Review copy provided by the publisher.
Well, I don’t know if this is the last Flavia de Luce mystery Alan Bradley is writing, but it’s the last one I’m reading.
The trick of young protagonists is that they grow up if you give them enough story time to do so. Adults ideally grow as well, but I think we find more tolerance for an adult character, especially an adult detective in a series, who doesn’t change much. A kid, though…there’s a precedent for Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden to stay the same age forever, but those are not series for adults. The teenage-ness of those detectives is the magical “big kid” nature of looking up in age at teens, not looking down at them. Flavia de Luce has to progress in self-awareness to be satisfying.
Entire Cousin Undine, who allows Bradley to keep writing about a precocious, bratty little girl and also give Flavia a taste of her own medicine. I see why he’s brought Cousin Undine into the series and also I don’t really enjoy the result. “What if this was entirely about a more mature teenager” is not the series he wants to write. Okay. But as for what I want to read…well.
And one of the things that forced Flavia to grow up recently was dealing with death as real and immediate, dealing with dead people as people and not merely mysteries. This book has the kind of plot twist that I find unconscionable: it leans on a character’s emotional reaction for pathos and growth and then pulls the rug out with “surprise, that person faked their own death.” To avoid spoilers, sort of, I’m not saying which character it was who died and then turned out not to have died, but it was basically the worst possible choice for my enjoyment of the series. I was beyond annoyed and into angry and disgusted. If you don’t hate that particular plot twist the same way as I do, you might still be entertained by this series despite Cousin Undine, or even because of her if your tastes run that way. Me, I’m done.
The other thing is that the reasoning for the faked death is related to the way that Bradley keeps leaning into secret super-spy networks as this series evolves, and frankly I find his secret super-spy networks super-tedious, so if anything could have made this plot twist worse, it’s that it’s done for very boring reasons. The more I learn about this super-spy network, the less impressed I am. So this is my stop, actually, this is where I throw Gladys the bicycle in the grass and wander away. The early books in the series are good, they’re still there, you can read them. This one is a stinker, and not just because of the prevalence of fart jokes with Cousin Undine.