Review – A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher (3.5/5 stars)
Reading Level: Middle Grade
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 320 pages
Publisher: Red Wombat Studio
Release Date: July 21, 2020
ASIN: B08CJ86Y1W
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: Borrowed ebook from Library
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
“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…”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I borrowed this on ebook from my library.
Thoughts: This wasn’t my favorite Kingfisher fantasy book. I felt like it was just too long and moved too slow for what it was. Mona is a pretty typical type of middle grade character and I didn’t find her or the story all that engaging. There are some fun fantasy elements here but I think this would have made a better novella.
The story follows Mona, a pre-teen baker with some slight magic that helps her with baking bread…it’s pretty specific magic. One morning she finds a young woman’s dead body on the bakery floor. From there things get a bit out of control and suddenly she is thrust into a plot to save the kingdom and dodging an assassin and the city guard.
This book is very middle grade and I somewhat disagree with the afterward where Kingfisher says this was too violent to be a middle grade novel (Wings of Fire anyone?? The level of violence, torture etc in that series left me pretty surprised). Yes, there is a dead body and people die but it wasn’t all that gorey or violent.
I enjoyed some of the story elements here. Watching Mona get creative with her baking magic was fun. Some of the other magicians are also fun characters. I loved the relationship that Mona has with her aunt and uncle and how supportive they are of Mona. I loved Mona’s little gingerbread man and reading about the fights with the golems.
However, when I said this was a “very middle grade novel” I meant it. The adults are all dorks and fairly unhelpful to the kids, a typical middle-grade-story thing. Mona seems alternately super naive and over mature for her age (another middle grade issue). There is a heavy theme of “no matter how small your actions you can save the world!” Which is supposed to be inspiring but comes off a bit heavy-handed.
The whole story has some pretty slow parts and seems long. There were two or three times where I thought the story was wrapping up but then there would be more. I really think this would have been better as a series of novellas or maybe even just one novella. I do enjoy Kingfisher’s writing style and love the description and creativity but this one was a bit of a miss for me. I loved “Nine Goblins” so much more.
My Summary (3.5/5): Overall this was okay but not great. Some of the fantasy elements are fun but the story itself is predictable, moves slow, and has a lot of “middle grade age” story issues. I would recommend reading “Nine Goblins” over this book if you are looking for an excellent Kingfisher fantasy novel. In fact, I think I have like everything else I have read by her more than this book. To date I have read “Nettle & Bone”, The Clocktaur War series, “The Seventh Bride”, “What Moves the Dead”, “The Raven and the Reindeer” and the Saint of Steel series and I liked all of those books quite a bit more than this one.
