Story gets told, ideas get presented, world gets saved, and just keep the sourdough starter firmly in place or it'll get weird ideas. But when her life gets knocked off its tracks with her discovery of a dead body in her aunt’s bakery, her path goes straight into the doings of the high and mighty. I don’t want to say too much about this story, because it surprised me on every page, and I don’t want to take that away from anyone else. Sometimes you have to rise up to a challenge when those in charge have failed in their responsibilities, and hope that you are not alone. And that's how we got this amazing self-published book, one of the most unique books I've ever read.

Kingfisher’s latest in a run of excellent middle grade fantasie The tone of the book is the irresistible mix of wry humor and action that I’ve come to expect from Kingfisher, and it also starts on a very dark note with a murdered body being found in the bakery in the book’s first line. I love that we grapple with the injustice of powerless groups having to be the ones who have to fix the mistakes of the empowered. I felt that it had such rich themes and such a wonderful premise that even more could have been made of it, we could have gone into much more detail concerning the magic system, the world, etc.But I found myself puzzled, supremely, by dual ideas (spoilery) of a large enough city that children can escape multiple guards on a canal and through smugglers' pathways, but that same young baker can make seven golems and twenty gingerbread men can hold off an advancing army in a way that a populace can't. Mona is fourteen, and has what she sees as a very minor wizarding talent — her skills are, as she describes, mostly limited to “making bread rise and keeping the pastry dough from sticking together”, and at times animating cookies and making gingerbread men dance — and therefore is quite unprepared when her skills are needed to save the city.

There was probably a moral lesson in there somewhere, but I had given up on moral lessons for today. While she does grow into her magic, I would hesitate to say she grows significantly into her personhood power. Let us pretend that we have done all that and that I have nodded correctly and made the proper noises, and skip to the point where you say, “I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll try. The story is abominably fluffy at times, but it is quite marvellously darkly dark for the most part. As does the way that someone has been using the powers of their office, along with a whole lot of propaganda and a dab hand at ginning up the crowd and pointing it at a convenient bogeyman.

There is no romance, for one thing, since her closest male ally is a boy from the streets who becomes a surrogate younger brother. If you give them a medal, then you don’t ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. And that one Ginger Bread Cookie has more personality than most authors give to their main characters. Admittedly she had few ambitions at the start of this story, but then grew into her own by the end, dispelled of her naivete while also being hardened by the harshness of reality.