Charming is a word often used to mean overly sweet, or cloying, or just-so-lovely, but charming can also mean blinding, and deceitful, and bewitching; a charm, after all, is not necessarily something you can trust the results of. In Alan Bradley’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie readers get all of the potential of charm, the danger and the delight. We immediately meet the heroine of the tale, the astonishing, charming, and dangerously clever Flavia de Luce. She may be very-nearly-eleven (and, as far as she is concerned, a chemical genius), but she is also an intrepid investigator and far more observant than the adults around her may realize.

All of these qualities, and her finally honed sense of chemically-assisted revenge, stand Flavia in good stead, for the lovely rambling family home of Buckshaw soon has death on its doorstep and a dead body in the garden. It is up to Flavia to defend her home and her eccentric family, all the while making sure that her sisters, father, and acquaintances (police and otherwise), never forget exactly how the world should really be run, by Flavia’s rules.

Flavia is such an entrancing character that the plot is almost unnecessary, but Bradley delivers here as well. It is not merely a dead bird that is found on the doorstep, it is a dead bird with a first class stamp pierced through by its beak; and the body in the garden throws the entire family (and the faithful retainers) under suspicion. Flavia’s inventive abilities are called into play as she must track down the history of a famously missing stamp, and the story behind a tragedy at her father’s former school. Flavia follows a convoluted trail that stretches back into her own family’s history and wends its way through the town as well. But what could be more pleasurable than watching Flavia work it all out? What’s not to love about a girl whose thoughts (and invective) go like this?

“Oh, scissors!” I said again. I would have to put off my research until another time. As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The rest of the characters surrounding Flavia are equally fascinating and full of the mystery and contradiction that makes a reader long for an immediate sequel. The post-war period is masterfully evoked, and the repercussions of the recent struggles and tragedies ring through as a way of life, something that serves as a tragic background to even the most lighthearted of events. But there is also hope, for the future and for Flavia, for what could this budding genius be but a fantastic success? And where would else we want to be but watching it all unfold?

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