Do you like mysteries, particularly those involving murder and a wealth of intriguing and poetic physical evidence (ie. a dead body in the cucumber patch and a missing piece of pie on the window sill)?Do you like English manor houses (even if you've never actually been in one, on the grounds of one, or in the same country as one (unless you count the airport))?
Would you like to view the world from the point of view of an eleven-year-old pigtail-wearing, bespectacled, bicycle-riding, murder-solving, impossibly erudite, fabulously cheeky chemist?
Yes to all three, you say? Hey! Me too. What a coincidence. Alan Bradley's debut crime novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, has all of three of these excellent features. It is also extremely well written. In fact, the voice of the first person narrator, Flavia de Luce, the eleven-year-old crime solver mentioned above, is so well written and hilarious that I wasn't even disappointed when I solved the mystery before she did.
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4 comments:
Hmm, I started this and didn't proceed - maybe I should take another look. I actually was pretty smitten with the cover design, as I suspect you may have been.
It was absolutely the cover design that did it. I judge all books by their covers. I think Flavia is worth another try. There are some seriously witty bits of internal dialogue later in the book--even if the start is a bit slow.
Awesome! I've been looking for a new book to read...This sounds perfect.
I really like your mug...
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