The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

by Alan Bradley

It was true. I hadn’t seen them—not since they had gagged and blindfolded me, then lugged me hog-tied up the attic stairs and locked me in the closet.

LOLOL

But not until Ophelia had spun round on her heel—quite neatly, I thought—and stormed out the door.

Nobody spins on a heel, neatly or otherwise. This phrase must die.

Ophelia was not, as I was, a long-range planner who believed in letting the soup of revenge simmer to perfection.

👌

Ophelia had too quietly put down the silver butter knife in which, like a budgerigar, she had been regarding her own reflection for the last quarter of an hour.

haha, like a parakeet. I love it!

There was even an articulated human skeleton on a wheeled stand, given to Tar when he was only twelve by the great naturalist Frank Buckland, whose father had eaten the mummified heart of King Louis XIV.

These strange and insignificant little sides are part of why I adore this series.

It was like having stumbled upon a recipe book that had once belonged to the witch in the wood.

✨️🪄✨️

What intrigued me more than anything was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation—all of it!—was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn’t see it in our own world, there was real stability.

This is how I feel about math. It is indeed comforting to know there are unarguable definitives upon which we may lean in times of confusion and indecision. Personal opinions, religion, politics, fads, advice, and other mercurial entities flow in the wind, malleable to person and time, but the ever reliable, good old "2 + 2 = 4" has never let me down! Facts is facts.

my life came to life—if that makes any sense.

It does indeed.

My particular passion was poison.

Oh, Flavia.

in the safety of my sanctum sanctorum, my Holy of Holies—I

I need to treat my office / craft room as such.

Odd, isn’t it, that a charge of lipstick is precisely the size of a .45 caliber slug.

🤔

“I noticed it when I purloined your pearls.”

once when Father raised his voice, she had rolled herself up in a carpet and refused to come out until her husband was sent for.

Ha

survived by daughters, Anna, Diana, and Trianna …

"Trianna" hahaha I see what you did there

So that was it. As at a birth, so at a death. Without so much as a kiss-me-quick-and-mind-the-marmalade, the only female in sight is enlisted to trot off and see that the water is boiled. Rustle something up, indeed! What did he take me for, some kind of cowboy?

LMFAO

“I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,” I told them. “How very like you,” Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.

This book just makes me laugh so dang much.

“Oh, scissors!” I said. It was locked.

what a marvelous child- friendly curse! must add to my vernacular immediately.

Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No … eight days a week.

YES PLEASE 🙏 😍

“Yes?” she said, peering over her spectacles. They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science.

I want to go to that school when I grow up.

Miss Mountjoy! The retired Miss Mountjoy! I had heard tales about “Miss Mountjoy and the Reign of Terror.” She had been Librarian-in-Chief of the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library when Noah was a sailor.

ye gods!

For some reason I suddenly felt as if my heart had been ripped out and swapped with a counterfeit made of lead. “Are you all right, dearie?” Miss Mountjoy asked. “You seem a little peaked.” Peaked? I felt as if I were about to puke. Perhaps it was nervousness, or perhaps it was an unconscious attempt to stave off nausea, but to my horror I found myself blurting out, “Did you ever hear of a Mr. Twining, of Greyminster School?”

I found this confusing and out of character. Why did she feel sick? and why would she ask her about what's-his-face? This felt like author shenanigans.

I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.

legit

It’s a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off.

ain't it the gawd dang truth tho!

As I approached from the west, the mellow old stone glowed like saffron in the late afternoon sun, well settled into the landscape like a complacent mother hen squatting on her eggs,

lovely phrasing

the Toccata by Pietro Domenico Paradisi—the one from his Sonata in A Major—come

listened on yt — it's a cheerful ditty!

Father looked round at us as if we were a gaggle of intrusive geese.

... because that's what you were, silly goose. HONK!