This book suffered from a bad case of interruptus, due to my inability to give it more than a paragraph's worth of attention at one time. It wasn't the book's fault, but it did affect my enjoyment of it greatly. 
 That said, as everyone has said, Flavia is a likeable gal. 
 Favorite Quotes 
 Her face went red, then gray, as if it had caught fire before my eyes and collapsed in an avalanche of ashes. 
 ...my mind was sounding the kind of "Oogah!" warning they have on a submarine preparing to dive. 
 Something came over Father's eyes, and I saw that he had vanished down one of those personal rabbit holes which so often engulfed him...But then, like a jammed clockwork toy that jerks abruptly back to life when it's flicked with a finger, he went on with his story as if there had been no interruption. 
 Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself onto my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky. For the first little while, I'm usually entertained by my "floaters", those wormy little strings of protein that swim to and fro across one's field of vision like dark little galaxies. When I'm not in a hurry, I stand on my head to stir them up, and then lie back to watch the show, as if it were an animated cinema film.