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!)