In his critically acclaimed first mystery novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: the wickedly brilliant eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a penchant for poison. One reviewer called her a “curious combination of Harriet the Spy and Sherlock Holmes.”
It is 1950, at the beginning of summer. A dead bird has been left on the doorstep with a postage stamp pinned to its beak at Buckshaw, a decaying English mansion that is the de Luce ancestral home, and then, just hours later, Flavia finds a dying man in the cucumber patch.
Flavia is both appalled and delighted. “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.” She puts aside her flasks and Bunsen burners, determined to solve the crime herself -- much to the chagrin of the local authorities
At once both an enthralling mystery and a thought-provoking depiction of class and society, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a masterfully told tale of deceptions and an absolute literary delight.
When asked in an interview about becoming a first time novelist at 70 years of age, Bradley replied, “Well, the Roman author Seneca once said something like this: ‘Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms--you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.’ So to put it briefly, I’m taking his advice.”
And in answer to why a 70-year-old-man chose to write about an 11-year-old-girl in 1950s England, he explained “To me, Flavia embodies that kind of hotly burning flame of our young years: that time of our lives when we’re just starting out, when anything--absolutely anything!--is within our capabilities.”
There are five more books lined up in this series, and Bradley plans to keep Flavia in the same age bracket. “I don’t really like the idea of Flavia as an older teenager. At her current age, she is such a concoction of contradictions. It's one of the things that I very much love about her. She's eleven but she has the wisdom of an adult. She knows everything about chemistry but nothing about family relationships. I don’t think she’d be the same person if she were a few years older.”
Oh, to be eleven again and seeing a whole long, hot, lazy summer stretch out before me! I am tempted to join the Flavia de Luce Fan Club.
Put this one right at the top of your summer reading list.
