The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2) in Read by Theme

Aug 21, 2013 Nancy McKibben rated it really liked it

Shelves: reviewed, historical-fiction, mystery

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag
By Alan Bradley

Flavia de Luce is a brilliant, quirky, chemistry-loving, crime-solving - wait for it - eleven-year-old. The novel happens in rural England in the 1950s. Flavia’s situation is both sad - her mother perished when Flavia was only a year old, her professorial father lives in a permanent fog because of it, and her two older sisters seem determined to torment her - and ideal, since Flavia is left alone to pursue her peculiar interest in poisons wit The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag
By Alan Bradley

Flavia de Luce is a brilliant, quirky, chemistry-loving, crime-solving - wait for it - eleven-year-old. The novel happens in rural England in the 1950s. Flavia’s situation is both sad - her mother perished when Flavia was only a year old, her professorial father lives in a permanent fog because of it, and her two older sisters seem determined to torment her - and ideal, since Flavia is left alone to pursue her peculiar interest in poisons with the aid of her great-uncle’s old chemistry lab, conveniently located in a little-used wing of the family manor.

Flavia’s friends are eccentric and her family extremely well-educated, making her an entertaining narrator. Here she describes Gibbet Wood:

Bright cobwebs hung suspended like little portcullises of light between the rotted tree stumps. Beneath the ancient oaks and lichen-coated hornbeams, bluebells peeped out from the deep shadows among the ferns, and there on the far side of the glade I spotted the serrated leaves of the poisonous dog’s mercury that, when steeped in water, produced a gorgeous indigo poison that I had once transformed into the bright red color of arterial blood simply by adding a two-percent solution of hydrochloric acid.

I thought with pleasure of how the ammonia and amides given off by the deep compost on the forest floor provided a perfect feast for omnivorous molds that converted it to nitrogen, which they then stored in their protoplasm, where it would be fed upon by bacteria. It seemed to me a perfect world: a world in which cooperation was a fact of life.

I drew in a deep breath, sucking the sour tang into the lungs and savoring the chemical smell of decay.

But this was no time for pleasant reflections.

Fortunately for the reader, this is a series. In this particular book, a famous puppeteer arrives by chance - or is it? - in the village and agrees to stage a show in the parish hall. Murder ensues and it’s up to Flavia to sort through the suspects: the pupeteer’s pregnant mistress, the mad mother of a murdered child, a pot-growing farmer (in 1950s British parlance, hemp), the vicar’s unpleasant wife. As Flavia muses at the end of the book when she enlightens Inspector Hewitt with the solution to the mystery:

I knew by the sudden closed look on Inspector Hewitt’s face that I had hit the nail on the head. Bravo, Flavia! I thought. Go to the head of the class!

There were times when I surprised even myself.

...more

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Apr 19, 2011 Elsa rated it it was amazing

I adore Flavia. There are parts of this book that are quietly, brilliantly, funny. There's a whole conversation about Madame Bovary that nearly made me wet my pants. ...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Dana Crouch (Callaway) rated it really liked it

Shelves: listened, mystery, audible

Read for Read By Theme (08/12): Set In England

9/8/16 - I upped my rating a star because I'm currently on an audiobook binge of this series and loving it.

8/16/2023 - Just realizing that I've finished this book in August each time I read it. Still great!

1st read: 8/24/12
2nd read: 8/2016 (audiobook)
3rd read: 8/2023 (audiobook) ...more

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