Set in the 1950 English countryside this latest book in the series finds eleven-year-old Flavia de Lucia's father the Colonial has rented out the family home to a film crew for the holidays in a desperate attempt to earn some money to get them through until next year. Daffy and Feely are pretty excited as their favorite actress is in it, Phyllis Wyvern. Also in it is the famous actor Desmond Duncan and the actress Marion Trodd. And as usual the same Brish crew she always works with including the same director she always works with Val Lampman. Wyvern confesses to Flavia that she is actually fifty-nine-years-old.
Wyvern gets Lampman to agree, though he is not happy about it, to put on a show for the locals to raise money for their church roof. Wyvern and Duncan do the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and Gil Crawford, a local, misses her lighting, so she comes over and slaps him across the face and then goes back to the stage where the lighting is now correct and performs perfectly, but the Vicar who had planned on having others perform after her, decides against it after that display.
Soon they realize that the snow is too much and everyone is snowed in and must stay for the foreseeable future. Flavia can't sleep and goes out in search of some company with Phyllis whom she knows stays up late watching her old films. She can hear one end as she makes her way across the house. When she goes into her room she finds her dead with film wrapped around her neck in a bow. She goes and gets the trusted Dogger and he says she was indeed strangled and to go and get the doctor. Flavia had noticed that someone had made up her face and dressed her in the outfit that went with the film that was playing.
Who killed Phyllis? Was it Val who it turns out is her son? Or one of the other actors? Or was it Gil or one of the members of the crew for some hidden reason? Flavia also plans to set off some explosive fireworks for Christmas Eve from the roof of the house. She has also been working on her secret birdlime formula for Father Christmas that she plans on using to slather on top of the chimneys so that he'll stick to them, or he won't and that'll be proof that he doesn't exist. Will she find out one way or another? Will she be able to figure out who killed Phyllis in time too? Flavia is a true delight to read about with her chemical mixtures and fanciful detecting trying to outwit the actual detectives while seeking the Chief Inspector's approval at the same time. Meanwhile, her two sisters treat her admissibly and she is forced to return the favor except when they are holding their truces. And she will need help from her sisters to solve this case. This is a wonderful book and a great read. I give it five out of five stars.
Quotes
Older sisters are much alike the world over: half a cup of love and half one of contempt.-Alan Bradley (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows p 34)Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that’s the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hyponists who ever lived.-Alan Bradley (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows p 129)Because it is a well-known fact that more than two men shut up together in an enclosed space for more than an hour constitute a hazard to society.-Alan Bradley (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows p 159)Perhaps, I thought, whenever we began to breathe the breath of others, when the spinning atoms of their bodies began to mingle with our own, we took on something of their personality, like crystals in a snowflake. Perhaps we become something more, yet something lesser than ourselves.-Alan Bradley (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows p 163-4)One does not preach sense to a Church of England clergyman.-Alan Bradley (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows p 165).
Well, there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Bablyon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah,
to shore up the city walls.
to shore up the city walls.
-Alan Bradley (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows p 201-2)
She was more than brave. She was British.
-Alan Bradley (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows p 222)
Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Am-Half-Sick-Shadows-Flavia-Novel-ebook/dp/B004X6PSCW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1545065982&sr=8-1&keywords=i+am+half+sick+of+shadows+by+alan+bradley
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