The opening sentence, "It was as black in the closet as old blood." drew me in right away. The analogy the author uses seems to imply that ghastly things are sure to follow. The protagonist, an eleven-year-old girl named Flavia is imprisoned in the closet by her two older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne but the way Bradley has written it made me assume that she had been kidnapped, and kept confined. After escaping she just waltzes down into the kitchen and her father’s there, reading the paper. The sudden turn from the very austere to the childish confused me when I read it the first time.
Bradley has given his characters such Shakespearian names that it makes it seem feasible that this eleven-year-old girl has a chemical lab, and an obsession with making poison, which she does for her eldest sister, melting it into her lipstick. The three sisters have an estranged, revenge-driven relationship that I, as a product of the reality television generation, find fascinating to watch. The way Ophelia and Flavia talk to each other is just horrible and menacing. It makes me glad Flavia isn’t my sister. The dialogue just so traditionally Upper-Crust English insults like snotrag and grubby little mouth.
The prose itself has a few faults. Bradley has a tendency to use chunky language at times,
“Each had become a recluse in his own antipode, and each forbidden the other ever to set foot across the black line which they caused to be painted dead centre from the vestibule in the front, across the foyer and straight through to the butler’s WC behind the back stairs.”
just seems like too many words to be read clearly. I found myself reading sections of the text over and over in an attempt to absorb the meaning when it just wasn’t clear enough. Despite the abundance of big words, the chapter ends with me craving more; Alan Bradley earned the contract he won over with this chapter.
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