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

The first in a series starring Flavia de Luce, a very dark, very smart, eleven year old girl who loves chemistry - especially poison, hates her two older sisters, and takes on the role of Nancy Drew when she discovers a dead body in the cucumber patch.

The story takes place in 1950. Flavia lives in a small English town in one of those huge heritage homes that get passed down through centuries and generations. Think Downton Abby. However there's only two servants for this huge place, Mrs. Mullet the cook/housekeeper, and Dogger the jack of all trades - gardener, chauffeur, maintenance man, and veteran who suffers from war shock. Frankly I don't know how those two manage it since no one else does anything. Plus Mrs. Mullet goes home at noon to feed her husband who apparently can't make a sandwich.

Flavia has a father who barely notices that she exists, a dead mother who she has no memory of since she was a baby when her mother died on a hiking trip, and two older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, (Feeley and Daffy), who like to tie up Flavia and lock her in closets. In turn Flavia likes to go into her fully stocked chemistry lab in a wing of the house that no one goes to and create concoctions to put in her sisters lipsticks so they can develop serious rashes. Honestly, although I loved reading Flavia as a reader and am cheering for her, I suspect that if she were my little sister I would have tied her up and locked her in a closet too. Especially considering that Ophelia is into her piano and the boy in town, and Daphne loves to read - neither are particularly interested in Flavia. So Flavia is doing something that is making them rise from their interests and punish her.

These people appear to be pretty isolated. No one goes anywhere, except for Flavia who gets around on her bike Gladys, an inheritance from her mother. It's summertime so no one is in school. And maybe we don't see the sisters go anywhere because this is Flavia's story and she doesn't keep track of what they're doing all the time and we see everything through Flavia's eyes. Flavia is the storyteller.

This is a cozy mystery with some beautiful writing. An example of a passage that made me want to throw the book across the room and exclaim "I am not a writer"... "Willow Villa was, as Miss Cool had said, orange; the kind of orange you see when the scarlet cap of a Death's Head mushroom had just begun to go off. The house was hidden in the shadows beneath the flowing green skirts of a monstrous weeping willow whose branches shifted uneasily in the breeze, sweeping bare the dirt beneath it like a score of witches' brooms."

Now that is descriptive writing. It doesn't go overboard, but it certainly gives us a picture of that willow tree. Lovely.

Bradley is careful with the descriptions. He paints enough of a picture but he never slows the story down so much that you get frustrated. Things are happening. People are talking. Flavia is thinking. This book won the Agatha Award (named after the Queen of mystery Agatha Christie), so it is definitely a winner! The clues are all there, but it's not one that is easily solved. I loved this book and Bradley has a new fan. At the point of writing this there are a total of ten books in the series. All with weird titles. I will be reading those too. As an added bonus, Bradley is a Canadian. I was sure he was English, but nope. He hadn't even visited England at the time he wrote this. He's got one of those magic discovery stories. His books were bought based on a competition that involved one chapter and an outline. He won and ended up with a pretty sweet deal. Sigh.

#AlanBradley #cozymystery