Author: Alan Bradley
Published: March 2010
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Series: ‘Flavia de Luce’ #2
343 pages (hardcover)
Summary: Flavia de Luce is an eleven year old girl with a passion for chemistry, solving mysteries and has an all together clever mind. Flavia finds herself helping famous and beloved puppeteer Robert Porson set up a show in the church as a favor to the vicar, who helped fixed Robert’s van. Unfortunately, Robert ends up dead before the show even finishes, fried from electricity. Curiosity settles in, and Flavia finds herself sleuthing about trying to figure out who killed Robert — and there are quite a lot of suspects as it turns out Robert, who appears kind and trustworthy on television, actually has quite a few enemies. And how does Robert’s death connect with another mysterious death that happened in town five years ago?
My Thoughts: (Another crappy summary by me, hahaha). I received this book as a gift for my birthday, but didn’t get around to reading it until a little while ago. So, what I am about to say is not just because I got it as a gift and am “pretending” to like it — this book had me in its grip the whole time and is a genuinely enticing read! The actual meaty part of the story — the murder — doesn’t happen until nearly halfway through the story because the first half is setting up the characters and back stories, and I admit the wait to the actual mystery part of the novel had me an itsy bit impatient; however, the main character Flavia had me more than entertained. Flavia has immediately become one of my favourite literary characters. She is extremely clever, devious, a pretty good damn liar at times, but still maintains her childlike innocence (such as the scene where she asks Dogger, the family servant, what having an affair meant, which Dogger explained as being really good friends with someone, haha). She also has troubles with fitting in her family because her older sisters constantly tease/bully her and her father is too obsessed with his stamp collection to notice her much. Anyway, the book is narrated by her, so it definitely helps that I like her character!
I also want to point out the writing style is very fun to read, it certainly feels as if Flavia is speaking to you, rather than eloquently narrating a story. Sometimes Flavia goes off on small tangents (kind of like in Family Guy, when Peter would recollect random scenarios), which are always fun to read about. This book definitely has its own brand of humor, one that I enjoyed very much. Overall, very awesome book! I’m so glad my friend exposed me to it, I think I just might search up the other books this author has written!
My Rating: 5/5
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