The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
Young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird on the doorstep, a postage stamp 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.
Krysten’s Review
I really wanted to like this book, but it ended up being a disappointment. The story starts off really slowly, and for the first two-thirds or so, you hear a lot of useless town history, suffer through several chemistry lessons, and follow the main character around on her bicycle. Flavia is certainly an interesting, if unrealistic, character. I found myself questioning her motives throughout the book. An 11-year-old girl who watches a stranger die in her garden is going to be traumatized, which she is not. I also found it hard to believe that she was able to solve not one but two murders when the police (who are fully trained adults!) were apparently baffled. That she was so easily able to figure out the villains’ motives and ascertain what they did and why was really unbelievable to me. In the final third of the book, the action picks up and it becomes more of a page turner, but that was only enough to bump my rating from two to three stars. I likely won’t read any others in the series.