Probably not for book clubs, but I love, love, love Flavia de Luce.
I just finished the fourth book, but am again listening to the first (
Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) and find that I enjoy this one the most of all.
Author is C. Alan Bradley.
Reader is Jayne Entwistle (absolutely brilliant!)
Flavia is a precocious 11-year old who talks to her bike (Gladys), is brilliant at chemistry (with a wicked passion for poisons), has a deceased mother, an emotionally distant father and two older sister who are the bane of her existence:
Ophelia: "Witch!"
Flavia: "Hag!!"
Flavia solves murders, typically under the noses of the local constabulary and constantly imagines how she will murder (by poison, obviously) those who have wronged her family.
If you ever ran down a hill with your arms out, pretending to be an airplane...
if you ever snuck into a place that had signs strickly forbidding entrance...
if you ever wondered why you weren't loved...
or rattled off chemical equations simply because the sound made you happy...
if you were ever fiercely protective and loyal to the very family that drives you crazy...
...then Flavia is for you. As in discussing her father's inability to remember her name:
“It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.”
or
“Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet's seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, 'Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?”
or
“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.”
All Hail Flavia!
click the IMAGE link for more of my favorite quotes.
http://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-at-Bottom-Pie/dp/0739384309/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323346091&sr=8-1
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1074866.Alan_Bradley
