The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press/Bantam Dell (Random House), 2009

I don’t normally read mysteries, and I forget where I first heard about this one: I know that Danielle over at A Work in Progress mentioned it last year, but I feel like I read about it elsewhere as well. No matter: I finally got around to placing a hold on it at the library, and was delighted to see it waiting for me on the shelf—I really like the cover.

Flavia de Luce, our heroine/sleuth, is only eleven. She’s a precocious child who know’s she’s smart, but who manages to be charming rather than annoying—well, annoying to her older sisters, but not to this reader, anyhow. I like her narrative voice, which gives us lines like this in the first chapter, after she’s ruined her sister Ophelia’s pearl necklace in a science experiment: “Retribution was not long in coming, but then with Ophelia, it never was. Ophelia was not, as I was, a long-range planner who believed in letting the soup of revenge simmer to perfection” (p 5). The de Luce girls’ mother is dead; they live in the rambling family manor with their father, who’s distant and seems to care only about stamp-collecting. And as the sister who’s not like the other two, Flavia’s probably had a bit of a lonely childhood. She has an aptitude for (and love for) chemistry, though, and science has become a solace for her—it’s great to hear her talk about it with such excitement and delight, like when she says: “I still shivered with joy whenever I thought of the rainy autumn day that Chemistry had fallen into my life,” (p 8), and goes on to tell about accidentally kicking a book off the bookcase (she was pretending to be a mountain climber), leafing through it, and becoming entranced. When she realizes that the chemistry book is connected to the disused chemistry lab upstairs, filled with glassware and chemicals left by a deceased uncle, she’s beyond delighted: “my life came to life,” she says, and you can feel her excitement (p 10). Speaking of excitement, Flavia is pretty much delighted when a stranger appears—and dies—in her own backyard: the death’s a mystery to solve, and Flavia sets about doing so at once. I like Flavia’s independence and cleverness and the fact that she’s an eleven-year-old 1950s feminist, delighted when she learns that radium was discovered by a woman, annoyed by the fact that the detective from the police department asks her to make tea for him and his team, and amused by an old booklet on bicycling by “the leader of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty” (p 73). (“Was there ever a companion booklet, Cycling for Men of All Ages? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men’s League of Health and Handsomeness?” (ibid.).)

This being a mystery, I don’t want to say too much more: but I’m glad I read it, and now I have the sequel checked out from the library as well!