Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Sassy Girl Detective

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

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BINGO GREEN I love me a good mystery novel and I love, love, love the heroine/main character in this book, Flavia DeLuce.  Flavia is the 11 year old youngest daughter of  Colonel DeLuce, the head of the county seat/manor.  Flavia has two older sisters who torment her as much as possible (Ophelia is boy obsessed and Daphne is book obsessed).  But Flavia, who is chemistry obsessed and spends her time in the old Victorian chemistry lab in her home learning about poisons, gives as good […]

I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

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It is the summer of 1950 and Flavia de Luce is an 11 year old budding chemist in the small, fictional English town of Bishop’s Lacey.  As she minding her own business (testing out chemistry experiments on her older sisters), mysterious things start to happen around her- first a dead bird with a postage stamp turns up on the family’s front doorstep, then she finds a man dying at 4am in the family’s cucumber patch! Her natural inclination to solve the mystery only increases when […]

If Jessica Fletcher was British and 11 (Bingo – Red)

The Golden Tresses of the Dead by Alan Bradley

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The tenth in the series, I find Flavia de Luce just as delightful now as I did in the beginning. Still precocious, curious, and clever (the way she talks about her bicycle always makes me smile) she’s grown up a bit and experienced real loss, but she is just as vibrant to me as she ever was. Okay y’all. We are calling this red. It’s not a hard red, more of a pinky/salmon/Ross’s shirt on friends sort of shade, but the powers that be in […]

This Was a Heck No Times Two

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

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Seriously…I see that some of you all liked/loved this one but I am baffled. This is up there with “The Catcher in the Rye” with most loathsome young adult character I have read in like decades. Flavia is dancing towards being a psychopath. I would have brained her for the crap she was doing to her two sisters. And all of them were just the most dysfunctional family ever. I can’t even tell you much about the murder. Someone was murdered. Flavia “investigated”. Bah. At […]

The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place – A Fine Mystery in a fine series

The Grave's a Fine and Private Place by Alan Bradley

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Whenever someone posts a generic “what should I read” status on social media, and if mystery is a genre they enjoy, I often to go this Alan Bradley series. Flavia de Luce, the youthful Angela Fletcher of 1950s England, is fun to follow on her exploits. It is just refreshing to have a fun female character to follow! Bradley has done a good job of keeping it fresh – though the murder mystery portion is formulaic, we have watched Flavia grow as she has faced […]

I would hire Arthur Dogger & Associates.

The Golden Tresses of the Dead (Flavia de Luce, #10) by Alan Bradley

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Flavia (and Dogger) continue to delight me. The mysteries continue to frustrate me. Will I continue to read this series (even though this was originally supposed to be the last book)? Most likely. The book opens at Flavia’s sister’s wedding to the German POW Dieter. Feely finds a severed finger in her wedding cake. She loses it and almost ruins her own wedding; Flavia is fascinated, and quickly tucks the finger away. Whose finger is it? Who put it there? Why? Flavia and Dogger are on […]



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