I Am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce Novel Review

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I Am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce Novel ReviewBuckshaw, the huge house of the de Luce family, is mostly shut up. There is very little money to maintain the house and Colonel de Luce has had to agree to allow a movie crew to use the house as a film set just to make enough money to fend off bankruptcy a little longer. Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce regrets that the crew's use of the great hall means the family won't be able to put up the usual Christmas tree and decorations, but she plans to compensate for the loss with the entertainment of secretly observing the visitors.
As always, Flavia is also deeply occupied with various experiments in her fully-equipped chemistry laboratory, originally outfitted by her uncle Tar. At the moment, her chief experiment is a fairly simple one. She has whipped up a super-sticky birdlime to coat Buckshaw's chimneys. This is intended to prove her hypothesis, much derided by her elder sisters Ophelia and Daphne, that Father Christmas exists. If he does exist, Flavia expects to find him adhered to the chimney on Christmas Eve and to join all of the house and surrounding countryside in admiration of the stupendous fireworks display Flavia has planned with all the firepower she has managed to cook up in her lab.
Before all that, though, there is another exciting event. The vicar has persuaded lead actors Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan to help raise funds for the church roof project by enacting the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in the great hall to an audience from the nearby village of Bishop's Lacey. During the thrilling show, a blizzard rages on outside, snowing in the villagers. That means we have a normally nearly-empty Buckshaw now full to the rafters with the family, the film crew and half the village. A perfect setup for a murder, which obligingly occurs.
Of course it's Flavia who discovers the body, and she is determined to crack the case, despite the usual dire warnings from Inspector Hewitt to stay strictly away from the murder scene and refrain from conducting her own investigation. Flavia's sleuthing results in a dramatic Christmas Eve resolution in which the case is solved and Flavia's chemistry experiments play out in wildly unanticipated ways.
If you're not familiar with Flavia de Luce, she's a little like Eloise: endlessly curious, irrepressible, no fashion plate, and a constant trial to her relations and acquaintances, but endearing in spite of it all. I also think of her in some ways as the anti-Harry Potter. Supremely confident in her intellectual powers and chemistry expertise, where Harry is self-doubting and hopeless at potions (at least until he finds that book . . . ). But they have some things in common, too. Both have suffered a parental loss that affects them deeply; Harry being an orphan and Flavia having lost her mother and living with a distant, heartbroken father. Both are tormented by other children; Harry by his cousin and by Draco Malfoy, and Flavia by her sisters. And, most important, both are featured players in a series of books enjoyed by adults.
I enjoyed reading this fourth installment in the Flavia de Luce series. Alan Bradley is skilled at characterization and setting his scenes. In this entry in the series, he subtly advances the background plot of Flavia's mother's loss and Flavia's difficult relationship with her sisters. He's not as strong at mystery plotting. In the end, his whodunnits tend to resolve themselves more than to be solved through hard evidence and deduction. But the charm of the books generally overcomes this weakness. Anyone who enjoys a lighter mystery should give the series a try. It's not necessary to read the series in order, but if you would prefer to do that, here they are:
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce Mystery
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag: A Flavia de Luce Novel
A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce NovelI Am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce Novel Overview

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