G is for Girl-Power

For Kerrie´s weekly alphabet meme.

I am probably very spoiled because I can say I don´t need to be a feminist. What I mean is that other Danish women fought that fight before I entered the Danish workforce. So I have had two jobs which were earlier regarded as men´s jobs, and today I teach. I have taught for fifteen years and never, ever come across discrimination because of my gender.

It is not everybody who is so privileged so let G be for Girl-Power.

A female detective I discovered several years ago and still follow is Sue Grafton´s private detective Kinsey Millhone. Strong and stubborn, and she has all the determination and courage it takes to get the answers she needs to solve her cases. A protagonist with lots of personality - and who could be more suitable for an alphabet meme.

A new discovery is Alan Bradley´s little Flavia de Luce, the eleven-year-old protagonist of "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie". Being a very young, female detective in Britain of the fifties cannot have been easy. And of course Flavia and her bike run into trouble and resistance - but real girls fight for what matters to them!

Finally there is my own Rhapsody Gershwin, a librarian and spare-time detective. (And a third motherless woman now that I think about it.) Rhapsody´s fiancé, Constable Primrose, does not get any kind of support - and hardly any assistance - from his superior, and when Rhapsody sees that he is in trouble, she sets out to find the information he needs about people in Knavesborough. To be honest, Rhapsody is  more curious than she is willing to admit so I am sure she enjoys hunting down the criminal.

Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009)

[Dansk titel: Flavia de Luce og hævneren fra Ulster, 2010. De to første kapitler kan læses på Saxos hjemmeside] 

This debut is written by a Canadian but set in Britain in the 1950s.

On the very first page eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce has been gagged, tied and locked up in the attic. Fortunately only by her older sisters Daphne and Octavia. With the mother dead and the father an unobservant philatelist, the daughters are left to solve their conflicts on their own.

Soon, however, a very real enemy from outside the family leaves a dead snipe with a one-penny stamp on the doorstep. Flavia, who is not beyond listening at doors, learns that her father is involved in a thirty-year-old mystery that involves a very rare stamp and a death.  The following morning she finds a dying man among their cucumbers, and when Inspector Hewitt botches up the case, it is up to Flavia to solve the mystery with the aid of faithful Gladys, her mother´s old bicycle.

Despite her young age, Flavia is an excellent chemist who also shows great detecting skills. She has taken over the old lab in the Georgian family home, Buckshaw – a setting which slowly comes to life together with Flavia who seems to know the place better than anyone else.

“Like an inchworm, I wiggled my way up onto my knees, but it was too late.”

This ubiquitous inchworm is a rather unusual amateur detective; a lonely, precocious protagonist who struggles hard to be the son she believes her father wanted.

I bought the Kindle version myself and my one-word judgement: wonderful!

Read for the 2011 Global Reading Challenge: North America (Canada)
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