The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

I've been sitting on this for a few days, trying to gather my thoughts. Super torn about how to rate this one. On one hand, I enjoyed the mystery. I thought it was quite interesting, but I do like stamps. I have a collection myself, but nothing really rare or valuable like in this story.

I liked how dysfunctional the de Luce family is, and how Dogger and Mrs Mullet just roll with it all. It was all quirky in a good way. They are a strange combo of odd and normal. And while I liked Flavia, and her genius wrapped up in immaturity, she played older than 11 years old. Had she been just a few years older, I think I would have been in love. Genius or no, she just didn't feel eleven, if that makes sense.

However, I give full kudos to the narrator for the audio. She was delightful and actually bumped my rating up from 3 to 4. Definitely will read book 2.

This book had some incredibly racist bullshit in it and I can't believe I'm not seeing anything about it in other reviews.

I read a much later book in the Flavia De Luce series, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, first, and liked it so much that I decided to read the rest of the series, starting at the beginning with this one. I'm sad to say that this was a huge disappointment. Firstly, Flavia was snottier, much more vindictive and mean-spirited, and her love for chemistry seemed more a love for murder routes. I am willing to concede that the character wouldn't have been as defined in the first book, and would also be younger and less experienced than in the volume where I'd already encountered her, but still, I don't believe that high intelligence necessitates a sneering disregard for everyone around her and plots to poison everyone who displeases her (and which are only foiled by Flavia being distracted or busy!). The other, and much more troubling aspect, is an extended, multi-page venture into racist, literal yellowface caricature of Chinese culture. The events it describes are set in 1920, and I have no doubt that they wouldn't have raised an eyebrow then, but the author was writing them in the 21st frickin' century and should ABSOLUTELY know and do better. The plot advancements in that scene could have been accomplished any number of ways without such a disgusting and needless display of bigotry. In addition, there is no hint of distaste from any character, leaving this awful activity to stand as perfectly okay. It has permanently changed the way I see both Flavia and Alan Bradley, and not for the better. I read through other reviews, expecting to see similar sentiments, and so far have seen nothing about it at all, which makes me hugely disappointed in not only this book and its author, but in the Goodreads community.

I read this in tandem with [b:The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements|7247854|The Disappearing Spoon And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements|Sam Kean|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1276468318s/7247854.jpg|8246153]. What a great combination.

The adjective that comes to mind when I think of this is cozy. It reminded me of my own childhood, filled with fingerprinting kits, lust for chemistry sets and Sherlock Holmes books.

Flavia is a spunky heroine, who is posed between the confidence that children have as a consequence of not yet knowing enough to feel insecure and the equally inaccurate easy dismissal of children by adults. This tension is expertly woven by Bradley, especially in the ideas of reference that Flavia has - her serious concerns that the adults around her consider her the prime suspect in the central murder (an idea both laughable to an adult, and familiar to anyone who was ever a preteen.)

Yes, at times, the mystery is a bit weak and predictable, but a well written child protaganist in a book for adults is much more unusual than a good mystery.

Fabulous opening scene: 'It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door. I breathed heavily through my nose, fighting desperately to remain calm....' The protagonist, Flavia, is an 11-year-old girl with a precocious ability in chemistry, and complete confidence in her ability to handle anything. I found her charming, and enjoyed her adventures: battling her older sisters (not very successfully), investigating a murder, misleading the police to draw them away from her father, and so on.[return][return]This is a first novel, by a 70-year-old writer. After a career in television, he published a memoir, and then started a mystery novel. He says that Flavia walked into that novel, and took it over.[return][return]I picked it up thinking that I might be getting something similar to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. There is a whiff of similarity, but this didn't sweep me away as thoroughly as Smith manages to do. Flavia's just a bit too impossible, perhaps.