In general, I have 3 rules when browsing in a bookshop:

1. I don’t buy anything at full-tote-odds from the New Release section;

2. I don’t read crime;

3. I don’t read anything where the protagonist is an 11-year-old girl.

Last Wednesday whilst idly browsing at Angus & Robertsons at Glenelg, I broke all three of these rules. “The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie” by Alan Bradley, caught my eye immediately due to its red cover (complete with black raven sillhouette). It reminded me of “Havoc In It’s Third Year”, and so I picked it up and read the blurb, then immediately bought it. Then I bought a coke, sat down by the foreshore and only stopped reading when it got dark.

The heroine Flavia de Luce, a cross between Tiffany Aching and Wednesday Addams, lives with her widowed father and two older sisters in the crumbling ancestral home in the country. It is 1950 and while all her sisters care about is reading and music, Flavia loves chemistry to the point where she has discovered her great-uncle’s lab in an attic and is learning to use it. Her father, Colonel de Luce, is an avid stamp collector with a hidden past. This past catches up with him and he is arrested for murder. With nothing better to do, young Flavia gathers all of the means at her disposal (a shell-shocked gardener named Dogger and her trusty bicycle Gladys) and sets out to solve the mystery.

I honestly did not think that I could emphasise with an 11-year-old girl to the point where i was avidly reading about her every move, but Flavia as a heroine is brilliant. She’s very pragmatic, and quite independent. I suppose the true test would be to see if any actual 11-year-old girls would identify with her. I strongly suspect that they wouldn’t. That said, the book is not for children, or even young adults. It’s written by a middle-aged man who was obviously influenced by Enid Blyton in his youth, and should be read as such. It is light in tone but the subject matter is dark, and only Bradley’s brilliantly comic prose stops it from becoming tired. In the end it’s all about stamps, which may seem a strange subject for a crime novel but I can assure you that it works with the gentle tone of the book, and the setting. I devoured this book in two sittings (which for me is almost unheard-of) and it ranks as one of the most fun books i’ve ever read.

The author’s acknowledgements (at the back of the book for once, thank heavens) and the phrase ‘A Flavia de Luce mystery’ on the cover lead me to believe that this may be the first of a series. If it is, i’m going to seriously reconsider those rules of mine…

Last Saturday it was Valentine’s Day. Not only was it Valentine’s Day it was also Library Lovers Day. My local public library, the Wagga Wagga City Library had organised “blind date with a book”. The concept is, that you borrow a book that is wrapped up and you have no idea what you are getting. It’ll either be a hit or a miss, or somewhere in between. I was able to request a fiction blind date and this is what I received.

I’m not a huge reader of crime novels, and this is what I got. Not only was this one of my least favourite genres (westerns and mills and boon style romance would have to be right down the bottom of the list), it was also set in a boarding school in Ireland. That being said, I did like the cover (yes that’s right, I judge books by their covers!) so I thought that it at least deserved a chance.

Usually I’m a fast reader and I can plough through 2 or 3 fiction novels in a week. This one took me a week to read. It was a little hard to get into, I think perhaps because my heart just wasn’t into my date. Even though the cover was nice, I was concerned about the content. Persevere is what I did and it paid off. I finished the book this afternoon and was happy to have found out “whodunnit”. That being said I didn’t love the book and I won’t be tracking down anything else by this author.

2 stars.

I picked up On Chesil Beach on Tuesday night and finished reading it before work on Wednesday morning. It’s an absolutely delightful read but heartwrenchingly sad. Well written, wonderful imagery and two beautiful but inexperienced main characters. This is the second novel of Ian McEwan’s that I’ve read and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.

4 stars.