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T. Kingfisher (the pseudonym under which Ursula Vernon writes for older readers) spent more than a decade shopping this manuscript around before self-publishing it in 2020, and the story of that delay is almost as strange as the book itself. Publishers apparently found it too dark, too weird, or too off-brand for its apparent target age. Reading it now, you can understand all three complaints and still think the publishers got it wrong. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is a middle-grade fantasy that went on to win the Lodestar, the Mythopoeic, and a Dragon, and it deserved every one of them - but it is also a book with genuine bite.

The premise is charmingly small. Fourteen-year-old Mona is a minor wizard in a city-state called Riverbraid, and her magic only affects bread. She can make gingerbread men dance, coax sourdough to rise, and keep a semi-sentient starter named Bob alive in her aunt's basement. What she wants is to be a good baker. What she becomes is something else, because a body turns up on the bakery floor, an assassin is quietly murdering wizards across the city, and the adults who should be solving this are variously absent, cowardly, or complicit. A minor talent turns out to offer no protection once a society decides it has a wizard problem.

What elevates the book is the voice. Mona sounds like a slightly pampered, slightly naive, genuinely tired fourteen-year-old, and Kingfisher never cheats by making her wittier or braver than she ought to be. She runs, hides, and cries. She has no clever one-liners. She also, eventually, builds twelve-foot gingerbread soldiers out of necessity, and the book's most quoted line - a quiet observation that being forced to save the day does not make you a hero, it just means the grown-ups failed - lands with real weight. Bob the sourdough familiar is a genuinely unsettling creation, and you can feel the horror writer behind the cosy premise in the way a burbling bucket of yeast becomes something you would not want to meet in a dark cellar.

The prose is nostalgic in a way that invites comparisons to Robin McKinley at her darker, with a dash of Tamora Pierce and a touch of Miyazaki's social imagination. The humour is dry, the parenthetical asides are frequent, and the pacing moves quickly enough that you barely notice occasional slips between past and present tense or the fact that the secondary cast - Spindle the street thief, the Duchess, various guards and generals - remain fairly thinly drawn. The plotting is also, in fairness, fairly simple for an adult reader; the mystery unravels in roughly the order you would expect, and the climactic beats land where the shape of the story tells you they will.

None of that matters much. This is a book about minor talents and major failures, about persecution dressed up as policy, and about the exhausting moral demand that good people keep trying even after the systems around them have quit. It is funnier and angrier than its title lets on, and very hard to forget.