The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Delightful!  One precocious eleven-year-old who has an active imagination, above average curiosity and intelligence finds a dying man and sets about solving his murder.  There are many things to enjoy in the book.

I like that the girl is interested in science, not afraid of much and spends lots of time trying to make life miserable for her sisters.  As a child I loved reading the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series and this is of the same genre in my mind. Bright young people often overlooked by adults who can find solutions to things often missed by those same adults make this a great novel for all ages. Flavia de Luce is entertaining, logical, impulsive, determined and honest.

Flavia has a great way of describing those around her. While she thinks her sister Ophelia is an excellent pianist she will never tell her any more than letting Daphne know the books she reads aloud are interesting. Affection between family members is strained at best.  Father is suffering from either extreme sorrow over the loss of Harriet, his wife and mother of Flavia, or from PTSD—possibly a combination of both. Folks in the house seem to go their own ways without paying much attention to the young girl unless she is being a pest.  She takes being a pest to new heights. In many ways this seems to be a bit of a characterization of the aristocracy as Father stays to himself in his rooms while the servants look after the children. 

Her vocabulary is something that most parents would appreciate if a child today knew even half those words.  No texting shorthand in that generation! Her descriptions of everyone from the cook to the librarian to the man servant are vibrant. I could almost smell the custard pie warming on the sill and unlike Flavia, I love custard pie.  Mrs. Mullet’s ?  Flavia brings Miss Mountjoy alive and it did not surprise me to learn that she was the town busybody who informed Dr. Kissing of all the comings and goings of Bishop’s Lacey. I was surprised to hear that Dr. Kissing was still alive.  I was more surprised that he set fire to the Ulster Avenger but is retrospect this was fitting given the way the whole story of the stamp began.

It really was not a surprise that Pemberton and Stanley were one and the same. Flavia deduced early that Twining had not committed suicide but the author did not confirm this until much later.  Once Father told his story to Flavia much began to make sense.  Once a cad and a crook, always one. I doubt anyone would feel sad to see either Boneypenny or Stanley go down. 

I also enjoyed the stamp mystery.  I used to collect stamps as a child and still love the uniqueness of the older stamps.  A little search found that these are real stamps and were the first adhesive stamps created.  The Ulster Avenger seems to be just a matter of fiction created by the author though!