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

by Alan Bradley

I hated Mrs. Mullet’s seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, “Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?”

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

When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poisons, and come to “Cyanide,” I am going to put under “Uses” the phrase “Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one ‘Dearie.’

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

Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me.

I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself as she directed me to Miss Mountjoy’s house.