I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes

by Jaclyn Moriarty.
Strange little book. It's based around the Zing family and their efforts to keep watch on Cath Murphy, Cassie Zing's Grade 2 teacher. These efforts are known as The Zing Family Secret. Why they do this is not revealed until the end of the book when it's finally explained that Cath is also a Zing - the product of an affair that Mrs Zing had with an actor, but she was adopted out and doesn't know any of this. The actor wants to keep tabs on his daughter without it ever becoming public knowledge. So he hired the Zings to keep him informed, which they do with enormous enthusiasm.
The whole story is a little bizarre and the writing doesn't follow "the rules" as such. Each chapter is based around one of the main characters. The events aren't, therefore, narrated chronologically. It took me a while to get used to this. There was a similar effect in the last book I read, Gloriana's Torch, but, in that chronological slips were flagged as an example of the author's supposed cleverness. In Buttermilk Pancakes they just happen and are so much more effective as a result.
There's a lot of humour in this book. Not laugh out loud stuff, but the sort of writing that gives you a chuckle later on when you realise the connection between something that's just been described and what happened three chapters ago.
There're lots of observations about relationships threaded throughout the book - particularly about having affairs, real or imagined, and how this affects the people involved. There's the original affair between Mrs Zing and the actor which produced Cath. Marbie Zing (daughter and, therefore, sister to Cath) has an affair with an aeronautical engineer which leads her boyfriend and his sister, named Listen, to leave. Fancy Zing (other daughter/sister) finds a purple sock in the washing machine and convinces herself that this means her husband is having an affair. Cath has an affair with Warren, another teacher, until his wife turns up.
Meanwhile, Listen has found a spellbook which she follows religiously to cast spells - to make a vacuum cleaner break, to make someone give someone a rose, etc. The spells all happen, but in a way that's quite normal in the circumstances - not as some flash of 'magic'.
All in all, an enjoyable read.