I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce, #4)

by Alan Bradley

There were times when I felt as if I were standing astride a cold ocean—one foot in the New World and one foot in the Old. As they drifted relentlessly apart, I was in danger of being torn up the middle.

“Well,” I wanted to say, “there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city walls.”