"'What's up, Dogger?' I asked lightly, trying to make it sound a little bit -- but not too much -- like Bugs Bunny."
Take note, Ms. Wright: This is how you do pop culture references -- you want them to have a topical and period adequate connection to whatever events you're in the process of describing.
And then, just a little later, we get to:
"Then there was curare. It , too, had an almost instant effect and again, the victim died within minutes by asphyxiation. But curare could not kill by ingestion; to be fatal, it had to be injected. Besides that, who in the English countryside -- besides me, of course -- would be likely to carry curare in his kit?"
Flavia is 11.
And a certain teenage boy comes to mind whose story Kathryn Harkup tells in A Is for Arsenic ... and who, like Flavia, also owned his first chemistry set before he'd actually turned "-teen" and used it to poison his stepmother. I guess it's a good thing Flavia is the narrator and heroine of this series ...