A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive backing By T. Kingfisher Review

(image taken from Goodreads)

I’ve had some pretty bad Monday mornings, but none quite as bad as walking into work to find a dead girl on the floor.

This particularly bad start to the work week kick-starts the events of T. Kingfisher’s A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. A fun, funky, and wonderfully strange cosy fantasy mystery, focusing on 14-year-old Wizard of bread, Mona. Upon discovering a dead girl in her aunt’s bakery, Mona gets kneaded and moulded by the adults around her into the role of an unwilling hero.

After being rejected for being too odd, Kingfisher self-published A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking with overwhelming success. The lockdown and the increase in home baking clearly helped cultivate the perfect reader’s atmosphere for this cosy mystery. Not only did it become a best seller, but it also won many awards in 2021, including the Nebula Award for Best Young Adult Novel.

The book follows Mona, a baker’s apprentice at her aunt’s bakery, from the day she finds a dead body in said bakery. This throws her into a fun mystery, where she learns things about the adult world you usually have to go through your quarter-life crisis to understand. She realises that nobody has a clue what they are doing, and that everyone is scared in their own way, all whilst introducing us to a wonderful cast of characters.

Kingfisher does an amazing job at creating a cosy mystery atmosphere which doesn’t take away from some of the more serious points she is making. Mona is a very relatable and lovable character, whose insecurities are refreshingly not based on her looks, but on the anxiety of being underqualified for the situation she finds herself in. Kingfisher handles Mona’s emotions with genuine respect and care, something that even in YA circles is shockingly lacking when it comes to teenage girls within fiction, especially when the adults surrounding her are complacent at best and negligent at worst.

This book is a whirlwind. With only 320 pages, it has a fun, easy, and fast pace that had me finish the book within a day. The fast pace, however, sometimes works against itself. Kingfisher packs a lot into this book and the speed you rush through doesn’t allow the deeper heartfelt moments the space to breathe and resonate with the reader. For example, there is a scene between Mona and her uncle (who is also underutilised) about his experience with heroism. It’s such a meaningful conversation tying into the overall themes of the book but is totally overshadowed by the rest of the plot crashing in before Mona can even give him a hug.

Due to the amount of plot, the book also suffers a bit of the Return of the King syndrome, where you feel like the story has ended but oh wait, there’s more.

Personally, I think this could have made for an excellent duology.

However, overall, the book is a good time and an enjoyable read for younger readers, with an interesting world, fun characters, and Bob. Every book should have a Bob (you will know what I mean). He is amazing.