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I am historically pretty terrible at keeping up with series. I get easily distracted by the thousands of other books that exist and promptly forget to keep going. This is especially true if the series isn’t complete and I have to wait years for the next installment. And when I do find a completed series that keeps me engaged enough to keep paying attention, I’m devastated when there aren’t more books to keep reading.
That was the case with Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce books, or so I thought. I don’t know whether I heard somewhere that there would only be 10 books in the series or if I made that up entirely, but I was convinced there’d be no more Flavia to look forward to. Then I got an email announcing a new installment and made weird happy noises about it. These are some of my favorite books ever. I have a tattoo with a quote from the book on my right hand. But my relationship with the books has changed since I first read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie years ago, something I realized when I went in for a re-read last year. I tried to write about it then, but it was too soon.
What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust is the 11th full-length book in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series, a cozy mystery series set in 1950s England. The titular Flavia is 11 years old and lives with her father and two sisters at Buckshaw, a dilapidated estate just outside the village of Bishop’s Lacey in the English countryside. Buckshaw has fallen into disrepair since the death of Flavia’s mother ten years prior. A WWII veteran and survivor of a prisoner of war camp, Flavia’s father lives life in a fog. Grief and trauma have left him emotionally distant, spending most of his days obsessing over his stamp collection and leaving the girls to parent themselves.
These conditions explain how 11-year-old Flavia so easily finds herself getting into trouble. She has a special knack for sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong, a habit facilitated by that general lack of parental supervision. She rides around on an anthropomorphized bike she calls Gladys and meddles in grown folks business, and in the process keeps on stumbling across dead bodies. How many corpses can one child find in a small English village, you ask? Lots. English country villages are absolute hotbeds of murder and other violent crime. Didn’t you know?
Flavia simply must solve each of the mysteries these grim discoveries present, even when (and perhaps most especially when) local law enforcement has explicitly told homegirl to get lost. Armed with Gladys, an insatiable curiosity, and a deep suspicion for most authority figures, she hunts down clues until the murder mystery is solved.
Flavia is the precocious child. She’s whip-smart with a mouth on her that very often lands her in hot water (#relatablecontent). She has a passion for science, most especially chemistry, choosing to make the abandoned lab in an especially run down and unheated wing of Buckshaw her bedroom so she might perform her scientific experiments unbothered. She reads way beyond her age level and is particularly good at making poisons, which I rock with as a kid who thought it would be fun to try and make Aqua Tofana (the look on my teacher’s face told me this was not something I should pursue). She is all of this and also manages not to be annoying. Well, most of the time.
Then there is Dogger, a man who works for the de Luce family at Buckshaw as gardener and several other capacities. He served with Flavia’s father’s in the war and was also a POW. He experiences memory loss and hallucinations due to PTSD, and he is Flavia’s companion and protector. She in turn takes care of him, remaining by his side when he experiences “one of his episodes.” Their bond is an important thread in each of their lives.
The day I got the email announcing that this book was coming after a five-year hiatus in the series, I felt a jolt of dopamine and then had to blink away a few rogue tears. I’ve recommended the books a ton in my years as a bookseller and internet book person, and I usually chalk that affinity up to an enduring love for books featuring scrappy young girls and women who break rules, cause trouble, and have the smarts to back up their bullshit. All of that is true, but it’s also something else these days.
I too was a precocious child. I was almost certainly annoying. Still am, actually (dusts shoulders off). I stayed all up in grown folks’ business, eavesdropping when I wasn’t supposed to be and inserting myself in conversations not meant for me. I was a reader and a tinkerer and was obsessed with knowing things, whether that meant solving the mystery in the book I was reading, memorizing facts to regurgitate on command, or coming in clutch when an adult couldn’t remember something that I could. Can’t tell you how many times I got scolded for “being a metiche” only for that same adult to be like, “What was that lady’s name?” No que no!
But my dad got me. The man once walked in on me kneeling by his bed in prayer; when he asked what I was praying for thinking it was something sweet and pious, I said I was asking Jesus to promise to someday tell me what happened to Amelia Earhart, what happens in the Bermuda triangle, and other answers to life’s unsolved mysteries. If he didn’t know who his kid was before then, he certainly knew thereafter. He never made me feel silly or like a giant pain in the ass for my relentless curiosity. And in the rare moments when he expressed his own vulnerability, he says I always seemed to know what to say to comfort him, too.
Last year my dad suffered through a hellish medical nightmare, one that took many long and grueling months to resolve. I won’t go into details on the internet because he wouldn’t want me to, but it was an experience that forced me to confront his mortality and him to be vulnerable in ways that pained him. In a particularly difficult moment in that journey, I couldn’t sleep and decided to put an audiobook to help the process along. I thought about smart-ass Flavia and her gentle, protective Dogger and re-read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
I teared up reading so many of their scenes because they felt so gobsmackingly familiar. It’s not a one-to-one parallel or anything. For one, my father is my actual father and not just a father figure. He is a former Marine but never saw combat, and PTSD isn’t something he experiences insofar as I can tell. He is an immigrant with a life story that maybe he’ll let me share more of someday; suffice it to say he’s seen some things and carries the weight of those experiences with him.
But the bond between Flavia and Dogger reminds me so much of the way my dad and I communicate. There’s lots of comfortable silence and good-natured ribbing. Sometimes I’m Flavia needing father-figure life wisdom and logic to calm me down when I’m feeling spicy about any number of things. Sometimes he needs a specific daughter-flavored dose of empathy and reassurance, someone to acknowledge that there’s more going on than meets the eye and who’ll just sit with him for a while.
The timing of this new book feels like a little gift. I can’t tell you much about the book because it would spoil a lot of stuff (definitely read the books in order). But it feels like Flavia and Dogger are also in a good rhythm, like they’re in a pleasant, happy space as companions and parters in crime. It’s coming at a moment when my dad is on the mend and looks more like his self than he has in awhile. Like Dogger, he’s not magically all the way healed, and that’s okay. He has support and love and purpose.
Dogger and my papa, they’re both gonna be okay.
