I seem to remember you've read Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, but not whether you've read the other two chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox - The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen.
Have you tried The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley? It's a murder mystery narrated (and solved) by an eleven-year-old English girl who's very keen on chemistry, and who is in a perpetual state of war with her two older sisters. Set in 1950. Their father has been coping (or not) with their mother's death for the last decade, and the financial mess it landed them in. The jack-of-all-trades who works for them has serious PTSD from being a POW, but the kid accepts it as a fact of life and is pretty good at talking him out of flashbacks when they happen. (Sequels: The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring without Mustard, and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. I like the author's taste in titles.) Available as e-books or as unabridged recordings, whatever strikes your fancy. I suspect if you'd tried the series, you'd have read the fourth book sometime this autumn, so I mention it.
It was Ophelia, the older of my two sisters. Feely was seventeen, and ranked herself right up there with the Blessed Virgin Mary, although the chief difference between them, I'm willing to bet, was that the BVM doesn't spend 23 hours a day peering at herself in a looking glass while picking away at her face with a pair of tweezers. - from A Red Herring without Mustard
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mmmag
Re: Books Read in 2011, Last Call
Date: 2011-12-30 12:30 am (UTC)Have you tried The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley? It's a murder mystery narrated (and solved) by an eleven-year-old English girl who's very keen on chemistry, and who is in a perpetual state of war with her two older sisters. Set in 1950. Their father has been coping (or not) with their mother's death for the last decade, and the financial mess it landed them in. The jack-of-all-trades who works for them has serious PTSD from being a POW, but the kid accepts it as a fact of life and is pretty good at talking him out of flashbacks when they happen. (Sequels: The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring without Mustard, and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows. I like the author's taste in titles.) Available as e-books or as unabridged recordings, whatever strikes your fancy. I suspect if you'd tried the series, you'd have read the fourth book sometime this autumn, so I mention it.
It was Ophelia, the older of my two sisters. Feely was seventeen, and ranked herself right up there with the Blessed Virgin Mary, although the chief difference between them, I'm willing to bet, was that the BVM doesn't spend 23 hours a day peering at herself in a looking glass while picking away at her face with a pair of tweezers.
- from A Red Herring without Mustard