#terapsina's awgtdb rambles

[terapsina]

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

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…

I absolutely loved this book. And I'd recommend it to anyone, but especially those who love reading Terry Pratchett. T. Kingfisher might not quite yet be the master in the art of landing hard truths about life in the most humorous of fashions that Sir Terry was, but she's way more than a novice. I'd call her a very proficient journeyman.

It's been a while since I've come across a book that was this full of likeable characters, or this fun to read.

She's certainly an EXCELLENT storyteller.

The characters all had very unique voices that were easy to keep up with. Though my absolute favorites were Mona (the 14 year old wizard girl with power over baked goods), Spindle (a very brave street boy about 10 years old who quickly joins Mona in the adventure neither of them want to be having) and Knackering Molly (whose entrance to the story and person I refuse to describe because it's too great a thing to be ruined by getting spoiled).

This is a book written for children. But as all the best kids books I always loved when I was a kid myself, it's a children's book that deals with dark and serious subjects that maintain their weight for any age readers.

And nothing shows it as well as the opening of the story which contains a 14 year old girl walking into the kitchen of her family bakery and finding the dead body of another girl only a little older than herself. It's terrible, and tragic and not something that can be made light of.

Another example of the kind of things this book deals with can be seen in this quote here:

"And there was still the problem of being a magicker. If I got to a city, I still might have to leave again, or live in a wizard’s quarter, or get registered by the government as a known magicker. That was what I was trying to avoid. It seemed like once you agreed that the government could put you on a list because of something you were born with, you were asking for trouble. Sooner or later somebody like Oberon would get hold of that list."

The world of the book is fun and interesting and sort of quirky (they have a living sourdough-starter gloop monster named Bob that lives in the bakery basement and occasionally consumes particularly unlucky rats is all I'll say) but that doesn't mean its all laughs.

And finally, something I really enjoyed is that the adults weren't all sleeping on their job and unlikable by virtue of being adults and leaving it all to the kids. It's true that Mona is the hero of the story (when in a perfect world she shouldn't be) but the reasons that it was left to her made sense. The adults might have failed to keep kids from the danger but at no point was it because they dismissed Mona and Spindle's warnings, or were just incompetent in general. They failed the kids from being heroes because they're human, fallible and not all-powerful, and there were no other good choices to be had.

It's been a while since I've come across a book that was this full of likeable characters, or this fun to read.

5 stars all around.

Now, excuse me I need to go off and read absolutely everything else T. Kingfisher has ever written.

(btw, for those who don't want to buy this book from Amazon, I read the book on Scribd (they're an e-book and audiobook subscription site) and they have the book in both formats)