The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What do literary critics mean when they talk about narrative voice? How are terms like “reliable” or “unreliable” narrator, “style,” “tone,” “perspective,” and “point of view” related to the idea of narrative voice? How does understanding narrative voice help the reader make meaning from a text?

Teaching Suggestion: Flavia’s distinctive voice is a significant factor in the popularity of the Flavia de Luce series. A thorough appreciation of this narrative voice will increase students’ enjoyment of the novel and support their understanding of the novel’s themes of The Precocious Child Detective and Social Class and Interpersonal Relationships. This prompt intends to measure what students already know about narrative voice and pinpoint gaps in their understanding before reading the novel. After students make a first attempt at responding to this prompt, you might offer the resources listed below, as needed, to help them strengthen their understanding. Afterward, you might ask students to go back and revise their initial responses to the prompt as a way to check their understanding and increase their retention of any new information.

• These 6-minute videos from Oregon State University explain the unreliable narrator, point of view, and the difference between tone and mood.
• This handout on style from NCTE/ReadWriteThink gives examples of various literary styles.
• This 7-minute video from Reedsy discusses technical aspects of narrative voice and their contribution to meaning.

2. In general, how were English children expected to behave in the 1950’s? How might your answer change depending on the gender, age, and social class of the child? How were adults with high socioeconomic status expected to behave? How were parents and children expected to interact?

Teaching Suggestion: A clear understanding of role expectations based on gender, age, and social class in 1950s England will help students understand and empathize with Flavia and contribute to their knowledge of the novel’s themes of The Precocious Child Detective and Social Class and Interpersonal Relationships. It will also deepen students’ awareness of how characterization in this novel more generally creates comedy and tension, develops themes related to Grief’s Effect on Families and Loyalty, and contributes to the structure of the text’s central mystery. If you suspect that your students have relatively little prior knowledge about Flavia’s social context, you might offer the resources listed below before they attempt to respond to this prompt.

• This article by historian Roland Quinault thoroughly describes Britain in the 1950s. (Depending on the amount of background you want your students to acquire, you may wish to offer only excerpts from this article.)
• This article provides an overview of the British social class system.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

Puzzles are a ubiquitous part of everyday life. What types of puzzles have you encountered in real life, games, and your reading and viewing of media? What do you think appeals to people about solving puzzles? How do you think society’s love of puzzles translates to the popularity of reading mystery novels?

Teaching Suggestion: This prompt intends to increase students’ interest in the practical and psychological puzzles that form the core of the novel’s plot. Students may enjoy discussing this prompt aloud and hearing about the many kinds of puzzles that others enjoy. As they discuss—or after they have responded in writing—you might explicitly connect this prompt to the idea of reading a mystery and help them see that the practical problem of who committed a particular crime is only one of the puzzles to solve in most mystery novels.