Fabulous opening scene: 'It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door. I breathed heavily through my nose, fighting desperately to remain calm....' The protagonist, Flavia, is an 11-year-old girl with a precocious ability in chemistry, and complete confidence in her ability to handle anything. I found her charming, and enjoyed her adventures: battling her older sisters (not very successfully), investigating a murder, misleading the police to draw them away from her father, and so on.

This is a first novel, by a 70-year-old writer. After a career in television, he published a memoir, and then started a mystery novel. He says that Flavia walked into that novel, and took it over.

I picked it up thinking that I might be getting something similar to Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. There is a whiff of similarity, but this didn't sweep me away as thoroughly as Smith manages to do. Flavia's just a bit too impossible, perhaps. ( )

f there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie". When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poisons, and come to "Cyanide", I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.' "

- Flavia de Luce

Flavia, eleven and the youngest of three sisters, discovers a body in the cucumber patch at her family's estate, Buckshaw in the town of Bishop's Lacey. Just before he dies he utter the word "Vale". Precocious and wise beyond her years, Flavia does not tell all to the police and is determined to solve the murder herself.

That was the truth: I didn't know his name. But I did know, and knew it all too well, that the body in the garden-the body with the red hair, the body in the gray suit- was that of the man I'd spied through the sturdy keyhole. The man Father had- But I could hardly tell them that.

my review: I LOVED this book. Flavia is a brilliant character. Living in the English countryside in 1950, she spends her time in her chemistry lab that belonged to her now deceased mother, chemistry being her true love, and finding ways to keep up with her older sisters Ophelia and Daphne. She also has a fascination with poisons.

It is charming and delightful, fun and engaging. The novel is full of interesting and colorful characters. The writing is excellent and the plot; revenge, boyhood secrets, and rare stamps, kept me hooked throughout. Flavia was really the best part and I am glad to learn that Bradley has written another Flavia mystery, due in March of 2010. I highly recommend this book!

my rating 5/5 ( )

http://theliterarystew.blogspot.com/2... ( )

Who would not love a 12 year old poison edxpert who helps solve murders? I sure did.

While well-written with interesting characters, there was no hook to pull me in this book. The story somehow manages to integrate stamp collecting and chemistry as integral parts of the plot, but neither subject interests me and the author was unable to put a spin on either to really make me feel involved in the book. The precocious 11-year-old protagonist is way smart for her age, but doesn't have any of the silliness or sarcasm that one would expect to bring this character to life as a relatable - or even just realistic - girl. Instead you have a character that acts much older than she is said to be, getting into situations over her head.

It's not a particularly bad book, especially if you like mysteries or have an interest in stamp collecting/England circa-1950/chemistry/young precocious protagonists, but I saw the "twist" early on. There was nothing in the story that made me want to keep reading and it took me almost a 100 pages before it picked up so that I found something to interest me enough to want to continue.

It just wasn't my type of book. ( )

A beloved teacher once told me that using cliches weakens your writing. Alan Bradley's use of cliches thoroughly entertains and introduces us to his young detective Flavia in all of her intelligence, sarcasm, perspicacity, hilarity, and eleven-year-old snottiness. She's quite a package - competent, self-directed, smart, clever, mean. She solves the murder in the cucumber patch, identifies the killer, discovers hidden aspects of her distant and distracted father, and much about her own mental and physical resources under duress. A thoroughly enjoyable read that will make you want to bike the English countryside in search of crumbling mansions, neighborhood pubs, weed-strewn churchyards, and mysterious corpses.

This book was phenomenal. The main character Flavia is a riot. She is an 11 year old who is trying to solve a murder mystery at the same time as getting even with her older sisters. Bradley does a good job of depicting England in the 1950s. I have never been into postage stamps but I became engrossed in books description of a great stamp debacle. I give this book 5 out of 5 stars. ( )

From the Goodreads newsletter (May 2009):In 1950s England, precocious 11-year-old Flavia is a budding scientist whose hobbies include chemistry (brewing poisons), riding her bike named Gladys, and tormenting her sisters. When a dead body appears in the cucumber patch and her father is arrested for murder, she decides to solve the mystery before it is too late. David says, "The narrator-protagonist is one of the cleverest, liveliest, most entertaining characters I have had the pleasure to meet in many a year. I laughed aloud many times and couldn't wait to get back to reading this gem."

