The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

This is the beginning of what I do in January, which is to look at what other people thought were great books to read that were published the year before and then read a few of them. I had a particularly good year as a reader in 2009, but I managed to miss reading almost everything that came out that year that received critical acclaim. That is what 2010 is for apparently.
I made a prelimary list and went to the library and got what they had in, and this is the first book I finished, and if there is anything to momentum on a task, this book is a great place to have started. I really loved this book. It is a simple story, told by a mature 11 year old, and told well. Alan Bradley is a 70-year old first time novelist (older than I am, you see), so I am particularly enamored with he, as well as his tale.

The story's heroine is Flavia de Luce, a British girl in 1950, living in an unforgiving family that have encouraged her to be independent and resourceful. Her mother died when she was just a toddler, and Flavia is forever finding her things, and incorporating who she thinks her mother was into her everyday life. This is particularly funny, because Flavia reminds me quite a lot of harriet the Spy, and Flavia's mother's name was Harriet.
The mystery involves a corpse, a stamp, and a bird--each of them has a history (the corpse and the stamp rather more so than the bird) and the story unfolds with the interconnections between the three items, the people in her life and community that have links with them, and finally a solution to the crime, and all its component parts. Flavia is a budding chemist (I like the new trend towards science in literature for children--see the Simon Bloom books by Michael Reisman for another precocious 11-year old, this one with the secrets of physics at his fingertips). The thing I liked best about this was the protagonist's sense of humor, and her ability to find humor in most of her life, even the times of adversity. She's not exactly a good role model, but she has real joyeux de vie.
I would say you could read this starting at age ten on up to adulthood and it is highly recommended.