After a hiatus that was rather longer than I expected it to be (thanks, Angmar, for taking up the mantle), I’m back. Since my last entry some six weeks ago, we’ve sold our 240-year old house to our son and his partner, packed twenty-three years worth of stuff, and moved across our farm to a house we built six years ago, winnowing 4,500 square feet of stuff down to 1,400. My library is disorganized piles of books everywhere and there are necessities missing (alas, my baking sheets and bath towels!) but it’s coming together, slowly. The dogs have adapted and the cats have mostly forgiven us the indignity of tossing them into pet carriers for the move. With November ending and without all the restoration work at the old house on my plate, I can settle in for the winter and write.
So that’s what I did on My Summer Vacation. Tonight I want to ease back into the fantasy hot tub with a light and deft book by T. Kingfisher, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking.
You would think that there’s no way a book can live up to the premise of a spectacular title and often it’s true, but this is the exception that proves the rule. Deft, charming, but possessing a serious underbelly, A Wizard’s Guide is both a fun read and a masterwork of character voice. Mona, the narrator and protagonist, is a 14-year old orphan who works in her Aunt Tabitha and Uncle Albert’s bakery in the canal-rich city of Riverbraid. She’s also a wizard, although in her estimation,
As wizards go, I'm pretty much the bottom of the barrel. Even Master Elwidge, who's got just enough magic to take knots out of wooden boards, is better than me. Dough and pastries are about all I can do. The great wizards, the magi that serve the Duchess, they can throw fireballs around or rip mountains out of the earth, heal the dying, turn lead into gold.
(from Chapter 2)
Mona is a born baker and loves her craft. Most of her descriptions of people, and situations, and emotions, are metaphors from baking, as one fellow has hair the color of melted butter, and a book of magic feels to her like a scone left by the oven. She’s self-deprecating and funny, especially when she’s scared. She has good reasons for fear.
Wizards, or “magickers” as they’re called, are a marginalized group, although their specialized skills are generally useful, which makes them tolerated by the general population. Whether it’s Sidney Weatherfort, who mends broken things, or Knackering Molly, who can get dead horses to move under their own steam and who rides a skeletal horse named Nag, or Mona herself, who can convince bread to rise and not to burn and can also make gingerbread men get up and dance, the magickers are eccentric and not particularly threatening.
They’re also disappearing. And public sentiment is turning against them. Mona keeps her head down, absolutely certain it has nothing to do with her. Until it does, and the city’s fate hangs in the balance.
A Wizard’s Guide is firmly YA, which means that plot points revolve around a 14 year old’s perspective. Mona’s voice is so charming and original that I found myself not minding it, whether she’s describing the carnivorous sourdough starter that lives in the basement and goes by the name of Bob, or matter-of-factly assuring us that her bakery is the best in the city:
The worst thing I've ever seen in the kitchen was the occasional rat--don't judge us, you can't keep rats out in this city, and we're as clean an establishment as you'll ever find--and the zombie frog that crawled out of the canals. Poor thing had been downstream of the cathedral, and sometimes they dump the holy water a little recklessly, and you get a plague of undead frogs and newts and whatnot. (The crawfish are the worst. You can get the frogs with a broom, but you have to call a priest in for a zombie crawfish.)
(from Chapter 1)
When the powerful Inquisitor Oberon turns his predatory sites on Mona and she is hunted by the mysterious and murderous Spring Green Man, when the community itself turns against magickers as alien and enemy, it’s time for the adults to step up. But Mona and her sidekick, a pickpocket called Spindle, find that the adults in charge aren’t very good at being in charge, and help doesn’t come easily. Mona learning how to deal with adults who fail, how to acknowledge their failures and, not forgive but understand them, is a powerful subtext, as are other hard lessons in adulting, such as the pervasiveness of prejudice (and Mona learns that she herself is not immune) and nature of heroism. She doesn’t feel brave, but learns to manage her fear. When people praise her heroism, she withdraws. It takes her Uncle Albert to put things into perspective. In his youth, cut off from supplies and starving, his army unit surrenders to its enemy and is eventually repatriated:
"[I]t turned out that nobody knew we'd been in trouble. A couple of quartermasters had been siphoning off supplies that the brass thought was headed our way. All the messages we'd sent were sitting at the bottom of a stack of papers on somebody's desk.”
I stared at him in horror.
“Well, you can't really have that happening. It looks bad when people just forget you're there. So they decided it had been a siege. Called it the Siege of Dusk End, I think. They gave us medals for surviving, and we all went home heroes of the war.”
“That's terrible,” I said.
“Yeah.” Uncle Earl glanced over at me. “But as long as they gave us medals, that fixed it, as far as the army was concerned. You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don't ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it.”
(from Chapter 26)
Anyone who says that YA can’t do dark hasn’t read much YA. Uncle Albert’s (yes, it’s Earl in the text, but that’s a typo in my edition) lesson helps Mona when she needs it most, and gives her the perspective she needs to earn the title she’s been given, Wizard of the Bakery.
If you have ever prepared for a siege in two days, then you know what the next few days were like. If you haven't, then you probably don't. Well...a big formal wedding is about the same (and because we do cakes, I've been on the periphery of a few), except that if things go wrong in a siege you'll all die horribly, and in formal weddings, the stakes are much higher.
(from Chapter 27)
I added this quotation just because, having done more than my share of wedding baking, it made me laugh. And it’s pure Mona — situations in baking metaphors.
It’s not great literature, but it’s charming and fun. Of course, I’m not the target audience, but still it entertained and engaged, and gave me a few things to think about. Imagine the benefit to teenagers. If you’re one, or you know one, it’ll make a great holiday gift.
T. Kingfisher is the pseudonym of Ursula Vernon, who writes for just about all ages, and works that range from horror to comedy. She’s also a prolific illustrator and the author of the graphic series Dragonbreath and Hamster Princess. Her website is the Red Wombat Studio.
Thanks again to Angmar, and congratulations on the launch of his successful series, Occult and Psychical Sciences.
I’ll be back next week, more organized and probably more serious. No promises, though.