Fun little mystery about Flavia de Luce-an eleven year old prodigy. Flavia is a chemist and amateur sluth. Reminds me of Nancy Drew. ( )

I thought the idea of this story was better than the actual final product. I love Flavia, and thought she brought a lot to the story. For some reason though, I just could not engage with this text. It is entirely possible that I read it at the wrong time. Perhaps I will give it another go. ( )

Our detective is an 11-year-old girl named Flavia who has far too great a knowledge of chemistry for someone her age. As with most girls that age, sibling rivalry is present. The mystery involves a dead bird with a postage stamp pierced in its bill, a dead body in the garden, her father's arrest, discovering things about her father's school life, some very rare stamps, and too little accountability for where she is and what she is doing. Still, it's a read that most preteen and young teen girls should enjoy. I'd give this a 3.5 star rating for adults but a higher rating for the intended audience so I decided upon a 4. ( )

Our main character, Flavia is, in a word, "precocious," is growing up in a crumbling old mansion in 1950s England with her terrorizing older sisters, her withdrawn father and the all-around handyman. Each sister is free to pursue her own passion, and for Flavia that is chemistry, and poisons in particular. When she finds a dead man in the yard, the evidence points to her father, who is arrested. But as she (and the police) investigate, suspicion falls on several different people, and she learns more about her father's past than she ever would have imagined.

This is pure delight, British to the core, from the fading aristocracy to the boys' boarding school to the taut, emotionless encounters between the family members. Flavia herself, while not always believable, is an irresistible character. I can't wait for more of her. ( )

I was told it was like Harriet the Spy, but it seems a bit more like a more realistic less wealthy female British Artemis Fowl, you know, without the fairies or super-villain resources. Oh and she doesn't seem to be trying to take over anything. ( )

I could not put this book down. Flavia is so enchanting and clever. I can't wait for Bradley's next book. ( )

Flavia is an eleven-year-old character you love to love, but thankful she isn't your daughter! She's into poison and has an advanced chemistry lab in her house. She extracts poison ivy and puts it in her older sister's lipstick. She spies. She picks locks. She's sneaky. And she solves a crime. A stranger is dead in the garden and her father is arrested. With research and interviews, Flavia figures out the story that goes back to her father's schooldays. This is a clean mystery--a more literary Trixie Belden, which I absolutely adored as a kid. Who should read this one? Public library women's book clubs. ( )

This delight is a debut mystery! A debut mystery, if you please, and a Crime Writers of America Dagger Award winner, and written by a Saskatooni writer, and just flat funny.

Whatever they do to the water in Saskatoon, they should do it to some Murrikin cities that're famous for nothing (eg, Dubuque or Terre Haute) so's they can make their mark on the cultural landscape. Bradley and Bidulka haling from the same city...what up with that?!

Flavia de Luce is an eleven-year-old chemistry prodigy, daughter of an extraordinary vanished mother and a reclusive abasent father, youngest of three sisters who are each at difficult ages. She's the most outgoing of the three, she's the most determined and organized and intellectually gifted of them, and alone among her family is not paralyzed by her upbringing. Her determination to prove her father innocent of a murder which takes place directly below her bedroom window is absolute and unshakable. She succeeds because she's a) smart b) stubborn and c) "just a girl" so unthreatening to anyone...except the murderer, who takes her very seriously indeed.

Flavia's dry-martini humor is old for her age, but she's presented from the get-go as old for her age in some very believable ways. Her intellectual capacities are also presented in such a way as to be part and parcel of a believable character. I like this book, it flew past me at a breezy 50mph and hooked me into its slipstream. I suspended disbelief the moment I met Flavia, and the author rewarded me with a very enjoyable afternoon. I'll read the next Flavia book, "Tied Up with Strings" (which I pray is only a working title, it's just gawdawful!) when it comes out from Bantam in 2010.

