13 of 52 in my 2011 book blogging challenge.
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is an absolute delight. The book’s epigraph tells us that the title comes from this line from William King’s 1708 The Art of Cookery:
Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie, who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?
It’s an appropriate title considering that at least two pies play major roles in the mystery involving stolen stamps, decades old grudges, and a dead man found in the cucumber patch by 11-year-old Flavia de Luce.
This is not heavy reading. It isn’t going to make you fear for the future of humanity or fall into deep contemplation over the state of your own soul. It’s just simply a fun book to read. This is not to say it is inferior in any way. It isn’t challenging reading, but it is clever reading. The book is well written, and the humor is really quite sophisticated.
The main character is an 11-year-old girl with a passion for chemistry. She has taken over her late uncle’s lab where she runs experiments that include things like injecting poison ivy into her sister’s lipstick. She has a particular interest in poisons and has read a great deal about them. This is how she’s able to solve the mystery when her father’s old school mate winds up dead in the cucumber patch.
Flavia is precocious to say the least, and like any good child detective, she has the freedom to be as precocious as she wants. Her father perpetually preoccupied, and her mother died when she was a baby. Her older sisters have their own interests. Flavia is left to her own devices. She takes advantage of this by riding her mother’s old bicycle hither and yon.
Flavia is a wonderfully original character, and while I do appreciate the kind of book that presents us with more brutal reality, sometimes I dearly love a book like this one that spares us the brutality and just gives us the intrigue. In this way, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie reminds me of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. We have a mystery to puzzle out. We have an unfortunate incident, and while it is bad enough, it is not presented to us with any sort of violent intensity. Instead it is presented to us through the filter of the lovely quirkiness of the main character.
For that, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I give it four out of five stars.
