Book #36: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

I feel like I've heard about this book several times, but finally got around to reading it after a friend wrote about it on her blog. I love a good mystery, and this one won the "Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award," according to the cover, which I have no idea what that means, but it seems like it must be a good thing.

It's interesting, because the main character is an eleven-year-old, but it's not a book written for children. It would probably work as a YA novel, but it's definitely not specifically for that audience. Flavia de Luce, though, is not your typical eleven-year-old girl. She is a precocious chemist obsessed with creating poisons, with an instinctive way of manipulating the adults in her life to get what she wants/needs and a very good sense of how to solve a mystery. She wakes up one morning and finds a dead man in her yard, and decides to be the child detective and find out who the killer was, managing to uncover a lot of her father's personal history (and recover an extremely valuable stamp stolen from the king's personal collection!) along the way.

When I read The Age of Miracles just a few weeks ago, the thing that I hated about it was how the heroine was an eleven-year-old who did not act or think or talk like an eleven-year-old. That was still the case with this book, but Flavia was quirky and crazy enough that it didn't really seem to matter that she wasn't a typical eleven-year-old. And this book wasn't meant for the same audience as The Age of Miracles so it made more sense. I liked this book very much, although I kept putting it down and not coming back to it for a few days, so I wasn't as totally invested in the story as I am with many books.