Go on, give it a try. You'll be surprised how easy it goes down! ( )

A delightful read. Witty, charming, intriguing and fun. Flavia de Luce is an extremely clever and endearing heroine. I can't wait until the next book! ( )

Alan Bradley has taken us on a convivial armchair adventure, a delicious romp into yesterday..into the lives of a quirky English village called Bishop’s Lacey and the genteel poverty stricken residents of Buckshaw: the de Luce family where pies are as easily served up as murder (okay with the exception of Mrs. Mullet’s custard pie). It is up to Flavia and her trusty BSA bike, Gladys to prove her father’s innocence, and net a murderer; all the while her intellect running circles around the local constabulary.

And who wouldn’t find Flavia de Luce enchanting? This enterprising young sleuth has a penchant for poison, can sing out the atomic number of arsenic and selenium by rote as easily as she can trill out the Mikado or hum along to the Tocatta by Pietro Domenico Paradis. She can extract a synthetic curare at the drop of the hat, distill the itchy humours of poison ivy, and yes..get pig-tailed deep into a postage stamp murder mystery of epic proportions.

Bradley’s tale of the fabled Ulster Avengers and the hands that have made off with them reads like a chronicle of the Hope Diamond, replete with quaint British history and a surfeit of historical idioms that will be bound to amuse and engage. He has created the most singular character in Flavia de Luce and it is a delight to read about her maiden voyage into Holmes’ territory. Obviously we will be seeing more of Flavia in novels to come! ( )

Surprisingly entertaining and involving mystery, full of the circumlocutions typical of the genre, replete with odd-to-American-ears British place names, satisfying with British stereotypes. An unusual eleven-year-old girl, Flavia pursues chemistry and science on her own in her family's grim and dusty manse while her sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, indulge in literary and fashion pursuits. One fateful night, she overhears a disturbance in her father's study ( )

Sweet and funny story with an adolescent protagonist that reminded me of Judy Blume books and days of my youth long gone but not forgotten. ( )

A delightful and refreshing read! Engaging characters and a rich setting.

The story has faults, yes. The main character, Flavia de Luce, is supposed to be an 11-year-old girl. I thought the author managed to stay truer to Flavia's voice in the emotional realm. Intellectually, the character would really have been more accurately represented as a highly gifted teenager. However, I generally found the character to be so enjoyable that I was, for the most part, willing to suspend disbelief of an 11-year-old having such intellectual prowess (it is a work of fiction, after all!).

To me, the richest part of the story is a conversation between Flavia and her father. I don't believe in spoilers, so I won't set the context of that passage in this review. Suffice to say, I thought the author did a lovely job of staying true to voice, and that entire passage greatly enriched the story for me.

This strikes me as a book that I would have LOVED as a pre-teen/teen...where were you 25 years ago, Flavia de Luce?! Realizing how much I would have loved this book as a teen also contributed to making this a fun read. So, my inner teenage girl gives it 5 stars, and my adult self gives it a hearty 3 1/2! ( )

I had hoped for more based on the reviews. None of the characters really grabbed me and I wasn't all that interested in the mystery. For me, the best part was the setting. ( )

Pure delight to read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie Flavia is a wonder at sleuthing. I look forward to the next book as Flavia probes further into her poisons and thwarts her two sisters along the way. I will be recommending this book to teens at the middle and high school level who are into reading mystery and those who don't care for reading as the book is an easy read and fun to figure out the mystery. ( )

Not to be trite, but The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is one of the tastiest reads that I've devoured this year. It's one of those rare books where you'll fret over your desire to gobble it down versus savoring it in small bites. It's a delicious-- okay, I'll stop now. But seriously, it's a great book, you should read it.

