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.

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.

Heaven

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

Was there ever a companion booklet, Cycling for Men of All Ages? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men’s League of Health and Handsomeness?

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

A long hallway, hung profusely with dark, water-stained sporting prints, served as a lobby, in which centuries of sacrificed kippers had left the smell of their smoky souls clinging to the wallpaper.