Thank you to LibraryThing for the opportunity to early review. Due to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and conflicts of interest involving the author, I will not be reading or reviewing this title.

The pros:
- Interesting world
- Cool magic
- A few lovely characters
- Lots of action/very fast moving plot

The not so great:
- Needed more editing
- Clunky/juvenile writing

I really wanted to love this - the story and the world are so interesting and fun, but it wasn't executed very well. The writing is stilted and awkward, especially when attempting to solidify the misogyny of the men. The internal monologues from several male POVs are exceptionally cringey, and high stakes moments lose their emotional momentum in the poor writing.

TBD on if I continue the series. I wouldn't try to persuade anyone out of reading it, and younger audiences probably won't notice much of what bogged it down for me; a disappointing read for me, though.

I was super looking forward to learning more about Iranian activism, but unfortunately the writing here is very unpolished. The dialogue is stilted and awkward, the framing entirely telling with no showing, and I think it needed more editing. Additionally, this is my fault but, I was hoping to reading an Own Voices situation, but the author is not Iranian. I should have vetted better. But, bad writing + not an own voices = moving on to better written books.

DNFing at ~10%. The dialogue is awkward and stilted and hard to get through, and the Medium has been referred to as the G-slur at least three times by this point. I am hopeful that the use of that word would have eventually been addressed, since "Romani" is in the glossary, but it was too much of a slog to get to. I also felt a bit cringe about a white woman writing about the perils of being a Black man in the setting, but how white women were prone to swooning for Watson when he put on the charm - it just felt off! There are lots of great and good reviews for this from diehard Sherlock fans, so if that's your cup of tea you may find this to your liking. It's not for me, though.

Thank you to LibraryThing for the opportunity to early review this book. Unfortunately, due to this authors deeply racist, zionist, and hateful stances regarding the genocide of Palestine I will not be reading or reviewing this title & have concerns regarding his ability to present history accurately.

This is a strange book for several reasons. First, it is not laid out in a normal format. Each chapter is bullet-pointed or numbered and there are no normal paragraph breaks (aside from chapter 21). It feels more like an outline of a book than an actual book.
I think what the author is trying to do is bring up questions that will help you dive into the text for yourself and reason through what it says and doesn’t say in a way that gives you a better understanding of Scripture. But for the most part, this doesn’t land well for me for several reasons:
1) Many of the questions are leading… they only have 1 "correct answer" often indicated by the way the follow-up question is worded. However, the author doesn’t explore what those answers are or why he worded the question in such a way to indicate there’s only one correct answer.
2) Sometimes the author does answer the questions, but probably only about 10% of the time. If the goal is to make the reader think and ask questions, why did he choose to answer these questions while leaving other more consequential questions unanswered?
3) The author asks questions and appears to have done little to no research to find the answer. For example:
"The Torah does not say the name of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why? What prompted many people to say that the fruit was an apple? Why an apple and not a pear? Isn’t it ironic that they say the forbidden fruit was an apple while today we say the opposite show more that an apple is a healthy fruit that people should eat: “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”? "
A two-second Google search will tell you that when the Bible was translated into Latin this confusion began. The Latin word for “apple” is mālum, while the Latin word for “evil” is mălum. Only after the Bible was translated into Latin do we start to see apples in depictions of the garden.
4) Some chapters (like chapters 20-22) contain no questions at all. If the point of this book is to provide you with questions to help you dive into the text of Genesis, chapters, and sections like this do little to help in that effort. Instead they prove that he could have done more to flesh out the possible answers to his questions earlier in the book.

Some of the questions in the book are very thought-provoking and good (see chapter 7). But many of the questions are not helpful and diving deeper into the text and will leave the reader wondering why this question is an issue or why this question came up at all.
There are a few other issues I take with the book like on page 13 the where author incorrectly transliterates a passage from Hebrew to English as (aher instead of asher) which is a very different meaning. Luckily he translates it into English correctly, but I think this misspelling is more important than an English typo. Because when working with translations there’s a natural desire to be more thorough, aware, and cognizant of what you’re doing.
The last 3 chapters are not on the topic of the book and feel out of place. Chapter 20 is about how we got verses and chapters, and then the last seven pages of the book (chapters 21-22) constitute a second part of the book on the "Mistaken Idea about Jewish Ethic (sic) and Behavior" which has nothing to do with "What we don’t know about God and People in the Bible."
All in all this book feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be.

I was given this book as an advance reader’s copy by my request in exchange for an honest review. show less