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

by Alan Bradley

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.

Odd, isn’t it, that a charge of lipstick is precisely the size of a .45 caliber slug. A useful bit of information, really.

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

I knew instantly, too, that Father had just told a lie, and suddenly, without warning, somewhere inside me, a little thread broke. It felt as if I had just aged a little and something old had snapped.

clapping an ear to his chest, loosening his tie, checking with a long finger for airway obstruction. I could see that he had not slept through his St. John Ambulance classes.

it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue.

The Thirteen Drakes, Mrs. Mullet had once told me, was given its name in the eighteenth century by a landlord who simply counted up twelve other licensed Drakes in nearby villages and added another.

Toccata by Pietro Domenico Paradisi—the one from his Sonata in A Major—come tripping out to meet me. The Toccata was my favorite composition; to my mind it was the greatest musical accomplishment in the entire history of the world,

I had to look this up and listen.

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

Here and there the broad expanse of lawn was broken by one of those huge, sad beech trees whose massive boles and drooping branches always reminded me of a family of despondent elephants wandering lonely on the African veld.

quite the description!

“If ever you’re accosted by a man,” she’d said, “kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!” Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn’t know where the Casanovas were located.

lol