{"id":1217,"date":"2010-05-07T21:49:17","date_gmt":"2010-05-08T01:49:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books\/?p=1217"},"modified":"2010-05-07T21:49:17","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T01:49:17","slug":"the-sweetness-at-the-bottom-of-the-pie-by-alan-bradleydelacorte-pressbantam-dell-random-house-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/the-sweetness-at-the-bottom-of-the-pie-by-alan-bradleydelacorte-pressbantam-dell-random-house-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press\/Bantam Dell (Random House), 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t normally read mysteries, and I forget where I first heard about this one: I know that Danielle over at A Work in Progress <a href=\"http:\/\/danitorres.typepad.com\/workinprogress\/2009\/02\/cozy-mysteries.html\">mentioned it last year<\/a>, 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&#8212;I really like the cover.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<script type='text\/javascript' src='http:\/\/insight.randomhouse.com\/widget\/viewer.js'><\/script><br \/>\n<script type='text\/javascript'>new InsightBookReader('preview', '9780385342308', 'The%20Sweetness%20at%20the%20Bottom%20of%20the%20Pie', 'Alan%20Bradley', '0', '', 'http:\/\/www.randomhouse.com\/cgi-bin\/buy_landing.php?isbn=9780385342308');<\/script><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Flavia de Luce, our heroine\/sleuth, is only eleven. She&#8217;s a precocious child who know&#8217;s she&#8217;s smart, but who manages to be charming rather than annoying&#8212;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&#8217;s ruined her sister Ophelia&#8217;s pearl necklace in a science experiment: &#8220;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&#8221; (p 5). The de Luce girls&#8217; mother is dead; they live in the rambling family manor with their father, who&#8217;s distant and seems to care only about stamp-collecting. And as the sister who&#8217;s not like the other two, Flavia&#8217;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&#8212;it&#8217;s great to hear her talk about it with such excitement and delight, like when she says: &#8220;I still shivered with joy whenever I thought of the rainy autumn day that Chemistry had fallen into my life,&#8221; (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&#8217;s beyond delighted: &#8220;my life came to life,&#8221; she says, and you can feel her excitement (p 10). Speaking of excitement, Flavia is pretty much delighted when a stranger appears&#8212;and dies&#8212;in her own backyard: the death&#8217;s a mystery to solve, and Flavia sets about doing so at once. I like Flavia&#8217;s independence and cleverness and the fact that she&#8217;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 &#8220;the leader of the Women&#8217;s League of Health and Beauty&#8221; (p 73). (&#8220;Was there ever a companion booklet, <em>Cycling for Men of All Ages<\/em>? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men&#8217;s League of Health and Handsomeness?&#8221; (<em>ibid.<\/em>).)  <\/p>\n<p>This being a mystery, I don&#8217;t want to say too much more: but I&#8217;m glad I read it, and now I have the sequel checked out from the library as well!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;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, [&hellip;]<\/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-1217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217","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=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}