a wizard's guide to defensive baking by t kingfisher

I kept waiting for the little gingerbread man to run down the road shouting, 'you can't catch me,' but that could be because I just read The Big Over Easy. Bob the sourdough starter is hilarious and steals every scene (and that ranks right up there with things I never thought I'd say about a book, along with spiders are cool). Like, how effing incompetent is this city and the advancing army? But I found myself puzzled, supremely, by dual ideas (spoilery) of a large enough city that children can escape multiple guards on a canal and through smugglers' pathways, but that same young baker can make seven golems and twenty gingerbread men can hold off an advancing army in a way that a populace can't. Had Kingfisher been content to keep it a smaller story like in Minor Mage, it would have worked better for me. The second challenge-perhaps like much in baking-was one of scale. I might have liked her better if I was ten. But not my favorite kind of lead character. And I kind of applaud Kingfisher for trying to tell a story about someone who doesn't want to be a hero, and who doesn't get powered-up and stomp all over the story. Her emotional breakdowns are in line with this persona, as are her worries. She's a young, rule-follower, trusting sort of young person, and that's fine. While that is entirely alright, the mileage one gets out of this may vary. While she does grow into her magic, I would hesitate to say she grows significantly into her personhood power. There were two problems here, both of which will vary tremendously depending on the reader.

I’m pretty sure that’s a scientific fact.'

It is nearly impossible to be sad when eating a blueberry muffin. 'You’re making their lives better, just a little tiny bit. Really, how can any baker resist a title like that, along with the lure of an enthusiastic but somewhat unreliable sourdough starter named Bob? But what at first seems to be a murder mystery when a young baker named Mona finds a body in the bakery morphs fairly quickly into a coming-of-age story, in the setting of a politically unstable landscape.

A wizard's guide to defensive baking by t kingfisher