find out more Heather W. Perry, check out her website. The review copy of the book came from the Niles Public Library.