Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d

Another shining mystery competently solved by the young sleuth, Flavia de Luce — Yaroo! It\’s December and Flavia has arrived back home in the village of Bishop\’s Lacey, England after having been banished to Canada for a semester of dismal schooling at Miss Bodycote\’s Female Academy. Her homecoming is decidedly spoiled on discovering that her father is hospitalized with pneumonia, and she is not allowed to see him. One of our favorite characters, Flavia\’s bicycle Gladys, is still intact; however, one of the others is definitely not. This, of course, sets Flavia\’s back up and she sets out to reconnoiter the neighborhood. Her first stop is the vicarage to see the vicar\’s wife, Cynthia, a friend whose simple request for Flavia to deliver a note to a woodcarver artisan named Mr. Sambridge leads to the scene of a quite unusual murder. Of course, Flavia solves the crime in her inimitable style, yet the ending of the novel is not the happy-ever-after we could wish for as a result. The reader will be happy to be reunited with Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, as well as Flavia\’s sisters Feely and Daffy, and cousin Ondine. He/she will not be disappointed in the twists and turns that the author introduces into the plot. And one can always trust that Flavia will survive whatever comes her way.

I have now read all the Flavia de Luce mysteries available and am impatiently awaiting the next, especially after the game-change ending of this latest volume. When I began reading the series, I was initially a bit skeptical that an eleven-year-old girl could believably be the main character and problem solver in a string of mysteries based primarily in a post WWII English village. I have been most happily surprised. The author has taken great care with the creation of Flavia and all the characters and places she encounters. The mysteries are quite intriguing (though I did feel that this latest one was a bit contrived and there is an underlying story thread throughout the series that borders on the fantastic) but in my mind they serve primarily as support for character development. Flavia has been described as a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and various young literary protagonists (Eloise, Harriet the Spy,Encyclopedia Brown, etc.) and all of them are valid to some extent. But Flavia is uniquely her own and Mr. Bradley is careful in balancing her \”schoolgirl\” persona with her more mature inquisitive nature. Flavia has a formidable intellect that drives her investigations. Her family life is very isolated-her father is distant owing to his time in a POW camp and the loss of his wife in in an unconventional mountaineering accident (a whole other story hopefully to be told). He tries to be a good parent but isolates himself from his three daughters and especially Flavia due to her uncanny resemblance to her mother. He putters with stamps and worries about the taxes on the family estate and we see little of him as anything other than the requisite widowed patriarch who is perpetually unhappy and sorrowful. Flavia is constantly at war with her older sisters who persist in trying to make her feel like she doesn\’t belong in the family. Being a prodigy at chemistry, Flavia is often quite successful at revenge. Indeed, she can be a bit ruthless at times. Her sisters are not entirely awful however and will show some redeeming qualities on occasion throughout the series. It is basically a normal dysfunctional family affected by war and loss, not uncommon for the time. Flavia is much attached to Dogger, the estate\’s Jack of all trades and her father\’s wartime POW companion. Dogger also has a story which I hope will be further explored in his own book. He is the least critical of Flavia\’s foibles and escapades and never seems to turn a hair at even her most improbable predicaments. He is a dependable and sympathetic presence in Flavia\’s world and they care for each other deeply without ever crossing the invisible \”class\” line. Inspector Hewitt is another important \”father\” figure in Flavia\’s life, not least because he is the investigative authority in the crimes that Flavia gets involved in. As expected, he initially treats Flavia somewhat dismissively. She is having none of it, however, and as the series progresses the good inspector goes from mild condescension to aggravation to exasperation to resigned and cautious recognition of Flavia\’s intelligence and tenacity. He admires her but is very careful with any praise because with Flavia a single word sends her over the moon, perhaps because she gets very little praise from anyone else. And really, how should a professionally trained official Inspector behave when confronted with a precocious little girl whose greatest happiness comes from dealing with corpses and chemistry? I don\’t envy the Inspector and I think he manages very well, again without crossing a line. His wife likes Flavia as well and Flavia in turn adores Antigone Hewitt. Flavia\’s best and perhaps only other friend is her bicycle Gladys, once owned by her mother. Gladys is the most developed inanimate character yet. Mr Bradley certainly believes in her because he treats her as a fully realized player in the books. Indeed, Gladys may well deserve her own story along with the others I\’ve mentioned. These are definitely character based stories and I enjoy that aspect even more than the mystery plots. Regarding this latest book, things happen that promise huge changes for all the individuals involved and it will be an anxious wait for the next chapter in Flavia\’s difficult and entertaining life.

Flavia de Luce is sleuth to rank with fiction\’s finest. She\’s utterly believable when she\’s solving murders and utterly entrancing as she wrestles with loneliness in a household in which her father has shut himself off from the world to mourn the death of his wife, who Flavia never knew. Discovering Alan Bradley was such a magical moment. First I read The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie with a sense that I was in good hands, and then realised there were more in the series. I\’d recommend reading these books in order, if possible.

Flavia de Luce is as fascinating as Harry Potter and his friends, but funnier and wittier. Her adventures are both preposterous and charming. The precocious chemistry whiz and all-around brainiac is rendered more human by her horrible older sisters who treat her with the disdain any older sibling feels for a younger. Gladys the bicycle is more a close personal friend than nearly any other in Flavia\’s life. Flavia gets along far better with the adults in her world than with children, though her increasing fondness for a child relative who has come to live with her family may provide Flavia with a kind of baby sister to teach and dote upon. The best part of the Flavia de Luce series is the wordplay author Alan Bradley uses so effortlessly. His prose style fills me with delight, and I am already eager to order and read the next installment.

I was really looking forward to this book, I wasn\’t too keen on the last one but thought this one would be different as Flavia was once again in Britain and I have really enjoyed the earlier books in the series very much. I feel let down and I\’m sorry to say bored which has never happened to me before with one of these books. Two of the characters made me think of AA Milne and his son Christopher but for the most part I didn\’t find any of the characters (not even the recurring ones) anything but \’cardboard\’, even Flavia wasn\’t as engaging as before. It\’s difficult to write further without introducing spoilers but I particularly disliked the incident at the end.

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