This is the seventh Flavia de Luce mystery, and while I still like this series featuring the young chemistry prodigy/sleuth, this book is not my favorite. I enjoyed it, but Flavia is set adrift in this book, and, as a reader, I felt like I was too. It’s hard to write about this book without being a little spoiler-y about some of the events/revelations of the last book, so if you’re reading this series but you’re not caught up, you might want to stop reading now.
It’s now 1951, and twelve-year-old Flavia is shipped off to Canada, to go to the same all-girls boarding school her mother attended. From the events of the last book, it’s clear that this is not an entirely ordinary boarding school, in a way that’s reminiscent of Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series. But where the Finishing School books are intentionally over-the-top (and are set in a steampunk Victorian world with vampires and werewolves), the Flavia books are set in our world (albeit with more dead bodies in Flavia’s small village than would be credible). The not-entirely-ordinary-boarding-school plot thread feels a bit odd/out of place/confusing. I mean: Flavia is told that her mother was a member of a secret society of spies (?) and is sent off to Canada with no more information than a code phrase and the knowledge that she’s likely to receive the same kind of training her mother did. She doesn’t know who else at the school is part of the society and who isn’t; she doesn’t know who to trust.
And the question of trust becomes important rather quickly: on Flavia’s first night at the school, a dead body is accidentally dislodged from the chimney in her room. Of course, she’s determined to figure out the corpse’s identity and circumstances of death. But there are false starts and red herrings, and meanwhile Flavia’s also trying to figure out what’s what at school, while also contending with her homesickness.
The book is fun and funny in the same way the others in the series are: Flavia is hilariously bold about sneaking into places she shouldn’t be, and there are some great bits of dialogue with adults, like when a Canadian immigration officer asks Flavia “the purpose of [her] visit” and she says, “Penal colony” (17). I would have liked more of a vivid sense of Flavia’s school life/the other girls—there’s a bunch of that at the beginning but it rather gets swept to the side as details about the body start to emerge. There is a great scene involving ghost stories and a Ouija board, though, and I quite liked this description of one of Flavia’s classmates: “Pinkham stood paused in the doorway, and just for an instant she looked like a girl in a painting by Vermeer: as if she were constructed entirely of light” (122).
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