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More early reviews. Not sure where where they are from.
I resent the implication that Bond girls weren't heroes in their own right. I get that she probably meant that she wanted to be the main protagonist, but her wording rubbed me wrong.
As a girl growing up watching Bond I DID want to be a Bond girl. And not just because he's attractive. I wanted to go on an adventure WITH Bond. Not just be in his world, or take his place.
I'm open to these new characters, but I've been hoping that Bond himself would show up in this series at some point, and play a major role eventually, even if it wasn't until the end of the 2nd book. If he's absent for the majority of the entire series, I'll be disappointed, no matter how much I might grow to like these new characters.
It's a high level specialized position that ought to take years of training and experience before being promoted to.
Maybe if we'd first met him while he was on his leave in Jamaica. We could have gotten some nice Bond-ese travel details of his home there that way. We could have been shown how he felt restless there during peace time, instead of him just telling Moneypenny that. Maybe he could have had a date while he was there, that was shown to be a guy.
The hearing disability he got during his time in the military might have been much more interesting reveal to wait until later in the story. Maybe with a flashback.
Maybe I'm being a bit too harsh from just a short excerpt. I am still looking forward to reading the book. But I just want it to be awesome and I'm not convinced.
Yeah, I think we are all kind of cautiously trending in the same direction, but this has some strong Modern Young Adult Fiction vibes. First we situate all the characters in their specific intersections of adjectives and then we figure out a story.
Still, the story could be good, so we'll see. I mean, it's not like Fleming has never introduced a character's backstory with an info dump by Tanner or M...
Happening right now, but available to watch later as well. Kim Sherwood is interviewing Anthony Horowitz about With a Mind to Kill at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. There might be a few bits about Double Or Nothing, but seems to be mostly focused on Horowitz.
I hope she talks about the villain next.
Very mild spoilers ahead.
3 out of 5 stars
In Kim Sherwood's novel Double or Nothing, 'Miss' Moneypenny has become 'Ms', and is now a Jaguar-driving spymaster
By Jake Kerridge
Whenever I read one of the many James Bond novels written by hands other than Ian Fleming’s, there always comes a point when my inner Alan Partridge mutters: “Stop getting Bond wrong!” I can watch even Roger Moore with pleasure in the films, but with a book, if I think for the briefest moment that Bond wouldn’t do that or say that or think that, the whole exercise suddenly seems rather pointless.
Kim Sherwood has sidestepped this problem in the first of a new series of novels set “in the Bond universe” and endorsed by the Ian Fleming estate: Bond doesn’t appear at all, except in the briefest of flashbacks. 007 is MIA, thought to have been captured by Rattenfänger, a terrorist group so ruthless as to make Smersh look like the Red Cross.
You might think a novel about the Double 0 Section of MI6 with no James Bond would be Hamlet without the Prince, but I can’t say I missed him much while I was bowled along by Sherwood’s yarn. Other familiar characters are here, however, albeit retooled for the 21st Century.
Miss – or, these days, “Ms” – Moneypenny has graduated from typing to running the 00 section, and drives a “1967 Jaguar E-Type Series 1 4.2 in British racing green”, newly converted to electric by Q Branch, where in the original novels she seemed like one of nature’s bus users. Q himself has undergone an even more radical transition than that of the bufferish Desmond Llewellyn into the hipstery Ben Whishaw in the films, but I won’t give away the details.
The focus of the novel is on not one but three Double 0 agents. 003 is Johanna Harwood, an ex-doctor who’s junked the Hippocratic oath. 009 is Aazar Siddig Bashir, a chess champion quietly appalled by Bond’s breezy amorality: gunning for baddies, part of his mind is focused on “trying not to want to kill, because a licence shouldn’t mean a desire”.
Finally there’s 004, Joe Dryden – gay, deaf, working-class and black. He’s also apparently not one for following the news, as Ms Moneypenny has to break it to him that the climate is in a spot of bother – “Modelling shows that if we continue business as usual, we could see a five-degree increase by the end of the century. Melting Arctic. Rising seas.” This is in the course of a briefing on tech billionaire Sir Bertram Paradise, whose geo-engineering schemes may represent the planet’s best hope. The trouble is that the Rattenfänger gang look to be trying to nobble Sir Bertram and hold the world to ransom.
As our three heroes get on with saving the day while also puzzling out who’s the mole in MI6 responsible for getting Bond captured, Sherwood bustles us round the world – from Syria to the Kazakh desert to Hong Kong – and treats us to a blizzard of well-executed set-pieces, including a thrilling boxing competition and a hair-raising encounter with a tiger.
Unshackled from the burden of fidelity to Fleming’s character, her book feels a lot freer and more spontaneous than the more conventional Bond continuation novels, while still managing to capture something of Fleming’s rollicking spirit – as well as sharing his taste for sadistic violence.
Sherwood – whose only previous publication is Testament, an acclaimed literary novel about a Holocaust survivor – has a nice line in banter between her Double 0s, and although she sometimes overwrites (“His chest was tight with smoke, which had poured down his throat like concrete eager to fill a void”), she is more often neat and concise.
There is the odd moment of guying the franchise – one villain lays “a mock hand over his mouth” and exclaims “I’ve said too much” after outlining his evil plan to a Double 0. But there’s also one of those foreign baddies who end sentences by saying “yes?” in a sinister way (“Always the knight in shining armour, yes?”) who doesn’t seem to be intended as a parody.
The book could do with a little more of that magical vitality that makes you happy to swallow any absurdity in Fleming’s novels, but I suspect this series is only going to get better.
Is this exclusive to Amazon?
And the pedant in me would also point out it's not a 4.2 if it's been given a different motor :)
I was wondering this myself or if there'll be a Waterstones Special Edition as well? I see the novel is £10 (half price) on pre-order on Amazon UK currently.
That's what Photoshop's for, lads.
The Waterstones Edition was announced some time ago. You can pre-order it here:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/double-or-nothing/kim-sherwood/2928377114749
I'm hoping there the same, as I've already ordered the Waterstones Edition.
The Waterstones Edition was announced some time ago. You can pre-order it here:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/double-or-nothing/kim-sherwood/2928377114749
I'm hoping there the same, as I've already ordered the Waterstones Edition.
Update: I asked whether it was an Amazon exclusive, and Kim Sherwood replied:
"No, just the first print run 🍸"
I like that she replies to fans. Same with Anthony Horowitz and Raymond Benson.