If my Goodreads shelving is accurate, it’s been three years since I last read a mystery, or at least, three years since I read a mystery that wasn’t middle-grade or YA\u2014which sort of surprises me and sort of doesn’t. Sometimes mysteries are totally my thing; sometimes they feel too plot-driven. And I didn’t love the seventh Flavia de Luce book, so I took a break before picking the eighth one up. But I’m glad I finally did, and I think I’m now going to get back into this series. I love the setting (England, early 1950s) and I love the voice of our narrator\/sleuth, Flavia, who’s a preteen chemistry genius and totally charming. In this one, Flavia’s just gotten back from Canada, having been kicked out of boarding school, but things at home are not great: her beloved pet hen is gone from her coop, and, worse yet, her dad’s in the hospital with pneumonia. It’s nearly Christmas, but no one at Buckshaw (the huge old house in which the de Luces live) is in a festive mood. After heading to the vicarage to talk to the vicar’s wife\/just to get out of the house, Flavia is sent on an errand to Thornfield Chase, where she’s meant to deliver something to Roger Sambridge, an expert wood-carver. Except Roger Sambridge can’t come to the door, because Roger Sambridge is deceased. <\/p>\n
As a distraction from her own troubles, and because she truly loves the art of detection, Flavia throws herself into the puzzle of Roger Sambridge’s death, and the puzzle of how Sambridge is connected to Oliver Inchbald, a famous writer of children’s books who died in gruesome circumstances several years prior. (Sambridge doesn’t have many books in his home, but he has a shelf of Oliver Inchbald first editions, including multiple copies of the same books, which Flavia finds curious.)<\/p>\n
It’s a delight to follow Flavia as she follows various clues and leads and reflects on her process in passages like this: “In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting off wildly in all directions simultaneously. It’s like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident.” And oh, Flavia and chemistry: it may not be very festive at Buckshaw, but she takes a few minutes to turn some rosemary sprigs into a “private Christmas tree,” coated with “artificial hoarfrost” thanks to benzoic acid<\/a>. Also: I love the wintry atmosphere of this book, with Flavia always bundling up and riding her bike, Gladys, on icy roads past snow-covered fields. (And the end, gah, it totally made me cry.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If my Goodreads shelving is accurate, it’s been three years since I last read a mystery, or at least, three years since I read a mystery that wasn’t middle-grade or YA\u2014which sort of surprises me and sort of doesn’t. Sometimes mysteries are totally my thing; sometimes they feel too plot-driven. And I didn’t love the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}