Flavia is quick to bring Porcelain into her private world, despite her preference for working alone, and Flavia becomes quite attached to her. Why doesn’t Flavia ask more people about her mother’s life and what she was like?ġ0. Vanetta Harewood clearly knew Harriet well, yet Flavia can hardly face her. Flavia spends a great deal of time missing Harriet, and wondering about her. Were you surprised that his gruesome death didn’t have more effect on the residents of Buckshaw and Bishop’s Lacey? Also, how could Flavia’s comment be applied to the novel’s characters in general?ĩ. “Oh everybody knows Brookie,” Flavia says when she arrives at his mother’s cottage, “He’s one of the village characters.” Discuss Brookie Harewood and how central he is to the novel, despite appearing only a few times. How do these different aspects of Flavia’s personality play against each other in the novel?Ĩ. For someone devoted to the scientific method, Flavia is awfully quick to believe in fortune-telling and old wives’ tales, like the one about Gypsies stealing babies (which she assumed true until she figured out what really happened to Mrs. Is the stoic silence of the de Luce clan something to be admired or to feel sympathy for?ħ.
(Perhaps the name Hilda Muir?) Are red herrings necessary to mystery novels?Ħ. Discuss a few of the more notable plot points that took you and/or Flavia down the wrong sleuthing path. Red herrings, those distracting clues that divert one’s eye from the truth, abound in this novel, as you might have expected from the title. What do you make of the scene in which Porcelain wears Harriet’s red dress to dinner?ĥ. Why are Flavia and the other residents of Bishop’s Lacey so tight-lipped? Discuss the various ways that truth is hidden in the novel (by who, and from whom), and how knowledge can be power- especially in a gossipy little village like Bishop’s Lacey.Ĥ. “Stepping through the door into my laboratory was like gaining sanctuary in a quiet church: The rows of bottled chemicals were my stained-glass windows, the chemical bench my altar.” Why is chemistry so important to Flavia?ģ. Alan Bradley has often said that Flavia’s appeal as a protagonist lies in the fact that eleven-year-old girls are invisible: they can go anywhere, ask anything, and no one thinks anything of it-or has the sense to keep their mouth shut! Discuss how well Flavia suits her role as an accomplished master sleuth, and her role as an eleven-year-old girl.Ģ.
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