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

by Alan Bradley

with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. 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.

“Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring.

that might have been snapped up at an estate sale at Manderley.