The other night I finally finished The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. I started reading it the day Joe had his back surgery in October. There is a reason it took me so long to finish it.
I bought this book when Borders was going out of business this fall. I LOVED the title of the book and the murder mystery that was suggested on the back cover intrigued me. I checked the rating the book got on Goodreads and it was pretty high so I decided to pick it up. It is a first in a series and I was hoping that maybe I could find a temporary reading home with some well-loved characters.
I have written before about my preference for character driven fiction vs event or setting driven fiction. The main character of this story is an eleven year old year girl. She is not a typical girl at all...fun and sassy in all the right ways, BUT the narration for me just didn't work. The story was set in the 1950's in the countryside of England with a murder being committed early on in the book. The girl sets out to solve the mystery but is forced to do so among long winded explanations of stamps and unnecessary adjectives. It just didn't fit. I want my mysteries to be fast paced and suspenseful, and while that did happen towards the end, it took too long to get there. By then, I was kind of bored and just really wanted to know who-did-it.
I wanted to love this book because of the title and the little girl, but I didn't. I did finish it so it wasn't awful, but I don't really intend on picking up any of the rest of the series.
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