A Wizard's Guide To Defensive Baking

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A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is whimsical and dark and imaginative and fantastic. It gets my enthusiastic recommendation for readers both young and old. If you would pardon the analogy though, our main character began as raw and unformed as a lump of raw dough, ready however to be shaped with a precise touch. Admittedly she had few ambitions at the start of this story, but then grew into her own by the end, dispelled of her naivete while also being hardened by the harshness of reality. Those who enjoy coming of age plots will eat this one right up, I think, especially the book’s target audience, but in truth, Mona’s journey is one that is universally relatable.

In this case, fourteen-year-old Mona’s magic only works on bread or pastries. There are other wizards in the city of Riverbraid but they are similar to Mona with specific abilities or not that powerful at all. She thinks I’m a hero,” I said, when the silence had stretched out. “But I shouldn’t have had to do any of it. There should have been so many grown-ups who should have fixed things before it got down to me and Spindle. It doesn’t make you a hero just because everybody else didn’t do their job.” Nothing But Readi...: A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T Kingfisher - Feb 2022 Theme BOM - Award Winner (start 16 Feb) Thirdly, as a female protagonist, Mona avoids several other clichés besides that of the badass action hero. There is no romance, for one thing, since her closest male ally is a boy from the streets who becomes a surrogate younger brother. She has a healthy attitude toward her own body, meaning she can appreciate her strong arms and enjoy her pastries without worrying about how she looks. There are no instances of putting other women down to make the heroine look better. Mona has a loving and respectful relationship with the aunt who taught her to bake, and later in the novel, a female ruler is portrayed as flawed but still competent. The second challenge--perhaps like much in baking--was one of scale. Had Kingfisher been content to keep it a smaller story like in Minor Mage, it would have worked better for me. But I found myself puzzled, supremely, by dual ideas (spoilery) of a large enough city that children can escape multiple guards on a canal and through smugglers' pathways, but that same young baker can make seven golems and twenty gingerbread men can hold off an advancing army in a way that a populace can't. Like, how effing incompetent is this city and the advancing army?Nefarious Last Words (NLW™): not all YA stories are created equal. Most Some are crappy as fish, while a few others are bloody shrimping NOT. And that, my Little Barnacles, is a scientifically proven fact.

You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don’t ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it. He doesn’t seem to mind me taking bits to make bread, and it’s still the best sourdough in town. We just don’t tell anybody about the eating-rats thing.”

It felt like Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City because to a certain extent Mona and Orhan are in the same position. Their city has been betrayed from within – although not for the same reasons. Both of them are woefully underqualified for the role of city savior. Orhan because he’s a despised non-native of the city and Mona because she’s a despised – or at least feared – magic user. And she’s only 14. Ironically I am publishing this in the midst of COVID-19, when we all started making sourdough at home and then started protesting police brutality. Suddenly a twelve year old book was actually relevant. Go figure.” Book Genre: Childrens, Fantasy, Fiction, Humor, Magic, Middle Grade, Mystery, Science Fiction Fantasy, Young Adult, Young Adult Fantasy