The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

I am reading a lot of books at once and also trying to get more active and do things with my kids this summer, so I'm not finishing books as quickly as usual. Sometimes the way to fix that is to read some easy books, so I've been reading the second Flavia de Luce mystery, sent to me a while back by Corey at Shelf Monkey. This one is entitled The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag. I find Alan Bradley's titles unmemorable, and I think he's going to have a hard time sustaining my interest in his plucky little heroine as her adventures continue--since part of my delight in her character is my surprise at what she turns out to be capable of--but I enjoyed this second one almost as much as the first, largely due to the unexpected cleverness of the way Bradley has Flavia use chemistry and other kinds of (to me at least) esoteric knowledge.

I didn't know who "Mother Shipton" was, for instance--a character who evidently inspired at least the costume of Mother Goose: "she was some old crone who was supposed to have lived in the sixteenth century and seen into the future, predicting, among other things, the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, aeroplanes, battleships, and that the world would come to an end in 1881." I like the way it makes me think about people who believe that the end of the world will come in 2012 and how Flavia dismisses the story as "a load of old tosh."

I love the way the book is framed by Flavia's chemical maneuverings with a box of chocolates that she has intercepted before they can be delivered to one of her older sisters and then has to intercept again before they can be served to a room full of family and friends.

The simplicity of some of the clues in this mystery are obscured by Flavia's 11-year-old philosophizing, which is less charming than her ferocity and chemical prowess:
"Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.
But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters."

One of the comforting things about reading a mystery set in a simpler time, like this one, is the attitude toward the death of a child. At the conclusion of a 45-minute inquest into the death of a 5-year-old boy with the verdict of "Death by Misadventure," the coroner "expressed his sympathy to the bereaved parents" and Flavia concludes that the article about his death is short because "the village wanted to spare Robin's parents the grief of seeing the horrid details in print." This seems so much more humane than the articles I read today, in which a stunned parent who has, for example, forgotten a toddler in a car on a hot day, is formally prosecuted for the "crime," on top of the already overwhelming guilt and lifelong grief. In Flavia's world, everyone knows everyone else, and so suffering, while occasionally deliberately inflicted, is never disregarded.

I also find that, as a parent who is trying to spend some time with the kids in the summer, it's good for me to read the occasional book written from an immature point of view, because I remember a bit of what it was like when I didn't already know everything but thought I did!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

It was a review at A Bookworm's World that first made me want to read Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, mostly because Luanne calls it "Harriet the spy for grownups." And when I got around to reading it, I was delighted to find that the 11-year-old heroine, Flavia de Luce, does occasionally remind me of my favorite 11-year-old heroine, Harriet: "I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did." I wouldn't call either Flavia or Harriet unreliable narrators, exactly, but part of the charm of their first-person narration is the fallibility of some of their observations--not because they're not intelligent enough to interpret what they're seeing, but because they're both only eleven, and don't necessarily have enough context yet to recognize everything they're seeing for what it is: "whenever she was thinking about Ned, Feely played Schumann. I suppose that's why they call it romantic music."

Flavia does not fancy herself a spy, but takes the part of Janie in terms of her hobby (she's a chemist). Her spying is part of her curious nature; when she discovers a body in the garden, she takes it upon herself to solve the mystery of how it got there, and along the way, she shows her intense loyalty to her reticent family circle. She gets around on her bike, which she calls Gladys, and she is tolerated and given considerable free rein by the Inspector assigned to the case, who gets to recite the lines of poetry from which the title is derived and politely declines to tell Flavia why the symbol for her in his notes is a "P."

Although Flavia figures out that the murdered man died from an injection of carbon tetrachloride just from smelling his last breath, she misses the fact that her family's cook knows no one in the family likes custard pie and so she makes one occasionally to take home to her own husband. Like the cook in Harriet the Spy, Mrs. Mullet doesn't always have enough patience to deal with the resident child genius, and when she laughs at Flavia, even Flavia is aware that "something in me that was less than noble rose up out of the depths, and I was transformed in the blink of an eye into Flavia the Pigtailed Avenger." That she can see herself this way indicates some potential for either increasing egalitarianism or noblesse oblige as she gets older.

In the end, Flavia figures out the mystery, although she has to have some help capturing the murderer. And this is only the first of her adventures; Bradley promises a series of mysteries featuring Flavia.