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A review by suzjustsuz
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher
5.0
4.5+
It's an interesting thing for me to find myself giving a YA book 5 stars, especially when I'm going to begin my review talking about the things I usually dislike about YA. So let me say out front that so far I've enjoyed everything I've read by T. Kingfisher, and I've never read anything she's published as Ursula Vernon
I don't particularly like spending time in a kid's head and believable, well-written YA characters don't let you forget their age. Mona, the MC of "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" is fourteen and she's very well written. In spite of all my personal peeves about missing the obvious, pacing, self-doubt, and the sort of inner monologues one might expect of a 14 year old, all deftly used here, I found myself enjoying the character, rooting for her, and I was thoroughly charmed by her sense of humor.
It's a middle grade book, but it's not for readers who don't care for dark topics, or who are unwilling to push those boundaries a bit. Topics such as treacherous murder, betrayals, and self-sacrifice are addressed, among others. Kingfisher shows morality on a spectrum in this book, if you need your middle grade readers to have black and white approaches to those things this is not that book. But if you prefer to challenge perspectives and prefer to see life in gradients then readers, middle grade or otherwise, may find this book engaging and challenging, certainly fun.
As for the story, well... we all come into the world and as our sense of self develops we are thinking of ourselves as an extension of whichever parent/s are around us. When we start walking we take a few steps away from the parental unit and then return to them until ready to venture 3 steps the next time. Most of us spend the rest of our lives doing that, becoming individuals independent of our parents, to one degree or another and in some form or another.
"A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" is a story about a 14 year old girl getting an "adults aren't actually gods just because they are adults" lesson that all of us learn in various points in our maturation process. With magic, semi-sentient dough.
It's an interesting thing for me to find myself giving a YA book 5 stars, especially when I'm going to begin my review talking about the things I usually dislike about YA. So let me say out front that so far I've enjoyed everything I've read by T. Kingfisher, and I've never read anything she's published as Ursula Vernon
I don't particularly like spending time in a kid's head and believable, well-written YA characters don't let you forget their age. Mona, the MC of "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" is fourteen and she's very well written. In spite of all my personal peeves about missing the obvious, pacing, self-doubt, and the sort of inner monologues one might expect of a 14 year old, all deftly used here, I found myself enjoying the character, rooting for her, and I was thoroughly charmed by her sense of humor.
It's a middle grade book, but it's not for readers who don't care for dark topics, or who are unwilling to push those boundaries a bit. Topics such as treacherous murder, betrayals, and self-sacrifice are addressed, among others. Kingfisher shows morality on a spectrum in this book, if you need your middle grade readers to have black and white approaches to those things this is not that book. But if you prefer to challenge perspectives and prefer to see life in gradients then readers, middle grade or otherwise, may find this book engaging and challenging, certainly fun.
As for the story, well... we all come into the world and as our sense of self develops we are thinking of ourselves as an extension of whichever parent/s are around us. When we start walking we take a few steps away from the parental unit and then return to them until ready to venture 3 steps the next time. Most of us spend the rest of our lives doing that, becoming individuals independent of our parents, to one degree or another and in some form or another.
"A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking" is a story about a 14 year old girl getting an "adults aren't actually gods just because they are adults" lesson that all of us learn in various points in our maturation process. With magic, semi-sentient dough.