The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery
Length: 373 pages

Reviewed by: Willow Locksley

Uncle Tar’s laboratory had been locked up and preserved in airless silence, down through the dusty years until what Father called my “strange talents” had begun to manifest themselves, and I had been able to claim it for my own.
I still shivered with joy whenever I thought of the rainy autumn day that Chemistry had fallen into my life...
My particular passion was poison.

Set in post-World War II England, Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a mystery that lives up to its appetizing title. Flavia de Luce is the youngest of three sisters, a self-taught and scarily adept Chemist, as well as a budding detective. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life,” she says, when a man is found dead in her cucumber patch. This follows the strange appearance of a dead bird on her doorstep, with a Penny Black stamp impaled on its beak. When her father is hauled off as the prime murder suspect, Flavia races to solve the mystery with nothing but her wits and her bicycle, christened ‘Gladys’, to assist her.

I’ve never met a character quite like Flavia. Her personality leaps off the page, engaging the reader from beginning to end with all the profundity of an underestimated eleven-year-old. Like most girls her age, she’s a study in warring passions, only in Flavia’s case these passions are held in check by the cool calculations of a developing genius. Her ability to keep pace with adults and even exceed them is balanced by endearing moments of vulnerability and naïveté. She’s an unusually young narrator in a novel marketed for adults, and the unlikely brainchild of a male author in his seventies. Nevertheless, Alan Bradley brings her fully into her own, and it’s impossible not to cheer her on as she employs the enthusiasm of childhood to tackle the frights and conundrums of an adult world.

“We de Luces had been Roman Catholics since chariot races were all the rage,” says Flavia, though her family attends St. Tancred’s, “a fortress of the Church of England if ever there was one.” She goes on to explain that convenience outweighs conviction, and makes her religious indifference clear in a number of small ways throughout the novel. Her loyalty to her father is fierce and admirable; her desire to breach the distance between them and prove his innocence is touching. She manipulates, though not always successfully. She routinely squabbles with her sisters (to the point of infusing her eldest sister’s lipstick with poison ivy after they lock her in a closet). Flavia jokingly attributes all of these behaviors to Darwinian theories, adding that an inability to verbalize affection runs in the de Luce blood.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie has the quick, light-hearted schematic of an Agathie Christie mystery, the guileless tone of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, and the spunk of Kristin Miller’s Kiki Strike books. Flavia continues her co-careers of Chemist and Detective in the following books: The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard, and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows.