Rating: WORTHY!
Flavia Sabina De Luce has been banished to Canada! Toronto to be precise. It’s a girls boarding school, which she has reached by extensive travel by ship and train, and on her first night there, due to some extraordinary circumstances (which you will never guess at, so read it and squee), a dead, desiccated body is discovered in her room. And that's just the first three chapters!
By about page two I was in love with this book and with Flavia, shameless cradle-robber that I am (Flavia is fourteen, the youngest of three daughters, the other two of which are Daffy and Feely. I want to meet the whole family). Alan Bradley is a talented writer who reminds me a lot of Gail Carriger - not in his looks, you understand, but in his style - although having said that, make no mistake that this is his style and not hers. If you like Carriger's writing, and you like some Brit in your lit, you'll doubtlessly like this.
I must confess that I'd never heard of the author until this novel came up for review. He's a Canadian writer who evidently has a really good grasp of English life (either that or the Canadians and the Brits have far more in common than ever I'd hitherto understood!). This isn’t the first in the series; there's a half-dozen others, none of which I've read, but which I'm now definitely planning on investigating forthwith:
- The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
- The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
- A Red Herring Without Mustard
- I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
- Speaking from Among the Bones
- The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches
Fortunately, the stories are apparently self-contained because while reading this I never felt like I was missing any vital information. No novel is perfect, of course, so there were some instances where I had cause to question the writing, or more accurately, the thinking behind the writing, but there was nothing spectacularly adrift with it. It was generally well-written, with no spelling or grammatical errors that I noticed, and the problems were minor.
One of these relates to how Flavia's name is pronounced. The first syllable is 'flay', not 'flahh'. When a teacher mispronounces it, it's understandable, because she sees it written before she hears it, but when the police inspector mispronounces it, it makes no sense, since Flavia has already introduced herself to him by name!
Either this novel was not well-written in this particular aspect, or the inspector is stupid or nowhere near as perceptive as an inspector ought to be! This is a writing problem: you’re so used to seeing the word on the page and reading it rather than hearing it, that you forget that this is supposed to be a view of life - of people living and moving and having their being, part of which includes conversation. You can’t forget that. You can’t forget that words have sounds, otherwise you make mistakes like this.
To balance this out, let me add that I'd initially thought there was another instance of bad writing which turned out not to be so. Flavia knows who Diana Dors is. I found it highly unlikely that a 14-year-old from Flavia's background (even one who is well-educated) would not only have heard of an actor who died thirty years ago, but was also familiar enough with her to formulate the remark which she makes. It was only later that I discovered that this series is actually set in the fifties! This was quite amusing to me, because for the first page or so, I'd also thought the main character was a boy, and even when that was corrected, I'd thought it was a contemporary story!
Other than questionable instances like those (including questionable perception on my part!), the writing is excellent - and very entertaining. Flavia got into a spot of bother in Britain. She was drummed-out of the girl scouts for one thing, and so this hying to Canada was deemed to be the best thing for her. Endearingly, this girl who (literally) dreams of riding bicycles up stairs and running a chemical laboratory, was not in the least bit discombobulated a have this fascinatingly deceased body plummet into her life like a Christmas present from hell.
Here's another minor correction: we're told that the body is wrapped in a Union Jack, but that's a mistake. It's only a Union Jack when it's flying from a ship, otherwise the British flag is called just that: the Union Flag. To be fair, most people get that wrong, and though the author's "Brit speak" isn’t perfect, but he does a dashed good job of it, what? I was impressed.
On her first full day in the academy, Flavia rapidly becomes acquainted with a variety of other girls, but she never really makes friends. Some of those whom she meets, however, she purposefully cultivates in pursuit of her desire to solve this murder mystery. Evidently the body in her room is not the first girl who has gone missing at Miss Bodycote's Female Academy!
The story really starts to pick up when the principal, Ms Fawlthorne, shares a secret or two with Flavia, and this is the start of a trend. There are secrets galore, and weird behavior, and secret societies, and oddball behavior, and secret activities, and did I mention hidden secrets? Lot's of people are not who they seem to be. Through all of this, Flavia keeps her head. She's no Mary Sue, and far from perfect, screwing-up and breaking the rules, but she never gives up on her pursuit of the murderer. She's determined, resourceful, inventive, and eventually, she gets, as they say, "her man" (not that the perp is necessarily a man, understand).
That's not to say that Flavia is a Mary Sue by any means. She makes mistakes, but she's really smart, deeply interested in science, is feminine without being a wilting violet, she has times of strength and times of weakness, she has flashes of brilliance and flashes of dufus, and guess what? here's a YA novel with no male (or female!) love interest at all. How refreshing is that? As happy as I am to absorb a novel like this, I have to confess it makes me a little bit sad to think that it was a guy who created such an awesome and strong female character. How come he can do it and so many female writers fail in the same quest?
This was an especially refreshing read which I highly recommend, and I'll leave you with this amazing quote which made me laugh out loud. It does help if you properly understand British idiom, however:
"How are you finding it?" Merton asked. "Miss Bodycote's Female Academy I mean?"
"Frankly, Mr. Merton," I said, "Just between you, me, and the gatepost - it’s a bugger."
