A Foray into Y/A (Part II): The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Like my other "foray into Y/A," The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley is a mystery, and a delightful one at that.

(Note: I hesitate to call it Y/A because it is quite intricate and very adult-friendly, but when I was working at a bookshop, we were to always put it there so let's run with that.)

When I first picked this up in the Mysterious Bookshop on a lunch break from the NYU Summer Publishing Institute, I was rather unimpressed by the blurb but absolutely captivated by the cover. It had no jacket and that brilliantly beautiful (while also disturbing) illustration of a dead bird with a stamp on its beak.

And thank the mystery gods for that one... Bradley's Flavia de Luce is a most unlikely heroine (and similar to Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in that unlikeliness only). She is merely 11, the youngest of three daughters (like moi), and has an obsessive penchant for chemistry (which leads her into pranks on items like her sister's lipstick).

In The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the first installment of this now series, Flavia (and her trusted bike Gladys) zoom around Bishop's Lacey (a blissfully British sounding town) in order to solve two mysteries. First, a man dies in her backyard, gasping out his very last words to Flavia herself. This mystery and the caricatured clues that surround it (a Norwegian bird, a rare stamp, a pie) lead her to poke the murder of her father's old professor at Greyminster, which dear old Mr. de Luce may be involved with himself. Naturally, in true mystery fashion, the two are connected and will be neatly sorted out.

Admittedly, the mystery is a bit contrived, but aren't all great mysteries so? It is the classic elements of this story that liken Flavia far more to the impeccable Sherlock Holmes than to the now-kitschy (but formerly wonderful) Nancy Drew. The mystery is precisely laid out, and is almost more realistic in its oft-criticized predictability. The reader is given the same clues Flavia is so that the reader can solve it at the same speed that Flavia does. Refreshing to be sure in an era of mysteries where absurd twists come out of just about nowhere.

I can't wait to meet up with Miss Flavia yet again in The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, due out March 8, 2010. (She even has her own fan club after just one novel!)

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

My posting history for the past month has been absymal. I'll chock it up to all of the craziness that decided to settle into my life for now, but enough about that. Back to books.

Truth be told, my reading has severely decreased because of my internships but I've managed to squeeze in some gems here and there. I'm going to keep these next few posts brief, partly because I read the books a bit ago and partly because I simply want to.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire, is, for those of you who live under a rock, his follow-up to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I admittedly had a lot of qualms with Dragon Tattoo, mainly with its rattling on and on about the economic scandal, which I frankly did not care about. A chapter or so would have been enough, but nevertheless I still enjoyed it greatly.

The Girl Who Played With Fire (thankfully) does not delve into economics and rather explores more deeply the fascinating character of Lisbeth Salander. Her background is (almost) fully divulged in the course of a murder investigation.

The parts that I did love about Dragon Tattoo stayed around for Played With Fire, but not in the boring way that Carlos Ruiz Zafon did with The Angel's Game. Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, and all the other main players stuck around for round 2. At the center of the novel was still an expose executed by Millenium magazine and a book counterpart to boot (which a publishing nut like myself has got to love).

Instead of the mystery taking Blomkvist & Co. to the depths of snowy Sweden, this murder investigation takes place in Stockholm itself with only a brief (but powerful) hiatus to the familiar countryside we came to know in the first installment. Also, instead of the mystery centering on one psychopath, it concentrates on the rather large exploitation of human trafficking which does share one thing with original mystery: Eastern European immigrant girls as victims.

But of course, despite any differences, there were still men who hate women and the woman who hates men who hate women. Larsson's chilling look into how the sexes have yet to become equal and how women still have much to overcome is like a blast of frigid cold into our cozy ideas of Sweden as a socialist safe haven for all. (Don't worry, there are plenty of men who love/respect women to ensure that it isn't just a man-bashing mystery.)

While The Girl Who Played With Fire is hardly polemical and not likely to change much in the way of how things are, it still is worth reading not only for the entertainment value of an SVU episode on steroids but also for its (disturbingly) deep questions it raises.