A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fantasy / Kingfisher, T.	4-week checkout	Due 05-17-2024
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fantasy / Kingfisher, T.	4-week checkout	Due 05-07-2024

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...

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Summary / Annotation

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Highly recommended submitted by Susan4Pax -prev. sueij- on June 23, 2022, 11:06pm This was delightful. I especially love books with young characters (Mona is 14) where they are making reasonable young-person decisions and taking reasonable young-person actions. In this book, the adults are adults and the teens are teens, but also the teens rise to the occasion and discover that they can be more than they thought they were. Mona is awesome. I love how thoroughly her character is a baker… colors are compared to cinnamon, textures are compared to dough or runny eggs, time is in relation to cooking. And having a wizarding skill in a “small” talent (bread) is fun. Turns out bread is more powerful than I knew! This was a creative and delightful story, wonderfully told. Highly recommended.

Quirky fantasy with thoughtful reflections submitted by srlorand on August 22, 2023, 8:14am I agree with everything the above reviewer said. This is a highly original, enjoyable, and entertaining story. It also includes reflections on economic inequality, power, and systems of government — but not in a didactic or heavy-handed way. I was sorry to leave the characters (the non-evil ones) when it ended.