A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

By T. Kingfisher

Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance.

But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries...

 

I enjoyed this - it was a YA-ish/middle readers take on despotic fantasy and a heavy emphasis on baked goods.  I'm in the midst of my next read right now, which is (spoiler alert) crammed full of Atmosphere, but (so far) lacking in Personality, and it's helping me pin down why AWGtDB is so charming.  The story is both dark and light: yes, it does involve murders, and attempted coups and registration of wizard folk for eventual extermination (not to mention battle scenes, and death of friends/companions) but everything is squarely centered around 14 year old Mona, who knows very well that she's too young to have to deal with all this shit, but she hasn't yet become cynical and or angsty about it.  

It's also pretty creative in what you can actually do with bread, and how terrifying an enormous golem who doesn't care if it gets stabbed would be.  It also feels nicely original, or at least not overwhelmingly overdone (bread pun!) although maybe it's because I don't read as much middle-reader as I do YA, so I haven't gotten as much exposure to those tropes.  

It does have a little bit of an uneasy balancing act between younger and more adult themes though, and I'm not sure it's always successful in walking that line.  The book opens with a murder, and Mona is being stalked by the murderer, but it's relatively lighthearted, considering she has to flee her house, hole up in a church, flee guards who are also on the lookout for her after she's accused of treason, and then try and find a way to alert "the people in charge" that wizards are being systematically killed.  In an older book, the people in charge would have been behind the whole thing, but in this one, it's an attempted coup. Again, we get back to that lack of cynicism. It does seem a bit simplistic at times, that all the good people are good (although sometimes ineffectual), and the bad people are bad, with no redeeming qualities.   Is it "realistic"? Maybe, maybe not, but it's nice to visit a world where things get set right in the end.