2013 Book Review #35: I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

[jethrien]

Title: I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
Author: Alan Bradley
Genre: Mystery
Thingummies: 3.5

Synopsis: 11-year-old Flavia de Luce is a budding chemist who loves poisons...and mysteries. So when a famous actress dies while shooting a movie in Flavia's English manor house, what choice does she have but to investigate?

Thoughts: While nothing revelatory, this is a charming little mystery. I'm not sure there's really enough clues dropped for a reader to solve it themselves, it comes together tidily enough.

Flavia is a delightful heroine. Bradley rather well captures the thought process of a precocious child. I remember all too well the combination of pride and eagerness to impress and lack of understanding that might make a kid think that the appropriate way to commemorate the death of someone they admired would be to make a giant firework Rocket of Honor and launch it off the roof.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Agh! Improper hyphen in title! Half formations are open unless otherwise noted in the dictionary!

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Not their fault. It's a quote from "The Lady of Shalott". Blame Tennyson.

(Although it's a pretentious quote that has little to do with the book.)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Treatment of hyphenation of word compounds is fashion, too. It was probably correct when Tennyson wrote. Nothing points this out quite like reissuing a book from 1984 and having the proofreader go crazy "correcting" all the things that were accepted style then but aren't anymore.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I really like the Flavia books, and I'm not a mystery fan generally.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

She's cute, although I think they would get wearing if one read too many in a row.