I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

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I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce #4)
Alan Bradley

Publisher’s Blurb:

It’s Christmastime, and the precocious Flavia de Luce—an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry and a penchant for crime-solving—is tucked away in her laboratory, whipping up a concoction to ensnare Saint Nick. But she is soon distracted when a film crew arrives at Buckshaw, the de Luces’ decaying English estate, to shoot a movie starring the famed Phyllis Wyvern. Amid a raging blizzard, the entire village of Bishop’s Lacey gathers at Buckshaw to watch Wyvern perform, yet nobody is prepared for the evening’s shocking conclusion: a body found, past midnight, strangled to death with a length of film. But who among the assembled guests would stage such a chilling scene? As the storm worsens and the list of suspects grows, Flavia must use every ounce of sly wit at her disposal to ferret out a killer hidden in plain sight.

After the last book, I was actually a little reticent to pick this one up, which wasn’t something I ever expected to happen.  I’m very happy to report that my concerns were entirely unfounded.  This book returns to the well constructed yarns that Bradley is so well known for.  It feels like it picks up where The Weeds that Strings the Hangman’s Bag left off.  In fact, I would have considered the series complete with just Books 1, 2 and 4.  However, before I devolve into another tangent about how much of an outlier Book 3 is, the point of this little exercise is to discuss this book.  I don’t know why I didn’t guess it, but an actress with a similar interest in crime and grisly murders is exactly what Flavia needed, a sort of mother figure without the inconvenience of evil step mothering.  She seemed a perfect fit for Flavia.  Finally an adult who could commiserate with her and help her solve crimes.  However, I would have liked for Wyvern’s cruelty to Bun to be explained in some way instead of simply throwing it in there to add another suspect to the list.

In fact, when it came to the suspects in this particular book they were oddly scarce and Bradley was completely aware of that.  I’m not sure what it says about me that I prefer a book wherein there can at least be someone for me to suspect, even if the rug is ripped out from under me later on, but in this book, I found myself not even bothering to guess.  Though that could have something to do with the fact that there were so many people in the book that it was actually a little difficult to keep them all straight.  You had your main characters and even your minor characters that you recognize from the other books, but in this one, Bradley threw in an entire film crew and then literally half the village.  The village I knew, but I actually found it difficult to keep the film crew straight.  When the final reveal came, I was a little surprised at who is was and actually found it a little difficult to swallow.

However, aside from that one moment of doubt, the rest of the story is downright delightful. Flavia’s scheme to catch Father Christmas (and I do mean catch) reminded me of all the Christmas mornings when I still believed that a man of magic had delivered presents over night.  Bradley’s blizzards actually made me want to be in them because they are the kind of blizzards you survive by hunkering down under a mountain of blankets and reading books until the wind stops blowing.  I cheered when Flavia finally called her sisters on their malodorous malarkey and asked them why they hated her so much.  Bradley’s true genius lies in his ability to capture a capricious eleven year old and make me love her.  I actually mentally reprimanded her sisters when they were awful to her because I knew no one else would and it takes truly good writing to get a reader to parent imaginary characters.  I found his revelation about Aunt Felicity to be marvelous.  It took a fussy old woman and made her into a the kind of strong woman the era is known for and he did it over the course of a single conversation that she spends half of complaining about her old age.

In the end, this book is lovely and delightful in all the best ways.  Flavia is still the chemistry loving child that we have all grown to love.  I only wish that she were real and not just a character because the world could use someone like Flavia de Luce.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 4 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4 Doctors
Pacing/Tension/Urgency: 4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  5 Snyders
Language: 5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce Book 1)
Alan Bradley

Publisher’s blurb:

It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.

For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “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.”

Adorable.  I know that Flavia, would cringe at my use of the word to describe her, but it’s the perfect one to use.  She is adorable.  The stereotype of the plucky Brit has always struck me as endearing and Flavia is the concept of plucky embodied.  Everything about her made me want to smack her dad in the head and tell him what an amazing kid he has.  Item the First, she’s a massive chemistry nerd.  She uses archaic names of chemical compounds to calm her nerves (“Butter of Antimony…Flowers of Arsenic”).  I’m not going to lie, if I’d been able to learn about chemistry the way Flavia does, I would have a whole different viewpoint of the topic. Item the Second, she uses “scissors” as a curse word.  Any eleven year old in the world who uses the word scissors as a curse word gets an automatic amazing award.  Item the Third, she named her articulated skeleton Yorrick.  Do you see what I’m getting at now?  I wasn’t this cool when I was eleven, but retroactively I totally wish I had been.  If the Doctor were to ever show up in Flavia’s life, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

