Saturday, October 5, 2013

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie Review

 Some of us really enjoyed this witty book and others only kept reading for the sake of book club. Flavia was an interesting 11 year old character! A few of us thought she was a little too much and not your typical 11 year old. There was nothing really sweet about Flavia she was in our opinion a little psycho. If you look at how she was brought up, no mother, a father and sisters who don't care what you do as long as your home for meals, its no wonder she is the way she is. Flavia's relationship with her father is not much of a relationship. She has a  moment with her father in the jail, Bradley writes it so well, "And so we sat, Father and I, primly, like two old women at parish tea. It was not a perfect way to live one's life, but it would have to do." That was the extent of their relationship.

 Bradley has a charming way of writing and does a great job of describing Buckshaw especially Flavia's laboratory. One reason some of us would pick up more of his books would be to visit Buckshaw estate again and to see what Flavia is up to.

 Another favorite paragraph was "It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you can never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between the girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me."

 Over all a light fun read with not much of a mystery.

 One question we all want to ask Mr. Bradley "Who on earth changed Flavia's diapers when she was a baby?!!"

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