Poisons and Murder and Bodies, Oh My! The Flavia de Luce Series by Alan Bradley

Greetings and hallucinations, my dears, and an early Happy Anniversary to me! It was a year ago this week that I began my blog, and have since, to my surprise, gained as many followers as I have over the last 12 months. Thank you all again for joining me.

Have you ever encountered someone constantly proving how smart they are? Or someone so intelligent it’s scary? Well, prepare to be introduced to an extraordinary 11-year-old named Flavia de Luce, created by Alan Bradley.

The book series begins in Bishop’s Lacey, a small town in England in the 1950s. Like the cliched villages, it has a grand crumbling pile of a manor house called Buckshaw, inhabited by the de Luce family for several generations. Of course, the latest generation of de Luces are all eccentric and brilliant. Widower and patriarch Haviland is an ardent and knowlegable philatelist with an impressive and valuable stamp collection. Eldest daughter Ophelia — “Feely” — is as musically talented as she is vain. Middle daughter Daphne — “Daffy” — is the ultimate bookworm, having read, reread, or reading every book in the library, with amazing recall.

And then there’s Flavia, the youngest of the three girls, who took it upon herself to move into her great-uncle’s chemistry lab and claimed it as hers, as well as deeming it her bedroom. She displays a great knowledge of chemistry and poisons for one her age, sometimes stealing her sister’s makeup for experimentation. But her fascination with murder begins with her discovery of a dead body; her first, which becomes a theme.

Over the course of the series (nine as of this posting), Flavia is at the scene of or discovers every body, including when she is sent to Canada to attend school. In every instance, she is determined to find the murderer, much to the chagrin of the police, embodied mostly by Inspector Hewitt. But that is only the beginning. Flavia keeps encountering people who knew her late mother, Harriet, insisting how much Flavia is like her.

This vexes all the de Luce sisters for different reasons. Flavia was a baby when Harriet was lost and presumed dead in the mountains, and only has pictures and others’ memories to go on. Feely and Daffy, on the other hand, go out of their way to make Flavia feel like an alien in the family, even though they have true memories of their mother.

You can’t read these books and not learn something, be it biochemistry, botany, or even a little bit of history. The narration is told from Flavia’s point of view, so events are filtered through her intelligence, emotions, even her (occasionally) overactive imagination. Unlike other amateur detective mysteries, she doesn’t always confront the murderer by herself, but is always present when they are caught. You sometimes need to remind yourself that the narrator is a preteen girl (“a cross between Eloise and Sherlock Holmes”, as the Boston Globe once said) instead of a veteran of several years and of more advanced age.

The series begins with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and are all in paperback. The tenth novel, The Golden Tresses of the Dead, will be released in January 2019.

Thank you for reading my ramblings, my dears, and I hope to hear from you. If you’d like to recommend a book for me to read and review, or even need me as an editor for your own work, please leave a comment or contact me.

In the meantime, keep reading, keep writing, and never give up making your own magic. Be well.