Review: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Piss off, Nancy Drew

From Amazon's description:

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 a remarkably fun book! I was deathly afraid Flavia was going to be some "plucky" Anne of Green Gables type, all... earnest and well-meaning. No such typecasting. Flavia's not necessarily a sociopath, but she sure is delightfully manipulative and treacherous. And shrewd. Sometimes her dialogue as an eleven year old is a bit hard to swallow, but her narrative is all hook. Well-written stuff. Anyone who loves quirky, non-twee English fare will love this Anglophile's whodunit.

     This book gets off to a mildly disjointed start, but quickly trots along once it sheds the husk of exposition. Really, promise yourself you'll read the first two chapters and you won't notice when you pass that turnoff and keep sailing on through the rest of the story. But that's just my often-wrong opinion: the first 15 pages won Mr. Bradley the Dagger award, so obviously somebody saw a lot of promise in what I'm shrugging at.

     The real weakness in any mystery is the denouement, the "Miss White, in the ballroom, with the lead pipe" moment. It's difficult to uncover the how of a crime gracefully, organically. I mean, that Jessica Fletcher broad did it every episode of "Murder, She Wrote" and it still seemed wooden and implausible. And like any other mystery there's a bit that's just a little too convenient. You know, like when someone stumbles upon a secret passageway, or an overheard confession, or the clue that puts it all into perspective. Thankfully, there's not as much of that sort of thing here. What little stumbling there is in this first installment I fully expect to be ironed out in the further adventures of Miss de Luce. I really fell hard for these characters and look forward to reading the other titles in this series.