As to the story, it’s surprisingly compelling.  It falls along the lines of a typical Agatha Christie novel (and not just because of the time period in which it’s set).  There’s a minimal amount of gore.  The plot centers almost entirely upon intrigue and Flavia’s progress in wading through it, with a small subplot regarding a fantastic prank she played on her sister.  (Seriously, if I had been half as clever as Flavia, I would have gotten away with so much more stuff.)  Like a cozy mystery, the cast of characters that revolve around Flavia are both eclectic and marvelous.  Throw in the fact that you’re in Britain in 1950 and the fact that the oddball histories of the characters are all marred by WWII, and you find there’s an odd sort of realism to the story. The tension and urgency of the story are wrought almost entirely by Flavia’s persistence.  Her tenacity is downright charming and it certainly goes far to keeping the story moving along at a reasonable clip.

In the end, this story is a perfectly lovely tale of murder and the plucky eleven year old who sets out to solve it.  I can’t tell you how thankful I am that this whole series is out so that I can pick up the next one tomorrow.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pace/Urgency/Tension:  4.5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language:  4.5 Feegles
Mystery:  4.5 Sherlocks

Book Links: Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch

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Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch
Nancy Atherton

The one word that comes to mind every time I think of this book is lovely.  Atherton builds a small village in the English countryside that is populated by exactly the kind of people one would expect to find there.  It seems to have missed the last century, in that people are more worried about their neighbor’s welfare than they are about what dress Kate Middleton worn to the gala last night.  You won’t find constant twitter updates here or anybody talking about the most recent podcast.  Ordinarily, when I sit down and pick up a book, I curl up in bed with a cup of earl grey or a Stella Artois and the world outside my window disappears.  Reading this book went beyond that.  It was bizarrely cathartic to me that this place could exist in this time.  It’s comforting to know that there’s a place where cell phones and husband grubbing spinsters exist simultaneously. It results in this delightfully light romp through the English countryside.

Publisher’s Blurb:

When Amelia Thistle moves to Finch, her new neighbors welcome her with open arms-and inquiring minds. Among them is Lori Shepherd, who isn’t fooled by Amelia’s unassuming persona. Amelia is, in fact, a world-famous artist with a rabid and eager-to-stalk fan base.

In order to keep peace in Finch, Lori must help Amelia conceal her identity. Amelia, meanwhile, sets about working on the riddle that brought her to town in the first place. A fragment of a family diary hints that one of Amelia’s ancestors might have been Mistress Meg, the Mad Witch of Finch. Following the clue, Lori hunts through Finch’s darkest and most secret corners, all the while dodging nosy neighbors and Amelia’s frantic fans. With Aunt Dimity’s otherworldly help, Lori inches closer to the true story of Mistress Meg-and Amelia.

In truth, I found this book to be refreshing.  It’s not every day when you get to read a mystery that doesn’t center on a murder or a terrorist plot of some kind or another.  The search for a hidden 17^th century memoir that’s been hidden piecemeal throughout a sleepy village is nothing short of delightful.  At no point is the situation life or death for our characters and though that can pump up the suspense, it’s wonderful to read a book that kept my eyes glued to the page without resorting to it.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for a good murder mystery or a action adventure that’s all action (see my review of Soft Target), but some days I want the mystery without the gore and this book 100% delivers on that.  It’s multi-faceted and complex without being ham-handed or overbearing.

There are two aspects, however, in which this story truly shines:  characterization and setting. We’ll start with the people.  Atherton created an entire village of fully fleshed out human beings with hopes and dreams, adorable idiosyncrasies and flaws.  For a while I thought that a few of the characters were going to be left on the shelf as dusty stereotypes, but rest assured, she didn’t leave them there.  These secondary characters were dusted off and allowed to adapt and grow.  Since part of the premise of the book is the intrinsic value of village life, it was necessary to create a cast of believable and fully realized people to populate it.  I’ll admit that there were times when I doubted that this could possibly be happening on the same planet that I live on, but the level to which I wanted it to be true more than compensated.

