Review: As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust 
by Alan Bradley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel was a bit of a departure from the other Flavia de Luce novels in that it was set at a boarding school in Canada instead of in the small English town Flavia is from. The regular characters, like Dogger, are referred to fairly often but don't actually appear and I didn't think the new characters that were introduced were as interesting. They weren't very detailed which could have been the problem. The mystery here was well constructed.
There were, as I have come to expect from Bradley, some wonderful observations.

"None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It's because they are in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to sramp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round." (p.343)

I also learned (though have not verified) that the first electron microscope in North America was built by a couple of students at the University of Toronto.

This is book 12/13 for the Canadian Book Challenge.