Talk about sweetness! Although there is actually quite a lot of poison in this book and a tiny wee bit of murder, it just has so much delicious charm that I could pretty much recommend it to anyone of any age. I loved it, I think the Ginger will love it, my mother too, my 12-year-old nephew – quite possibly. I could twitter on forever but author Alan Bradley actually sums it up perfectly himself: “It’s the kind of detective novel I’d like to stumble across myself: a 1950s village, a church with its own encrypted saint, a forgetful vicar, a crumbling country house, a Victorian chemistry laboratory, wicked sisters, an absent father, a precocious (and perhaps unreliable) female narrator in pigtails – and poisons galore!”
Flavia de Luce is the unreliable female narrator of whom he speaks: a hilariously bright but slightly tragic 11-year-old chemistry fanatic rattling around her sprawling pile inventing different revenge strategies to practice upon her sisters. Invisible to her heartbroken widower father, Flavia is delighted to find a dead body residing in the cucumber patch early one summer morning, so undertakes to solve the mystery of who he is and just what brought him to the cucumbers – and finished him off – so expertly. The local police inspector, needless to say, finds this something of an irritant, which does not put Flavia off anything other than him. Her rage at being asked to go and rustle up some tea while he inspects the corpse had me in stitches. “So that was it. As at a birth, so at a death. Without so much as a kiss-me-quick-and-mind-the-marmalade, the only female in sight is enlisted to trot off and see that the water is boiled. Rustle something up, indeed! What did he take me for – some kind of cowboy?”
Delightfully English, I was astonished to find out that Alan Bradley is Canadian and only set foot on British soil for the first time to accept the Debut Dagger Award for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. overwhelmingly recommended.