As to the setting, it’s surprising the economy of words with which Atherton brings the village to life.  The tearoom and village green are left with only their names as their descriptors, allowing my mind to populate them with dainty china and verdant grass.  Atherton does describe the locations of the clues more thoroughly, which is as it should be since they will have to be searched for the aforementioned clue, but when she does I was more than a little surprised to find that it matched (at least externally) what I had in my mind already.  Granted the names of the cottages were pretty damn expressive, in and of themselves, and once again I found it difficult to believe that there’s a house on the planet that’s commonly referred to as Pussywillows, but oh how I want it to be true.

This is the first book I’ve read in this series and I fully intend to go back and read the rest, but there’s a key piece to this story/series that I haven’t covered yet:  Aunt Dimity.  It’s not explained how the effect is achieved in the story, but the main character, Lori, has a journal which she can speak to and her deceased aunt will write her response.  It sounds weird when I describe it like that, I know, but oddly, within the confines of the book it works.  You look forward tp Lori sitting down to talk to Aunt Dimity in front of the fire because Aunt Dimity is something of a spit fire.  She reminds me quite a lot of Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.  She’s exceedingly intelligent, pragmatic and always talks with a certain dry wit that I just adore.  We should all be so lucky to have a leather bound Aunt Dimity in our life.

In the end, this book is a light read, but it’s delightful nonetheless.  If you have a free afternoon, this is one hell of a way to spend it.

4 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 4.5 Buffys
Character Investibility: 4.5 Doctors
Pacing/Urgency/Tension: 4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4.5 Snyders
Language: 4 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Murder in a Basket

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Murder in a Basket
Amanda Flower

I’m not ashamed to say that this book appealed to the Murder She Wrote fan in me.  I hadn’t heard of the cozy mystery genre before, which is completely absurd since it’s right down my alley (see the last sentence for the reason why).  The fact that the main character is a librarian is absolute perfection.  The oddball characters that populate the small Ohio town she lives in only made it better.  This book is a wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon. It’s light and entertaining with the exact right amount of urgency, humor, and intrigue.

Publisher’s Blurb:

College Librarian India Hayes is back and better than ever in this new entry to Amanda Flower’s Agatha Award-nominated series.

India’s annoyance turns to suspicion as she discovers the body of Zen-like basket weaver‚ Tess Ross‚ on the festival grounds. Tess leaves behind an angry blacksmith husband‚ a confused adopted son‚ greedy siblings‚ a dysfunctional artists’ co-op‚ and a chocolate-colored labradoodle with a two-million-dollar trust in his name. India finds herself playing sleuth as well as foster-owner to the two-million-dollar labradoodle. With her own eccentric family commenting from the sidelines and her Irish-centric landlady‚ Ina Carroll‚ as volunteer sidekick‚ India must discover the truth before she has a permanent canine houseguest or she ends up the next victim in the basket weaver’s murder.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that Flower’s last book Maid of Murder was nominated for an Agatha Award because I spent the entire book thinking of how much this reminded me of a Christie novel.  It’s very classically written (light on the gore, heavy on the sleuthing), which is refreshing in our culture drenched in sex and violence.  (If you’d like to refute that last point, go ahead and watch the next CSI.  It doesn’t matter which one. Done?   Point made.)  It incredibly rare to have murder treated in a way that illustrates the visceral horror of the act while consciously averting its eyes from the blood splatter.  Flower still crafts the dark amorphous shape of murder in the night, but she does it in a way that is infinitely more subtle than has become customary in our times and I cannot tell you how much I appreciated it.  It’s immensely comforting to me to know that this story was created in this year and that it’s well received.  It restores my faith in humanity a bit, which is not an easy thing to do.

As to the characters, I really love India Hayes.  She won my complete buy in as a fully actualized human being.  She’s super-intelligent, persistent, and surprisingly reasonable giving the family that swirls about her.  I can’t even tell you how easy it is for me to empathize with her.  While my family’s language is different from India’s, we still have one that’s specific to us.  Hell, we even have short poems that are specific to us, mostly involving purple cows and birdies in the sky.  Moving on…  Although India is fully fleshed out, she isn’t the only one.  It would have been easy to reduce the characters surrounding her to stereotypes, but Flower rose far above that.  She added shades of gray to each and every one of her characters, even the ones that were dead.  Even the animals were given full personalities.  In fact, they were the primary means of injecting humor into the story and I’m not going to lie, it really made me want to bring a dog home.  (Though, of course, I still can’t what with allergies and all.)

In the end, this story is immensely entertaining and it’s a very well written mystery.  A tale of murder, trust funds, and art co-ops in a sleepy Midwestern town that will make an afternoon disappear in no time.

4 ink bottles.

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher