“Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
So speaks Flavia de Luce, a heroine after mine own heart: chemist; amateur sleuth; expert in poisons both rare and bog-standard; eleven-year-old girl. Flavia’s world is turned upside-down when she wanders into the garden one evening in 1950 and discovers something most unpleasant in the cucumber patch.
In a crime genre context, Flavia occupies territory somewhere between Miss Marple and Nancy Drew. This book is the first of an ongoing series. I’ve tagged it YA, because the first person narrator is, after all, eleven, but honestly it’s not clear to me whether this is intended to be marketed at teens or not: it was written in 2009, but is about as far from John Green (or, more accurately, from my conception of John Green) as it’s possible to get. For one thing, sex is completely absent, both literally and in almost every other sense. For example, Flavia’s older sister Ophelia advises her, if ever accosted by a man, to “kick him in the Casanovas”; Flavia remembers this advice at a crucial moment, but is hindered in following due to not knowing where on the body the “Casanovas” are located.
That’s what the book isn’t; but what about what it is? Flavia is a ripper of a protagonist: tenacious, smart, and creative, but also capable of diplomacy and of acting like a little girl to get what she wants. She lives basically in my dream house, a kookily-expanded Georgian mansion, which features a chemical laboratory built by a hobbyist great-uncle that is Flavia’s exclusive domain, as well as a library occupied largely by her bookworm sister, Daphne (hi Daphne! I like Dickens too, let’s be friends!). The whole kit is located in a post-WWII English village where bicycles, custard pies, daily women and cucumber frames are plentiful, and everyone’s business is public property. A streak of darkness, and an acknowledgement of the changes to England wrought by the war, is present in the family gardener, a former POW with clear signs of PTSD, who saved Flavia’s father’s life during the war. For a certain kind of reader (hi again!) it’s heaven, possibly only improveable by the addition of a puppy or two, and by one of the characters developing an interest in crafts. As a fan of both Miss Marple and Nancy Drew from an early age, I would have loved to have access to these books as a kid.