Oh, Flavia. Flavia de Luce, heroine of this book and of three others by Bradley, is the best eleven-year-old sleuth\/narrator ever. When the book opens, she’s dreaming about ice-skating in an indoor rink at Buckshaw of her own making. (In the dream, she’s flooded the portrait gallery, which is in the unheated wing of the family manse anyhow: as she skates, she looks down and sees the parquet floor through the ice, and the room is lit by the “twelve dozen candles [she] had pinched from the butler’s pantry and stuffed into the ancient chandeliers” (3).) And that pretty much sets the tone for the book as a whole: deliciously wintry fun.<\/p>\n
It’s late December, and Flavia’s planning a chemical experiment to find out if Father Christmas is real: she’s made up a batch of birdlime and is planning to booby-trap the roof and chimneys. Meanwhile, lacking money and having plenty of taxes, Flavia’s father has rented out Buckshaw to a film studio, so a whole movie cast and crew (including a famous actreess, Phyllis Wyvern) descends on the house. Flavia isn’t totally thrilled at the disruption—the director, for instance, says they’re not allowed to put up a Christmas tree—but the movie set is interesting<\/em>, as is the star, Wyvern, who seems half-sweet\/half-bitchy. The Vicar of the local church asks Wyvern if she and her co-star will perform a scene or two for charity, to raise money for the church’s new roof: she agrees, and it’s agreed that the performance will happen at Buckshaw. The night of the performance, there ends up being a blizzard, meaning the whole audience is snowed in (this is small-town England in 1950) … and then someone turns up dead, making this quite the Country House Mystery.<\/p>\n I keep thinking I might be done with this series, but then whenever a new one comes out, I find out about it through those Goodreads emails that tell you about new books by authors on your shelves, and I always find myself putting a hold on the newest Flavia de Luce mystery at the library. In this instance, I’m glad of it: this was such pleasing lazy-long-weekend reading, really perfect to read the day after Thanksgiving, when I didn’t feel like doing much of anything else. It was funny and interesting, and I do like Flavia and the characters around her (especially Dogger, her father’s factotum, who’s smart and kind and traumatized from having been a POW in WWII). At this point in the series, quite a bit of suspension of disbelief is required—this is, what, the fourth time death has come to the small town of Bishop’s Lacey (and\/or right to Buckshaw!) in a single year of Flavia’s life? But I’m OK with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh, Flavia. Flavia de Luce, heroine of this book and of three others by Bradley, is the best eleven-year-old sleuth\/narrator ever. When the book opens, she’s dreaming about ice-skating in an indoor rink at Buckshaw of her own making. (In the dream, she’s flooded the portrait gallery, which is in the unheated wing of 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-3243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3243","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=3243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}