Friendship is built on a foundation of trust that's not often articulated beforehand. People intrinsically want to trust their friends, spill all their secrets, and expect their privacy to be respected. Of course, not all friends (and certainly not all people) are truly good, so what happens when there's a breach of trust in the unspoken contract of friendship? In the newest installment of the Charlotte Holmes series, Brittany Cavallaro puts these ideas under scrutiny after the tragic ending of The Last of August. With a new format involving narration from both our main characters, an ever-evolving mystery case, and immense growth of character, readers will be on the edge of their seats wondering, will Jamie and Charlotte solve this case and come out on the other side unscathed?Brittany Cavallaro is the New York Times bestselling author of the Charlotte Holmes novels. With Emily Henry, she is the author of Hello Girls. She is also the author of the poetry collections Girl-King and Unhistorical. A recipient of a National Endowment in the Arts fellowship, Cavallaro received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her PhD in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. If you're interested in more of my reviews of Cavallaro's work, you can find them all here.
It's been a year since the shocking death of August Moriarty, and Jamie and Charlotte haven't spoken. Jamie is going through the motions at Sherringford, trying to finish his senior year without incident, with a nice girlfriend he can't seem to fall for. Until strange things start happening to him. Strange things that might mean nothing at all -- or that someone is after him again. Charlotte is on the run, from Lucien Moriarty and from her own mistakes. No one has seen her since that fateful night on the lawn in Sussex. Charlotte wants it that way. She knows she isn't safe to be around. She knows that her Watson can't forgive her. Holmes and Watson may not be looking to reconcile, but there is someone who wants the team back together. Someone who has been quietly observing them both. Making plans. Biding their time. Because that someone wants to see one of them suffer and the other one dead.
In my reviews of the first two books of the Charlotte Holmes series, I commented on how I enjoyed Jamie's first-person point of view narration for the story. But that's really all that it was: mostly just narration. Now, as we begin this new saga, Jamie is reconciling who he is without Charlotte. More than just narration, Jamie feels like a solid character readers can start to connect to, because he's grieving and surviving -- maybe not in the best way, but that's one of the reasons he starts to become dynamic all on his own (and not in the face of or because of Charlotte's presence). We begin to understand Jamie's obsession with moral and morality, and how his past experiences are responsible for those world-views. In fact, all of what Jamie believes in now has meant his painstaking stripping of romance from it all. In other words, he's stopped romanticizing everything, and has started to look at the world in a completely different light. This is a really refreshing point of view, then, because we are truly growing with Jamie. Jamie is in no way an unreliable narrator, but is telling the story as he's seeing the changes in it, which suggests all the growth and progress his character has made since the first book in the series. This is incredibly reflective of how we all move through life, as past stories become clearer as we keep revising who we want to be. This is the main reason I find Jamie feeling more like a character in this novel, rather than just a narration device, and a very compelling character at that.
I've always loved Charlotte's morally gray character, and seeing her more in-depth in this novel is exciting for many reasons. Through Charlotte, we begin to understand what exactly happened at the end of The Last of August and what that meant for the Holmes-Watson relationship. We do start in a sort of weird time, since so much time has passed between the ending of The Last of August and The Case for Jamie, but Charlotte's control over her story allows the reader to also feel in control of the events going on. That is to say, it's harder for readers to get lost in the story. It's also difficult for readers to confuse Charlotte and Jamie in this story, because Charlotte has such a precise and clear voice. Though she has trouble articulating what she wants to say to others half the time, to readers she is articulate, even in her rambling moments. We also finally get to see the infamous childhood she's survived, and the backstory -- but can we trust her morally gray character? For the first two books in the series, we might not have, because Jamie didn't always fully trust her. But when we see how clearly and rawly she lays out the facts of her heartbreaking childhood, we can't help but sympathize for her. There's so much emotion behind her hard-to-read and heartbreaking confessions to not trust her. For those who remember what Charlotte was like back in A Study in Charlotte, we definitely see a progression of growth in her character, as she's constantly battling herself and others to become a better version of herself -- even if she isn't always nice, which she doesn't even have to be. Charlotte remains my favorite character in this series, and finally getting to see her happy was well worth waiting for -- I just hope it lasts until the end of the series!
This storyline is definitely grittier, as seen by the extreme lengths the characters would go to by the end. But, we can tell that the book is going to be different from just the very first page. Cavallaro has executed a very smooth way of implementing character point of view switches for the third novel in the Charlotte Holmes series. In A Study in Charlotte, we got only one chapter in her point of view; in The Last of August, we got two chapters. Now, The Case for Jamie is half narrated by Jamie, and half narrated by Charlotte. These point of view switches are effective for the story in numerous ways. For one, it helped me track the growth both of these characters presented within these novels that I've just analyze above. Secondly, the chapters become shorter, which makes for a quicker (but no less enjoyable) reading experience. Cavallaro is also able to expertly build anticipation at well-cut chapter breaks. This decision leads to overall better storytelling, because higher anticipation and the ability to read faster causes for readers to be more engaged with a story and with its characters -- at least, this was my experience with The Case for Jamie. While Charlotte's and Jamie's storylines don't overlap all the time, it does allow for the full weight of the ending of The Last of August to hit home: seeing it from two points of view drives the heartbreak home, and allows readers to remember how much the characters continually grow throughout the book. It's also a fun parallel to see how Jamie's looking towards the future but is always caught up by the past; Charlotte is looking towards the past to better understand her present, thinking she doesn't have much of a future until the two characters meet up again. The point of view switches are definitely one of my favorite parts of this novel.
Charlotte's and Jamie's relationship is definitely a fan favorite, because it's not an easy relationship whatsoever. It's not an easy romance, or an easy friendship, for so many reasons. There have been breaches of trust, past violations, and a lot of distance that makes the kind of easy camaraderie we expect in young adult fiction to be nonexistent. It's an interesting relationship to follow, mostly because we've only seen it from Jamie's point of view so far. Now that we get to see Charlotte's side of things, we start to see how truly messy it all is, and how hard it is to articulate the mess it has become. Jamie and Charlotte have harder conversations with one another that most teenagers never experience, which makes them characters we can constantly learn from. Of course, Jamie and Charlotte have also gone through things no rational human being can expect to go through, but even then, there's always something to learn. The kind of aching happiness they find at the end is so hard-won you can't help but smile and cheer for them. But when they were fighting and bleeding together, I know my heart hurt for them, wondering if they'd ever figure it out. That, in my opinion, is another part of real life that Cavallaro literally rips from the world to put in her novels. It's raw feeling, and while we might not relate intimately with what Charlotte and Jamie go through, we can certainly remember times in our own lives those feelings were relevant and hurt. I'm beyond excited to see how their relationship will continue to evolve in the last book in the series, and hoping all the best for some of my favorite young adult characters.
After a heartwarming and open ending, it's almost impossible to imagine anything else crazy happening to Jamie and Charlotte. The key word there is almost. Get excited for the last adventure starring these two dynamic and crackling characters in A Question of Holmes. Find that review here!
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