A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

 

From the publisher:
 

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…

 

Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Ursula Vernon writes awesome children's books, including the popular Dragonbreath series. But some of her books for older readers can be a bit dark, and rather than risk scarring children for life, she also write under the name T. Kingfisher. I've loved Ursula's writing and artwork for decades, and her earlier books were comfort re-reads during the spring quarantine. So the odds were pretty good that I would enjoy this one. And I did.

As described by the publisher, Mona's talent lies in bread. She can make cookies dance, tell the muffins they don't want to burn, and then there's Bob. Bob is the sourdough starter she 'created' when she was younger, who now lives in a bucket in the basement and blorps happily in greeting when she comes down to feed him flour. The book opens with Mona discovering the body of a young woman on the bakery floor, and unfortunately her day goes downhill from there.

As stated above, it was likely that I would enjoy this book, but I definitely think it will appeal to new readers as well. The characters are well thought out, the magic system makes sense and the focus on one particular aspect (like bread) allows for further imaginings. The situations and dialog are frequently humorous, such as arguing over whether baked goods created for wartime situations should be smiling or not (and whether angry frosting eyebrows will make things better or worse). There is drama and tension, and I did cry at the end.  As with many of the author's characters, minimal physical description is given, so the characters, for the most part, don't read as one race or another. 

Yes, the protagonist is 14, but this is a perfectly fine book for Grown Ups, and would be suitable for some younger readers as well. The book does open with a dead body, there's a carnivorous sourdough starter (not the most terrifying creature in the junior fiction section, I can assure you), and Mona must deal with the fact that the adults don't have everything under control, and even the People in Charge sometimes can't fix everything.

If you're looking for a fantasy that will make you hungry, I highly recommend this one. 

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is available at Galesburg Public Library via inter-library loan.