a wizard's guide to defensive baking by t kingfisher

The setting is a standard fantasy city - one of many in the lands, ruled by a Duchess, defined by a river and numerous canals, tolerant of magic users - because Kingfisher (a pen name of Ursula Vernon) is far more interested in exploring the nuances of people than the details of places. She discovers how much she can do by seeing what needs to be done and setting to it, even when the adults around her are scared or unable. 1) It will turn out that Mona is one of those people too, though she does not know it at the outset. If a herd of ravenous centaurs descended on the city and went galloping through the streets, devouring small children and cats, Aunt Tabitha would calmly go about setting up barricades and manning crossbows as if she did it twice a week.” (Ch. “Not that Aunt Tabitha had bodies in her bakery on a regular basis, but she’s one of those competent people who always know what to do. Like a sensible young teen, Mona knows when she’s out of her depth. You can get the frogs with a broom, but you have to call a priest in for a zombie crawfish.) (Ch. Poor thing had been downstream of the cathedral, and sometimes they dump the holy water a little recklessly, and you get a plague of undead frogs and newts and whatnot. Not right away, of course Mona partly distracts herself from the horror of the body in the kitchen (“the red stuff oozing out from under her head definitely wasn’t raspberry filling”) by thinking of worse things that have been in the kitchen, like a zombie frog that had crawled in from the canals.

Worst of all for the dead girl, of course, but a horrifying start to the day for Mona, the fourteen-year-old first-person narrator of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. “There was a dead girl in my aunt’s bakery.” There’s the first problem right away.

A wizard's guide to defensive baking by t kingfisher