Alan Bradley 2010
In this second book of the Flavia de Luce Mystery series (although they are all stand-alone books), eleven year-old Flavia who has an unhealthy fascination with death, chemistry and poison, craftily solves the mystery of puppeteer Rupert Porson's sizzling demise. As usual, the plot is absorbing and the characters amusing (if you are able to suspend your disbelief that Flavia seems to know everything!). The vividly described puppet shows were especially enthralling for me. I am slowly getting familiar with the 1950s rural English town of Bishops's Lacey and really getting attached to the family's trusted gardener Dogger.
'I was lying dead in the churchyard. An hour had crept by since the mourners had said their last farewells.'(opening lines)
'I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I don't give a frog's fundament for them when they come from an adult. It has been my experience that facetiousness in the mouth of someone old enough to know better is often no more than camouflage for something far, far worse.'(17)
'Everyone needs to escape don't they? In one way or another.'(20)
'Meg, in a tattered outfit of rusty black bomabazine, looked like a vulture that had been sucked up by a tornado and spat back out. A red glass cherry bobbed cheerfully from a wire on her black flowerport hat.'(68)
'Now it seemed that Daffy's brain had not only died, but that it had begun to curdle. Her right eye rolled off into one corner, while the other looked as if it were about to explode clean out of her head.
This was the effect she had been working on for years: the ability to bulge her eyes out in two different directions at the same time.
"A touch of old exophthalmos," she had called it once, and I had begged her to teach me the trick. I had practiced in front of a looking glass until my head was splitting, but I could never manage more than a a light lateral googly.'(103)
Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like "boof-boof" -- just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we're still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we're invisible -- except when we chose not to be.'(112)
'A stir at one side of the stage caught our attention, and then a figure strode confidently out towards the hapsichord-- it was Mozart!... Dressed in a suit of green silk, with lace at his throat, white knee-stockings, and buckled shoes, he looked as if he had stepped straight through a window from the eighteenth century into our own.... Shaking his head, he went to his instrument, pulled a match from his pocket, and lit the candle: one at each end of the harpsichord's keyboards.... It was an astonishing performance!'(128)
'Jack seemed to be looking up as, with a sound like thunder, the giant came crashing down from the sky.
For a few moments, the monster lay twitching horribly, a trickle of ruby blood oozing from the corner of its mouth, its ghastly head and shoulders filling the stage with flying sparks, as smoke and little flames rose in acrid tendrils from its burning hair and goatee. BUt the blank eyes that stared out unseeing into mine were not those of the hinged giant, Galligantus...'(151)
'We sat for a few moments in silence, Aunt Felicity dabbing away at her canvas with no particularly exciting results, and then she spoke again: "If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world."'(203)
'There's something about pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind. When the slightest slip of the hand could prove fatal, one's attention is forced to focus like a burning-glass upon the experiment, and it is then that the answers to half-formed questions so often come swarming to mind as readily as bees coming home to the hive.'(276)
'Gelsemine was one of chemistry's chameleons, shifting color with delicious abandon, and all without a trace of its former hue... People were like that, too.'(278-279)
'Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.
But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger -- even miles away -- has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it "woman's intuition.".'(308-309)
'Brains and morals have nothing to do with one another. Take myself, for instance: I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.
I am quite firm in my belief that poisons were put upon the earth in the first place to be discovered -- and put to good use -- by those of us with the wits, but not necessarily the physical strength, to ...'(350)
2011 Bantam Book Trade Paperback Edition
358 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge
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WINNER of the 2011 Reading from My Shelves Project Giveaway:
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#2 - Avid Reader
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