A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

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It’s about people who don’t really want to be heroes — who shouldn’t even have to be heroes — but still rise to the occasion when others have failed, because they’re needed. Mona is a young magiker with control over dough, biscuits, and pastry adjacent products (although icing gives her a headache). She is whisked off to the palace to be tried and from there slithers into a way bigger barrel of shenanigans than she could have suspected. But I also loved how she realized and discussed with herself that this should have been completely handled by the adults.

And no, until I read this book, I did not have much of an idea of what exactly a sourdough starter is. Mona’s life is upset when she finds the dead body of a young girl in the bakery and is promptly suspected of killing her herself. But that is just the start of her troubles because there is a killer in the city and this assassin seems to be targeting magicas - minor ones like Mona. If you are looking for something a little fun and uplifting this should work just great for you even if it is Middle-Grade. Or real life and any number of groups who can be used to focus attention away from whatever an administration doesn’t want people to look at.I very much hope that Kingfisher finds that her lovely heroine won’t leave her alone – and that she, too, misses Mona. Good thing she has found a ally in street kid with a lot of street smarts and a gingerbread man she might have magicked just a little more than she was supposed to, to help her out. She was the one who found the body of the girl in her aunt’s bakery, but because Mina is a wizard (does being able to magic bread even count ?

It certainly doesn't hurt anyone to be told fictionally that evil should not ultimately succeed, that they can't leave it for others to fight, good people do die, and that, by inference, the hero, as well as the reader will have to work hard to defeat their own particular evil/s.Nobody said anything to me, and they didn’t exactly stare, but they knew I was there, and I knew that they knew, and they knew that I knew that they knew, all in a creepy, crackling tangle of mutual awareness. We have our kids grow up too fast in stories, and although Mona does a fair bit of this given the responsibilities thrust upon her, I love that in the end she’s still a kid at heart. Sometimes you have to rise up to a challenge when those in charge have failed in their responsibilities, and hope that you are not alone.