A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

by

eBook, 298 pages

English language

Published July 21, 2020 by Red Wombat Studio.

ISBN:
978-1-393-51910-2
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(1 review)

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…

4 editions

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

disappointing

the book is funny and has an intriguing premise which i appreciated, but the ending felt very rushed and left a lot of threads untied for me. the villains felt two-dimensional, like they were just villains for the sake of the plot. then again, maybe i’m expecting too much from a book that’s targeted at younger readers.

i’m also disappointed with the portrayal of the secondary antagonists as uncivilised, barbarian cannibals. that blatantly colonialist rhetoric felt very out of place in a book with generally progressive, anti-fascist themes.

the book also could’ve used better editing. i noticed that characters had names swapped or changed out midway and there were quite a few punctuation errors.

Subjects

  • fiction
  • fantasy
  • young adult fiction