The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by alan Bradley

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


You’d really think a book about an eleven-year-old smart-mouth named flavia de Luce who lives on an old English estate in 1950, loves chemistry and poisons, and solves crime would be inherently awesome. Unfortunately, no book is inherently awesome. Why do I have to keep learning this over and over again?



This one is just . . . lacking . . . something. I mean, Flavia’s great – she’s the sort of crazy who, at eleven, plans to write a magnum opus on poisons and note, under cyanide, that it is “particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one ‘dearie.;” But Flavia’s extraordinariness is mishandled, somehow. This book needed to be either exponentially more zany, or exponentially less – either would have helped.



And if I’m ever teaching a writing class (God forbid -- my girlfriend has said on multiple occasions that I should never be given access to young minds, even though I can still be said to have one myself) I now have an example of a well-written book with a completely unconvincing voice. These are distinct qualities. The writing here is excellent – crisp and dry and intricate. And Flavia has great eleven-year-old moments, like shouting all the way down hills on her bicycle (named Gladys), and singing unself-consciously. But she also says things like this on every page, “The finely curved legs of the Queen Ann nightstand seemed almost indecent beside the gloomy gothic bed in the corner, as if some sour old chamberlain were looking on dyspeptically as his mistress unfurled silk stockings over her long, youthful legs.” What a great simile! But. The blasé sexual imagery, use of the word ‘youthful’ as if this is a concept she has adult perspective on, it’s all wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. There’s precocious, and then there’s simply bad voice.





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