Synopsis (from
the publisher):
It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has
struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s
family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage
stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man
lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying
breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in
earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was
afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the
most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire
life.”
To Flavia the investigation is the stuff of science: full of
possibilities, contradictions, and connections. Soon her father, a man
raising his three daughters alone, is seized, accused of murder. And in
a police cell, during a violent thunderstorm, Colonel de Luce tells his
daughter an astounding story—of a schoolboy friendship turned
ugly, of a priceless object that vanished in a bizarre and brazen act
of thievery, of a Latin teacher who flung himself to his death from the
school’s tower thirty years before. Now Flavia is armed with more
than enough knowledge to tie two distant deaths together, to examine
new suspects, and begin a search that will lead her all the way to the
King of England himself. Of this much the girl is sure: her father is
innocent of murder—but protecting her and her sisters from
something even worse.
— ◊ —
— ◊ —
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
A Flavia
de Luce Mystery
Alan
Bradley
Delacorte Press (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-385-34230-6 (0385342306)
ISBN-13: 978-0-385-34230-8 (9780385342308)
Publication Date: February 2009
List Price: $23.00
— ◊ —
Review: Alan
Bradley’s novel, The Sweetness
at the Bottom of the Pie, is the 1950s debut for eleven-year-old
English sleuth and chemistry buff, Flavia Salina Dolores de Luca or
“Flave” as she calls herself. It’s a five-star
performance for young and old, and well worth applauding.
Flave’s a brat, a loveable, precocious and endearing one, but a
brat nevertheless. She’s fixated on chemistry, thanks to the lab
paraphernalia and ancestral genes inherited from a mentally unstable
Tarquin de Luce. “My particular passion was poison,” she
says. She’s also influenced by the mystery novels she reads and
likes to refer to them. So when Flave discovers a downed man gasping
his last in the cucumber patch at her family home of Buckshaw near the
village of Bishop’s Lacey, with his final whispered word
“Vale” cloaked in “a whiff of a peculiar odour
– an odour whose name was, for an instant, on the very tip of my
tongue “, she is ecstatically in her element. Now, she can apply
her knowledge of chemistry for more than avenging slights from her
older sisters, seventeen-year-old boy-mooning Ophelia
(“Feely”) and thirteen-year-old bibliophile Daphne
(“Daffy”) with her fountain-like spewing of passages from
the latest novel she has read.
Flavia’s premiere case gets complicated when a dead bird, a jack
snipe indigenous to Norway, is found on the premises with a Black Penny
stamp impaled on its bill. Her father, a stamp collector who she thinks
“loved stamps more dearly than he loved his offspring,”
especially after his wife, her beloved mother, Harriet, died in a
mountain climbing accident, gets entangled in the case, too. And his
entanglement draws in “Father’s man, his factotum,”
Dogger, an abused prisoner of war who it was rumoured “had been
forced to eat rats,” suffers occasional delirium and is
“happiest in the garden.” But others are implicated, too,
as Inspector Hewitt discovers. There’s Mrs. Mullet, the cook, for
example who thinks of herself “as a character in a poem by A.A.
Milne” and produces “pus-like custard pies” for
which, Flave says, the family “would rather eat creamed worms on
toast.” There’s a strange photographer who comes to call
and a retired librarian, a niece to “old Cuppa Twining”
whose mysterious death years ago is linked to Flavia’s father
when he was Jocko, the schoolboy , to the dead man in the garden, and
to others in the story. Always just a step ahead of the Inspector and
his men, Flave races about the village and its environs on
“Gladys” her mother’s ancient rechristened bike to
interview her own list of suspects, do her own experiments, find
newspaper archives and obits and root through waste containers because
“You never know what you’re getting into when you stick
your nose in other people’s rubbish.” Her nosing around,
though, gets her into far more trouble than she ever imagined, and she
must use all of her ingenuity and knowledge of poisons and chemicals in
order to clear her father’s name, save her own life and bring a
murderer to justice.
Flavia is undoubtedly the star of this show. She is no goody-two-shoes
but neither is she as wicked as she tries to present herself. Her love
for her parents is obvious but never maudlin, and there is a begrudging
affection between her and her sisters, despite the chemicals she
injects into Feely’s lipstick. As younger readers will
appreciate, Flave frequently appears to be light-years ahead of the
adults she deals with (one of whom looks like “a George Bernard
Shaw who had shrunk in the wash”), and more than capable of
holding her own against her siblings. As everyone will agree,
she’s a pretty smart cookie even on the run as a self-confessed
“eleven-year-old murderess in pigtails and jumper,“ trying
to protect her father. And scenes are priceless of her searching the
foliage for a poisonous plant while “launching into a loudly
whistled rendition of ‘Bibbidi –Bobbidi-Boo’”
or warming a bread and brown sugar sandwich for as long as it takes to
sing three verses of “If I knew You Were Coming
I’d’ve Baked a Cake” or of her cycling
“bumpty-bump across the fields” for a shortcut while
belting out: “Oh the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter/And on her
daughter./They wash their feet in soda water.”
A well paced story, written with Dickensian flair, Sherlockian suspense
and tongue-in-cheek fun, Alan Bradley’s sterling novel sets the
bar for the series to follow.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
Review Copyright © 2009 — M. Wayne Cunningham — All Rights Reserved — Reprinted with Permission
Have you read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie? How would you rate it?
Mysteries in this series …
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Delacorte Press (Hardcover), February 2009
ISBN-10: 0-385-34230-6 (0385342306)
ISBN-13: 978-0-385-34230-8 (9780385342308)
Omnimystery keywords for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
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Location(s) referenced: England.
