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When Flavia de Luce, adolescent poison-fancier and practising chemist, was bundled out of her ill-fated term at Miss Bodycote's Female Academy in Toronto, she could hardly wait until she was safely home to Buckshaw, to her father, to Dogger, to Gladys the bicycle, and even, though she would never admit it, to her sisters, Feely and Daffy. But now that she is home, things are bleak indeed.
It may be almost Christmas, but the house is not in a festive mood. The first blow comes when Flavia finds her pet chicken's cage empty. She's been killed and cooked into a nourishing broth for Flavia's father. He is in hospital, worn down it seems by insoluble money problems and the residue of his maltreatment during the war in a prisoner of war camp, and suffering from bacterial pneumonia. Flavia can hardly object to the sacrifice of her beloved pet in such a cause (though the reader might wonder why a nice fat hen from the butcher wouldn't have done as well), but she cannot wait to escape cold and gloomy Buckshaw which feels to her as if some ancient, ancestral curse has fallen over it. So she runs an errand for the vicar's wife before setting off to see her father.
The errand sends her to the house of an ecclesiastical wood-carver, a Mr Sambridge, who turns out, unsurprisingly, to be dead, hanging upside-down from some sort of wooden apparatus. Flavia is cheered by her discovery and sets about examining the premises with her detective's eye. She finds little save a book by the children's author, Oliver Inchbald, whose verses Flavia has by heart though she recites them with loathing. There is also a cat. Both will be central clues to the mystery of what happened to Sambridge and why.
Flavia's father's condition is serious enough that he is not allowed visitors, so Flavia is free to distract herself by following the clues where they may lead her. Eventually, she travels to London, where she meets up with her mentor from Miss Bodycote's, Mildred Bannerman, and back to Bishop's Lacey and a neighbour of Sambridge, Lillian Trench, who may possibly be a witch.
While Flavia still has her moments of enlivening irreverence, a change has fallen over her and indeed, over the entire book. The warfare between Flavia and her sisters is largely absent and Flavia surprises herself with sudden flashes of unexpected politeness. She is, whether she likes it or not, beginning to grow up, and is losing some of her particular charm as a result.
Those who have been following Flavia since the beginning, eight books ago, will certainly want to read this one, though if you have not, this is decidedly not the place to start. And it is, I fear, despite its seasonal setting, a pretty poor choice for heart-warming Christmas reading. The passage from child to adolescent is a perilous and rocky one, and it seems that Flavia will not navigate it unscathed. There are evidently two more books in the series to come and it remains to be seen whether Alan Bradley can conduct his heroine safely to a clear path to the adult world.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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