Kestrell

1. _The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce Mystery_ by Alan Bradley (Delacorte Press, 2009)
Flavia de Luce is an eleven-year-old girl with a flair for chemistry growing up in 1950 England, the youngest of three sisters who live in an old country house where obviously no one has ever organized a closet let alone thrown anything out, and a would-be poisoner: how could I not love this character?

I think every eleven-year-old girl should be given a copy of this book. And a chemistry set. Let the rest of the world tremble in fear (it's probably just as well I didn't get to read this book when I was eleven).

I also read the next in the series _The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag: A Flavia de Luce Mystery_ (2010), but found it to be somewhat less satisfying, possibly because it focuses more on the mystery and less on any character development.

_Big Machine_ by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau, 2010)
This book just won a Shirley Jackson award for best novel, and it definitely delivers a haunting story about a black man named Ricky Rice who is trying to cope with the everyday struggle to be a decent person despite nightmarish memories and almost crippling self-recrimination. He reminded me a lot of Eleanor in Jackson's _The Haunting of Hill House_, because his past is a cold cruel sea which is always waiting to drag him down. So when he gets a chance to make a new start as a scholar working in a secret archive (secret library!) in the wilds of Vermont, he grabs at it, never suspecting what a long strange trip it will turn out to be.

The two main characters of this novel, Ricky Rice and Adele Henry, are great--tough but imperfect people who are struggling with addictions, harrowing memories, and the struggle for self-respect. They are the two last people who would expect the heroes of the story to turn out to be themselves, and LaValle does an outstanding job creating a sense of the hopelessness and horror of having to struggle just to keep body and soul together.

My one issue with the novel is that the supernatural elements, which show up pretty late in the story, felt grafted on, leaving me wishing that there had been either more or less of them, but perhaps I am just a cynic. Ultimately, the story is really about faith and doubt and what people are willing to sacrifice for what they believe in, and the ending will probably strike you as either hopeful or ambiguous depending on your own belief in the miraculous.

_Book of Shadows_ by Alexanda Sokoloff (St. Martin's Press, 2010)
I felt last year's Sokoloff novel, The Unseen, was pretty tepid, but I got drawn into _Book of Shadows_ because it promised an evil book (evil book!) and it has a character who is a witch from contemporary Salem (books involving Salem are one of my guilty pleasures, even when I know the author is going to do a half-sass treatment of real witchcraft). The witch really is a witch, but the book is just an ordinary book of shadows, so that was pretty disappointing. The male protagonist, a Boston police officer whom every female in the book finds irresistible, ultimately turns out to be a hypocritical jerk--all the characters in this book are cliches--but the action is non-stop, and hey, in this novel Man Ray still exists, so it was kind of a nostalgia trip. The story is really a mystery concerning who killed a glamorous Amherst coed, and the entirety of the novel is preoccupied with keeping you on the edge of your seat asking if anything supernatural is actually happening, but frankly, by the end of the novel, I was glad to be rid of the whole group of whiny characters. Still, I've read much worse books while on summer vacation in the wilds of Maine with nothing else to read, so others may find it enjoyable as a beach book.

You can find all threee reviews linked from
the new edition of Green Man Review
http://greenmanreview.com/