THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE

If there’s anything I love more than cozy postwar British country-house mysteries, it’s books about brave and precocious young girls, so as soon as I heard about this book by Alan Bradley (via a glowing review in Entertainment Weekly), I put it on hold at the library. Maybe I let my expectations get a leeetle too overblown—although how could I not, when Publishers Weekly compared it to Harriet the Spy?—but once I finally got my hands on the book, it took me a while to warm up to it. I like my literary kids preternaturally mature, eccentric, and brilliant, but even I found it hard to buy Flavia de Luce, budding chemist and detective, as an actual 11-year old; her disconcerting lack of affect made the book feel flat to me. (Perhaps having read Ellen Klages set my bar too high—see The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace for fully realized, spunky postwar young girls who have rich intellectual lives but still believably age-appropriate emotions.) But eventually, perhaps because I let go of expectations of realism, I came around. It may not have rocked my world (and Flavia can’t hold a candle to Harriet, so let’s just nip that comparison in the bud right here), but ultimately this was a fun, absorbing read and I’m looking forward to the sequels. Bradley has already been contracted for five more Flavia books, and although in the past I’ve demonstrated a tendency to fall away from contemporary series that showed promise but ended up generating too many similar books too fast (Thursday Next and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, I’m looking at you), I think this is one I can stick with.