pared; and Mma Makutsi, who is crazy about shoes, who says shoes talk to her, must select the most perfect, most beautiful shoes for her big day. The wise and wonderful Mma Ramotswe, proprietor of the detective agency, is a natural investigator — she’s observant, she listens, she surmises. As she was growing up, her father “had never suggested that there were any limits to what she could do with her life.” When she sees the behavior of a bully, she remembers that “Such men who put women down were really rather weak themselves, building themselves up by belittling women. A truly strong man would never want that.” Her joy in living and her love for Botswana are inspiring. She says, “Here there were no real strangers — even if you did not know a person, he was still the brother or cousin of somebody whom you might know, or whom somebody else would know. And people did not come from nowhere, as seemed to be the case in those distant big cities; every-
Volume 3 • Issue 3
one had a place to which they were anchored by ties of blood, by ties of land.” The books are always uplifting, filled with the musings of Mma Ramotswe: “That we have the people we have in this life, rather than others, is miraculous, she thought; a miraculous gift.” A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley is the
third Flavia de Luce novel, set in the British village of Bishop’s Lacey in about 1950. Flavia, 11, has two older sisters who are unbelievably mean to her. She wonders, “What had I ever done to make them detest me so?” But their cruelty does not exceed Flavia’s patience and ingenuity in exacting her elaborate revenge. A gypsy woman has come to the village, and Flavia (without her father’s knowledge) lets her camp on the family land. When the gypsy is brutally attacked, Flavia has some explaining to do. Later, the body of a man who was killed with a piece of the family cutlery is found near the family home. The plot also involves theft, kidnapping, and possible infanticide. And something smells fishy — well, many things do, really. “It was enough to make an archangel spit,” says Flavia. Flavia often makes me laugh. She is, by turns, brilliant and a pain in the neck. Besides riding her beloved bicycle, Gladys, around the village, her hobby is tinkering in her uncle’s chemistry
lab, located in an unused wing of the family mansion. But don’t think a mansion indicates wealth: Her widowed father is having money troubles — chiefly, the absence of it. Flavia is a complete character. She enjoys being by herself: “Alone at last! Whenever I’m with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.” She also occasionally finds someone she really likes, who respects her ideas, such as police inspector Hewitt: “How I adored this man! Here we were, the two of us, engaged in a mental game of chess in which both of us knew that one of us was cheating.” It’s a clever romp with a captivating heroine, a spunky girl who isn’t afraid to inspect the cellar at midnight — a Nancy Drew for our time. This book’s as good as the first of the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Copyright © 2011 by Mary Louise Ruehr TJN
MAY 5, 2011
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