Reviewed by HekArtemis on
This was unexpectedly a kids novel, or middle grade as some call it. The MC, Mona, is a 14 year old girl and the secondary character, Spindle, is a 10 year old boy. Mona is a baker girl and has baking magic, and she is relatively sheltered and trusting, while Spindle is a street urchin, pickpocket, thief, and street wise brat with the usual smartarse attitude that comes with such characters. They meet via sad circumstances but their new friendship, adoptive siblinghood even, seems to make up for this. Mona soon discovers that people with small magic like hers are being murdered all over the city, and she has accidentally put herself at the top of the murder list. She also discovers a political conspiracy and decides to try to save the ruling lady who was nice to her once.
As with most Kingfisher novels this was full of humour and it had me cackling loudly several times. It also managed to make me cry once, in a bittersweet sort of way. The magic was a standout in this story. It seems like the people who get magic all end up with different types of magic, and it's not hereditary or anything, so people just randomly are born magical to non-magical parents. The big types of magic are those that can affect big things - fire, water, weather, earth, etc. But most wizards have small magic like Mona, where it controls a very specific thing like, in her case, bakery foods. She doesn't seem to have an control over the individual baking ingredients, but once they are formed into some kind of dough, she's good to go. Another secondary character is a gingerbread man she accidentally leaves alive (because her magic can do that), it doesn't talk, but it has a personality all its own. Her familiar, other than this gingerbread man, is a sourdough starter that she almost killed one day and in her panic tried to make it not die, which made it come to actual life. It too does not talk, it also does not ride around on her should like the gingerbread man does, but it also has a personality. Goodness.
But I think my favourite thing in this book was the underlying (or overarching perhaps) theme of this book. Adults and children. Mona is 14 and she ends up in a horrible position because the adults of the world have messed up, cowered in corners, and let her be used and abused. And then they expect her to save them. It's an interesting view of the typical hero teen story, where in this one our MC is not just a reluctant hero as so many are, she is actively learning that the failures of adults are to blame for her position. Her anger, lightly sprinkled through the story, and her confusion, give this book a unique perspective. An important one that is always overlook by other teen hero stories. That we end up with several adults confronted with Mona's accusations and instead of acting like she expects them to - getting angry at her for being rude - they instead apologise to her, because no one should have to be a hero, but especially not a child. They should have protected her.
There are also some interesting side characters in the story too. A madwoman who rides a skeleton horse is perhaps the most interesting on a surface level. But there were also many surprise depths to some of the side characters that start out seeming like your typical background characters with no depth at all. We don't go too deep into these characters, but it is nice to get more than just wallpaperness from them, and those depths they share do matter.
There are some darker tones to this story, but I wouldn't consider them too dark for even my 5 year old to be honest (she wouldn't understand a lot of the story, sure, but it wouldn't be too dark for her, the existence of the gingerbread man would make her love it probably). So I think this is definitely a great kids book and I think I might just buy it in deadtree format for my kids to have a go.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 23 October, 2020: Finished reading
- 23 October, 2020: Reviewed