April Books

Someone kindly lent me The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley and I fairly galloped through it; could hardly put it down. England, 1950, an ancestral country house with five eccentric inhabitants: father, Colonel de Luce, obsessed with philately and with sad memories of the past; Daffy, a fanatical reader; Feely, a brilliant pianist and the youngest daughter, our heroine Flavia. Oh dear, Flavia. She is as weird and clever as her sisters but her obsession is with chemistry. Precociously knowledgeable and resourceful, with excellent powers of deduction, at eleven she is too young to realise when she is putting herself in danger. When a body is found in the garden and her father arrested, Flavia tracks down the true killer but at great risk.

The fifth eccentric occupant of the house? Dogger, the gardener, ex-POW and devoted to the family. His name is perhaps the only thing in the book which will jar on a British reader as for a whole generation and more ‘Dogger’ is of course the subject of Shirley Hughes’ book for children. This novel won the 2007 CWA Dagger Award and is the first in a series. I’m looking forward to the next book. ( rest of the month’s reading )