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

by Alan Bradley

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

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

I detected instantly that she didn’t like me. 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. With a boy you never know whether he’s smitten or gagging, but 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.

I was about to retort that there were times I scared myself, but then I remembered that silence can sometimes do more damage than words. I bit my tongue.

Why did the universe conspire against me like this? First the closet, then the library, and now the confectioner’s. My life was becoming a long corridor of locked doors.

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

People love to talk—especially when the talking involves answering the questions of others—because it makes them feel wanted.