Precocious children

These dang kids always running circles around us.

Feb 17, 2024

I’ve been sort of doing EELS on a fortnightly basis lately because of being very busy at work and home. You know how it goes. Life! The good news is, that has allowed me to fill my reading coffers, so I’ve got a backlog of ideas.

Without further ado, I bring you… three books for grown-ups about kids who are smarter than the adults around them.

Guess what! There’s an archive spreadsheet to see all my recommendations from this year in one handy spot! If you’re a subscriber, you can have it!

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🧣 Crooked House

Agatha Christie, 1949

Agatha gets me every time! This is one of the Dame’s later novels—did she write them all herself? I know there are all these facts and theories to find out, but I simply do not want to and will delete your emails if you try to tell me the truth.

Josephine is the child in this, and she is a pretty snarly brat who is solving this murder mystery faster than the police. And they know it. And so does the murderer, maybe. This is a solid, fast-moving Agatha Christie novel that will not so much merrily delight you as leave you shivering darkly and kind of wishing instead that more things could be like Knives Out. I’m not selling this well, but you should read it. It’s very clever.

Recommended for: Those who like a tightly done mystery about a complicated family in which a murder has been committed.

🥧 The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Alan Bradley, 2009

OK, here we go! Here’s the merry delight you were looking for—Flavia de Luce is an absolutely fantastic brat who also is solving crimes faster than the police, but in a way that makes you cheer. This is so British and haughty and good, and I’m fairly sure my book pal RA recommended it to me in my early days of audiobooking because the narrator is just that funny.

So we’ve got a murder mystery, a precocious child who’s always slipping away from her minders and digging around in the garden and annoying the inspectors or whatever, humor, Britishisms, custard pie that tastes like snot, and a fantastic narrator. And a name like Flavia de Luce.

Fun fact: When I looked up “novels featuring precocious children” just to jog my memory to see if there was a third book I was really missing here, “Flavia de Luce” was the fourth entry. So.

Recommended for: Those who always thought Eloise had the right idea.

Recommended format: Audiobook.

Here is an outtake from my DALL-Eing. I tried to get it to do Flavia and Mick hanging out, but it could not do “poor Southern girl in the 1930s” without putting her, more and more acutely, in some sort of maid’s outfit. Often, she was Black, which Mick is not—and which is telling because DALL-E *never* gives me Black women unless I ask for it (despite me trying to train it to stop giving me so many white people all the time. It’s only learned that for men, it seems.) Depressing! Anyway, I was going for a Dorothea Lange look here.

🎶 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers, 1940

We’re departing from the mini-theme of young lady amateur detectives here and going back to the overall theme of just kids who are several steps ahead of the game.

If you have not read this classic, it is time. There’s a lot going on in this book, and I wouldn’t say its central theme is the precociousness of a child. But I have wanted to get this into an EELS for so long, and my favorite part of it involves a child being truly moved by classical music. I think about this scene all the time.

Mick (that’s her name) is so changed by Beethoven (as one is) that she launches into an adolescence characterized by a talent that’s trying to break out. There’s so much frustration involved with that as she’s stuck in her 1930s Southern town. Again, a lot of other stuff is happening too—it’s a book about loneliness, but it’s really beautiful. Carson McCullers was a really interesting writer. Look her up!

Recommended for: Those who like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

And now, a bonus recommendation!

I don’t have a bonus book recommendation for you this week, but I do think you should drop everything and watch The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) directed by Armando Ianucci and starring Dev Patel and every actor from every Masterpiece series I have ever seen. If you’re in the US, it’s President’s Day weekend—and what better way to, uh, honor whatever president we’re supposed to be honoring than watching Tilda Swinton shove people off donkeys.

If you’ve got a recommendation, by all means, give it to me! You can do so by hitting reply to this email, shouting your truth, and we’ll get it going.

That was the thirty-seventh EELS! As always, send any and all questions, feedback, and shouted book recommendations by hitting reply.

📚 Susan