Title: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the PieAuthor: Alan Bradley
Every once in a while, I love a good mystery. This is a good mystery. The eleven-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce, wakes up early one morning to find a dead man among the cucumbers in her garden, and then proceeds to race the police in her small English town to find the murderer. A child detective could be oh so wrong, but Bradley does a great job with the precocious de Luce, whose greatest love in life is Chemistry. She takes off on her bicycle, sleuthing in an age before the internet made it both easy and possible to do it from the comfort of home (the book takes place in 1950).
As far as the mystery goes, the murderer wasn't all that much of a surprise, but the backstory is compelling enough that it doesn't really matter. I learned a lot about philately (which sounds dirty, but it's really just stamp collecting) and poisonous compounds along the way. While the book's heroine is a child, this isn't a book written for children (it won the Dagger Award for best first crime novel), although I think it would be appropriate for a teenage reader. Apparently Bradley has a second Flavia de Luce novel in the works, and I'm very eager to read about her next adventures.
2 comments:
I just finished reading this one too and I loved it! Bradley's second Flavia de Luce book comes out in March I think and is already on order at my library. I thought it was interesting to compare Flavia with Paloma Josse, a similarly precocious girl. I found it impossible to believe that Paloma could be real, but for some reason, Flavia felt more authentic and I adored her.
I keep hearing great things about this book. I'm going to go put it on my hold list right now.
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