#bread magic

Fourteen-year-old Mona is a baker first and foremost. If she sometimes can save overworked dough with magic or make a like of gingerbread men can-can, well thats just a thing she can do. She is a baker. Until, of course, a dead body shows up on the kitchen floor.

Dead bodies showing up randomly is just never, ever a good thing.

Its even less a good thing when a bougie, dickheaded wizard from the castle decides you did it, and because a whole lot of people at a whole lot of levels failed catastrophically in their job, you end up in the position of having to climb a garderrobe to galvanize a weak leader into not doing a magical racism. And then because EVEN MORE PEOPLE FAILED TO DO THEIR JOBS, you at 14 are the last wizard left to defend the city (which is currently sans army) against a bunch of mercenary raiders. Oh, and your magic is entirely bread-based.

I, much like Mona was, would have been royally pissed that I had to be a city-saving hero at 14 because the system and a bunch of key individuals failed that hard and it somehow got left to me. And that is possibly one of the best parts of this book, is that discussion that heroes rarely feel heroic, and then asks WHY. And the answer is almost always some variation on "because a bunch of other adults fucked up." And that sucks, and it's hard, and it's unfair, and all of that is acknowledged in story. But Mona still has to step up and BE that hero.

Thankfully, however, the book at least acknowledges that the 14-year-old should never have to make the sacrifice play. Knackering Molly, a deadass (pun fully intended) horse necromancer who was heavily implied to have been forcibly employed by and subsequently deeply traumatized by the army in her youth, steps up to make the sacrifice play to save the city that did her so dirty. And she does it not because it's heroic or even because it's the right thing to do, no. She does it because if she doesn't, then another wizard kid--of whom she is rather fond--would have to. It's not fair that Molly has to take that hit either, but she was a grown-ass adult who was capable of making that choice, and I love that she did it for Mona. If Mona hadn't been in the picture, I think Molly would have let the city fall without a second thought. And that might even have been the right choice.

Wrapped up in Mona's hard lesson in adults fucking up is a hard lesson about the fact that authority can be weak and corrupt, and it can and will use state actors (the "all cops are bad" energy of a couple of scenes in this book is legendary) to oppress and murder people without power or authority. It encourages questioning and holding authority figures accountable. And once the fight is over, it acknowledges that being given a butt-ton of awards and recognition doesn't make any of it ok. Mona is still angry at the Duchess after all is said and done, and that is very much framed as perfectly understandable and acceptable.

Now, while the politics and power brokering and coming into an adult understanding of how systems of authority work are really excellent parts of this book, they're not the only excellent bits. We have got to talk about the magic system.

People who hate soft magic systems should leave now, because the magic system in this book is softer than raw dough. There is no Sandersonian breath counting here. But I have always thought that magic systems shouldn't get in the way of a good story, and I like a good soft magic system. This one also goes back to basics with what they call sympathetic magic--basically, if you have a bit if a thing, you can command the rest of the thing (you might recognize this as thaumaturgy).

This works beautifully for baking magic, because you can do a LOT of this with dough. And Mona does, from little magics like saving overworked dough or stopping biscuits from burning to full on bad gingerbread men who sabotage the enemy and GIANT BREAD GOLEMS. Seriously, the magic and the baking works together with a natural synergy that just happens effortlessly. The gingerbread men are sassy and wonderful.

But of course I would be remiss if I didn't mention Bob the Sourdough Starter. Bob is...an accident, more or less, from when Mona panicked that she had killed her aunt's sourdough starter and threw magic at it. Bob was the result. Bob eats flour, sugar, odds and ends of baking, and the odd dead fish when nobody's looking. He also has definite opinions about people. Mona is the center of his world, and Spindle and Aunt Tabitha are acceptable. Uncle Albert gets growled at, and when Mona yeets Bob at the Spring Green Man during his attempted assassination of her, Bob burns the Spring Green Man like acid. Needless to say, when the city is besieged, they yeet chunks of Bob at the oncoming hordes and it is...disturbingly effective.

In this house, we stan Bob. From a safe distance and with a haddock I hand, if at all possible.