Fingersmith, Sarah Waters

John Everett Millais, Twins, 1876

(May 21) This book Blew. Me. Away. By the end of Part One, I felt like an innocent country bumpkin who had wandered into Dickensian London and had been fleeced and filleted, and all my worldly goods fenced before I even knew they were gone.

Then the plot becomes a leeetle overcomplicated... but it is still a tour de force of mirroring and false identities and interweaving points of view. And -- the narrators! After Part One, I thought I could never invest in any other narrator but Sue... NEVER! Yet, the next narrator, Maud, was just as compelling, if not more. Sweet.

It's a faux Victorian novel, and hits all the beloved leitmotifs of the genre: pickpockets, orphans, grim prisons, lunatic asylums, "laughing villains," stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad -- but it actually feels more authentic than even a genuine Victorian novel like The Woman in White (which it resembles a lot). It was well done.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley

Russell H. Tandy, detail of cover art for The Secret in the Old Attic, 1944

(May 4) As fresh and cheerful as a babbling mountain brook and as bracing as a flash flood.

Loved this book, love Flavia. Her picture should be in the dictionary to illustrate "plucky." Loved the dramatic similes.