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Okay, I guess I just needed to binge four mystery novels in a row today. Rereading needs happens when a new book comes out five years after the last one, though I didn't go all the way back to the beginning. The Flavia deLuce series by Alan Bradley takes place in early 1950's England, and is about an eleven year old girl obsessed with chemistry in general and poisons in particular. Fortunately, she lives in a crumbling family manor where one of her ancestors had a full chemistry lab in one of the abandoned wings.
Our heroine, Flavia, could easily have come off as annoyingly twee and precocious, but the author has captured her SO WELL as a deeply weird child, and her point of view is unerring about three-quarters of the time, and the other quarter comes from the fact that she is eleven and oblivious.
Her family consists of two older sisters who torment her in a very realistic older-sister way (they tried to convince her as a small child that she was a changeling goblin and the real Flavia was away with the fairies), a distant but well-meaning father who's still affected by his time in a POW camp, and his father's manservant, who was with him in said camp, and has stayed on with the family and keeps everything running despite his own trauma and scars.
Flavia is DELIGHTED every time she stumbles across a dead body, which happens regularly, because murder mystery series, and is fascinated by the forensic science of it all. This is a child who decides that she's going to try to trap Santa by concocting her own birdlime and smearing it around the top of the chimney. There's the expected cast of eccentric characters, and her prickly relationship with her sisters does evolve and grow a bit over the series. It's clear they do love each other even when they don't like each other.
I thought the series was over with book 10, but book 11 just came out, and there's another one coming in 2025. So, today I lay on the couch and read, and made a pot of hot and sour soup.I finally found dried lily buds at the Asian market, one of the less common ingredients. Not a bad way to spend a long weekend Sunday, all in all.
Our heroine, Flavia, could easily have come off as annoyingly twee and precocious, but the author has captured her SO WELL as a deeply weird child, and her point of view is unerring about three-quarters of the time, and the other quarter comes from the fact that she is eleven and oblivious.
Her family consists of two older sisters who torment her in a very realistic older-sister way (they tried to convince her as a small child that she was a changeling goblin and the real Flavia was away with the fairies), a distant but well-meaning father who's still affected by his time in a POW camp, and his father's manservant, who was with him in said camp, and has stayed on with the family and keeps everything running despite his own trauma and scars.
Flavia is DELIGHTED every time she stumbles across a dead body, which happens regularly, because murder mystery series, and is fascinated by the forensic science of it all. This is a child who decides that she's going to try to trap Santa by concocting her own birdlime and smearing it around the top of the chimney. There's the expected cast of eccentric characters, and her prickly relationship with her sisters does evolve and grow a bit over the series. It's clear they do love each other even when they don't like each other.
I thought the series was over with book 10, but book 11 just came out, and there's another one coming in 2025. So, today I lay on the couch and read, and made a pot of hot and sour soup.I finally found dried lily buds at the Asian market, one of the less common ingredients. Not a bad way to spend a long weekend Sunday, all in all.
