The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Author: Alan Bradley

Genre: Mystery, Cozy

Rating: Exceeded my expectations.

Synopsis:

It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.

For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

What I thought:

Surprisingly I really liked this book. Usually when there is a book where the heroine is a child, the child is portrayed as a great deal smarter than all of the adults around them. Also, the adults tend to be bumbling idiots. That always annoys me because although children are arrogant enough to thing that they know more than adults; they really don't. In dangerous situations, children don't know enough to not get them killed.

Flavia is quite a precocious 11 year old, but she isn't smarter than the adults around her. Although she is annoyed about the fact that people talk down to her, she has respect for the adults around her. She nearly got herself killed. I thought it was a more realistic portrayal for a child protagonist.

This was the first book in this series, and I am very much looking forward to reading/listening to the rest of this series. I'm particularly interested in seeing how her relationship with her sisters develop. I think that she thinks she is a shade smarter than her two older sisters, but it is clear by the end of the book that both her sisters are a step ahead of her. They might not be the chemical geniuses that Flavia is, but they are very intelligent in their own right.