The setting is Bishop's Lacey, a small, sleepy English town in 1950. Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce, eleven, is better at chemistry than most of us can probably ever hope to be. (And the Dolores is a lie. She sometimes fabricates things.) She is our narrator and when asked what her passion is in life, Flavia unhesitatingly says chemistry. She even has her own lab which was originally created by a great-uncle and then used by her mother, who died in Tibet when Flavia was still a baby. It's her sanctuary in her her family's sprawling and somewhat dilapidated manor house where Flavia lives with her reclusive father (Colonel de Luce), two sisters (Ophelia and Daphne, whom she loathes), and Dogger (Colonel de Luce's once-manservant/driver and now gardener with a loose grip on the day-to-day, as he came back from the war a bit shattered).

The novel starts on a seemingly normal day (after a fight with Ophelia, Flavia stole her lipstick, melted it down to mix with the essentail oil of poison ivy leaves, and reformed the lipstick using a .45 caliber slug) and then something peculiar happens. The housekeeper opens the kitchen door to discover a dead jack snipe with a stamp impaled on its beak. Flavia's father is visibly shaken and later, Flavia eavesdrops at the keyhole of his study to see and hear him argue with a redheaded man Flavia has never seen in her life. For her quiet philatelist of a father, this is uncommon behavior -- but perhaps more uncommon is when Flavia walks through the cucumber patch in the pre-dawn hours and discovers a body. It is the redheaded man with whom her father had been arguing and he breaths his last word into Flavia's face: "Vale!" Unlike most eleven-year-olds, Flavia does not run in fear: "I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the opposite. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."

Well, I think you can guess by this point that Flavia is not the kind of girl to simply leave this matter to the authorities, particularly when she calls them and once arriving, they tell her to run along. While the police conduct their investigation (in which her father is the prime suspect), Flavia does some sleuthing of her own. The result is a fantastic journey into her father's less-than-innocent school days, priceless stamps, and magic tricks that go horribly right.

By far, the most delightful part of this novel is the refreshing voice of Flavia, whose steadfast determination and piercing intelligence might be characteristic of a mystery novel detective, but her charm and occasional childish whimsy make for something original and fresh. With her knowledge of poisons and capacity for revenge, she is certainly a dangerous force; though despite her vast knowledge of chemistry and her very adult means of analysis, she is still a child wrapped up in fights with her sisters and desperate to clear her somewhat distant father, for he is the only parent she has left. Flavia also knows something adults tend to forget, which is that the best way to get information is to ask someone, and in a small town, certain people will always know everyone's business. Her search for information takes her all over Bishop's Lacy (on her trusty bicycle, Gladys) and as a result, we are exposed to a delightful cast of small-town characters, who might not always be as smitten with Flavia as the reader, but certainly understand that this is a remarkable young girl who sees far more than anyone else.

When I finished the novel, I rather lamented the fact that the story is so wrapped up in Flavia's family history that a second might be a difficult thing to pull off -- but evidently, Alan Bradley is working on a another Flavia de Luce novel, for which I can only be thankful. Bradley himself is retired from a career in media and television, and this is his first novel (though he did co-author a Sherlock Holmes work). He won the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award for this particular tale, so mystery lovers should take note. And even if you are not a mystery lover, I heartily recommend The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. I don't think that you'll be disappointed with the remarkably enchanting Flavia de Luce -- and if you love books, I recommend buying this in hardcover, as it's a beautiful little volume, compact and elegant without a dustjacket. Though really, if you're a friend of mine with whom I exchange presents at the holidays, forget everything you've read here -- you'll be getting this novel soon enough as a gift. ( )

This delightful little book ranks #2 in favor of all those in my library. Number 1 is "I Capture the Castle", of which this book is reminiscent in having its main character a young girl, Flavia de Luce, while the star of I Caputure the Castle is another young girl named Cassandra Mortmain. Their contribution to each story is one of sheer enchantment. Bradley has succeeded, as did Dodie Smith before him, in capturing the very soul of an exuberant 11 year old on paper without making her obnoxious or too cute. ( )