A book that is truly a gift
Or, Rediscovering joy via sentient sourdough
Other cookies charged into the fray. Some of them went for their neighbors, while others started arming themselves with kitchen utensils. Two formed a temporary alliance and flipped up a cookie sheet as a makeshift barricade.
“Everybody stop!”
They weren’t listening. There was a jar of walnuts at one end of the table and the two cookies behind the barricade broke into it and began pelting everyone indiscriminately with the contents.
—A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher
Fourteen-year-old Mona loves working at her aunt and uncle’s bakery. While some folks in the city look sideways at anyone with a magical talent, most of the bakery’s customers are fine with Mona, because who wouldn’t love magically soft bread, perfectly golden crust, the fluffiest biscuits, and dancing gingerbread men?
But when Mona shows up at the bakery to start work one morning—at four a.m., as bakers do—and discovers a dead body, she quickly becomes the prime suspect. And it just gets worse from there: someone is disappearing—or maybe murdering?—anyone in the city with a magical talent, and the authorities don’t seem to care?
There might be a coup brewing?
And there’s an invading army on the way?
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is the first book I’ve read in a long, long time that’s made me feel evangelical—when I finished it, I wanted to stand on a street corner and hand copies out to whoever walked by.
And for real, days later, I still feel that way.
It’s the first one I’ve read in a long, long time that’s made me laugh out loud and cry with heartbreak not just while reading, but also while telling Josh about it after and then ALSO at a dinner party after that. It’s the first one in a long while that has me welling up days later, even as I’m writing this.
It’s the first book I’ve read in a long, long time that reminded me so much of what I love about Diana Wynne Jones: it’s a book that made me feel the vast possibility of magic, from the joyfully absurd to the heartbreaking. It’s a book that introduces what seems like an insignificant magical talent—one centered around baking—and shows that the only thing that makes it insignificant is the magic user’s own perspective. That with a little imagination, even seemingly small magic can be mighty.
Maybe more importantly: T. Kingfisher, like Diana Wynne Jones, can make anything come to life. She can give anything—including sourdough starter—personality.
It’s the first book I’ve read in a long, long time that reminded me that reading can feel like literal magic.
After so many years of wondering if I’d lost that feeling forever, I’m so, so grateful.
To the book, but moreso, to the author.
It’s about friendship and responsibility, about the nature of heroism, about leaders failing to lead, about unfairness and anger, about prejudice and sacrifice, about feeling small and scared but standing up anyway. It’s warm and funny and angry and surprising and heartbreaking. It’s scary and joyous and entirely wonderful.
If ANY of this sounds at ALL up your alley, order it.
And do me a favor? If your library doesn’t have it, please request that they purchase it. From the Author’s Note, I gathered that traditional publishers were nervous about it because it’s on the darker end of upper MG/lower YA, so it didn’t fit with Ursula Vernon’s brand. It didn’t get picked up, and she eventually self-published it under the name she uses for her darker stuff, T. Kingfisher—which means that despite the ABSOLUTELY ABSURD number of awards it won, it won’t be on everyone’s radar.
It certainly wasn’t on mine, and I’m so grateful to the reader who recommended it. THANK YOU.
It should never have come down to me. It was miserably unfair that it had come to me and Spindle. There were grown-ups who should have stopped it. The Duchess should have found her courage and gone to the guards. The guards should have warned the Duchess. The Council, whoever they were, should have made sure the Duchess knew about the proclamations. The Duchess should have had people on the street who reported back to her. Everyone had failed at every step and now Spindle and I were heroes because of it.
—A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher
More by T. Kingfisher
More soon,
Leila
YAY!!! So glad you got to this one!!! T. Kingfisher is one of the best things that has happened to my reading. You laugh, you cry, you "Hmm" over those points that are just. so. true. -- especially in this book where the main character realizes that the adults are just big piles of suck since she and a kid and a homeless woman on a bone horse have to save the world. I mean... yeah, and you wonder why more MG/YA fantasy characters don't have this realization.
Summer in Orcus was one of my favorite books forever until her next one, but I still hold big love for that one and you must find it. I really hate that her MG books are considered too... something for broader audiences - it's really ridiculous and I think it's just that her editor or agent isn't enough within kidlit spheres. I TOTALLY think there's a whole passel of kids who would be ride-or-die superfans pretty much immediately. I have read everything she's written so far except for the Scary On The Label horror stories... and I feel I'll someday work up to them. Maybe.
I LOVED this book. And after DNF'ing three extremely-mediocre-but-somehow-bestselling books in a row, I picked up her new one, Nettle and Bone, and breathed a huge sigh of relief, because it's just as wonderful.