Reprise: A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

Since Karen's blog last week discussed several children's books by Ursula Vernon (aka T. Kingfisher), including A WIZARD'S GUIDE TO DEFENSIVE BAKING, I'm reprising my review of that book, which I first posted last year:

This YA fantasy novel set in a secondary world is quite different in tone and content from Kingfisher’s contemporary adult horror novels such as THE TWISTED ONES. The only obvious similarity consists of the heroines, first-person narrators with distinctive, witty voices and self-deprecating personalties.

Fourteen-year-old orphaned teenager Mona works in her aunt’s bakery. Mona’s baking talent encompasses more than mundane skills. In this world, many people have magical gifts, although more often small and specialized than big and flashy, and Mona can do amazing things with dough. She entertains customers by making gingerbread men dance, and she keeps one long-lived animated gingerbread figure as a sort of pet. Her other mascot is a bucket of sentient sourdough starter named Bob. He's confined to the basement because he has a habit of eating animals that stray within his reach.

On the morning when the story begins, Mona finds a dead girl on the bakery floor. Local law enforcement takes Mona into custody for questioning, and things get worse from there. Following her release after many hours, she’s attacked by ten-year-old Spindle, brother of the murdered girl. After Mona convinces him of her and her family’s innocence, the two of them team up to uncover the truth. A mysterious figure known as the Spring Green Man seems to be involved. Magic-users have been disappearing or dying. Aside from Mona herself, one of the few left in the city is Molly, a kindly but deranged woman with a gift of animating dead horses; she wanders around with a dried-up, nearly skeletal zombie horse. Meanwhile, their city-state is at war, and the authorities are cracking down on magical folk. In desperation, Mona and Spindle eventually sneak into the castle to appeal to the Duchess herself. As the plot thickens, Mona gets unwillingly involved in combat and discovers extraordinary uses for the baking magic she’s always considered minor and ordinary. While fast-paced and entertaining, with humorous bits, this novel also delves into issues such as the nature of responsibility and heroism.

Although it's certainly true that the female protagonists in Kingfisher/Vernon's fiction have a definite "type" -- to which Mona conforms -- I don't agree that ALL of them fall into that category. For instance, the Hamster Princess and the were-bear nun (in the Clocktaur universe) don't. Moreover, although the protagonists of THE TWISTED ONES and SNAKE-EATER, for example, find themselves in basically the same situation (a woman alone with her dog in a strange house), they have opposite personalities, the former confident in her career and competently taking charge of her late abusive, hoarder grandmother's house, the latter practically apologizing for daring to exist in the world. As for whether they're avatars of the author, I can't make a guess because I don't know anything about Ursula Vernon as an individual aside from the persona displayed in the afterwords to her novels. Of course, most fictional characters reflect facets of their creators, but otherwise it seems like a stretch to assume her protagonists "are" her.

Margaret L. Carter

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