A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic

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After the rapid pace, thrilling tension, and macabre fantasy nightmares of Holy Terrors, I was definitely keen on the idea of a cosy read for my next book. Something cute and comforting with low stakes. A while ago, I came across a children’s trilogy by J. Penner that sounded right up my cosy fantasy alley, so this is what I’ve chosen to settle the nerves and adrenaline from last week’s read with. This week I travelled into the quaint magical world of Adenashire with A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic.

Arleta Starstone is a human with an incredible talent for baking. While she may need to work twice as hard as everyone else because of her lack of magic, her baked treats infused with herbs are her own unique form of magic. While Aleta does not believe she is anything special, her orc neighbours do and to prove it they enter her into the prestigious Langheim Baking Battle. Nervous that her being magicless and competing against the likes of elves, dwarves, and other magical beings will surely work against her, Aleta nevertheless travels to Langheim to compete. But the competition turns out to be a life-changing adventure as Arleta discovers her own self-worth and makes some unique friends along the way.

So admittedly I got a little bit of whiplash in the difference in prose, coming from the more mature writing of Owen and then diving into a book that is definitely aimed at a younger audience. The Adenashire trilogy feels like it’s a bedtime story for that age bracket between childhood and angsty adolescence. The writing is very simple and plain, comfortably building the world and its characters, but not quite doing it with as much flare as one would expect from a fantasy novel.

The events of the novel are then told in very quick and factual succession with a ‘no-muss no-fuss’ attitude. The story itself is very sweet and wholesome, a perfect cosy read when you’re wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea. One thing I would have liked though is a bit more drama and sense of stakes. Our heroine, despite being described as constantly nervous and keeping everyone at arm’s length, doesn’t really have a lot of dept to her. We aren’t given the story as to why she is standoffish and a loner, which I feel would then give her being in the competition – and indeed the competition itself- some stakes. It’s true I was after a low-stakes read, but not a no-stakes read. But in all honesty, this was the only area in which I felt that the book was lacking, and to give credit where it is due, once the supporting characters are established then the pace and the atmosphere of the novel picks up.

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Filled with romance, humour, and a cosy token fantasy world, A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic is a very sweet and cosy afternoon read.

Author: J. Penner, 2023

Published: Originally self-published by J. Penner, 2023. Pictured edition published by Sourcebooks, 2025

Holy Terrors

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After what seems like an age since I discovered that Little Thieves is a trilogy and ecstatically bought the remaining two books, I have now been able to hunker down and read the final instalment in the thrilling adventures of Vanja Ros: Holy Terrors.

After banishing the vengeful ghost of her mother who has haunted her for years, Vanja is slowly coming to terms with who she is as a person. Still unable to believe that she won’t be used against Emeric in his career, she has chosen to go it alone and has made a new name for herself as the Pfennigeist: helping those that the law cannot. After one particularly irksome job, Vanja discovers that there is a serial killer tearing through the country’s royalty. Normally this would not concern her, except that the killer is leaving her signature red penny on all the victims and the Pfennigeist is fast becoming a villain rather than folk hero. In order to save her name (and herself), Vanja has to team up once again with Emeric Conrad after breaking his heart a second time.

The final instalment in Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves trilogy is every bit as exciting and intriguing as its predecessors: a ghoulish fantasy-whodunnit with an underlying love story and journey of self-discovery. All our favourite characters return for a thrilling final adventure in which everyone is in mortal peril every single minute.

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Following the classic themes and formula of the whodunnit, Holy Terrors elevates the genre by being a noir thriller set against a delightfully macabre Scandinavian fantasy background. While a few modern musical throwbacks jerk you out of the world for a minute, Owen’s delightful banter between characters as well as her rapidly flowing prose guarantees total immersion and memorable scenes that cause you to exclaim out loud.

If the book falls down anywhere, it would probably be with the introduction of a comic-book narrative trope that is just everywhere at the moment (obviously I don’t want to spoil anything). There are also a number of places in which major plot twists or dramatic reveals don’t feel like they land the way there were intended to, either because they were nonchalantly dropped onto the table or were not sufficiently set up to achieve the desired response.

But having said that, Holy Terrors is still a wonderfully intriguing and action-packed end to a refreshingly different type of YA fantasy novel. Filled with suspense, gore, humour, romance, solid character development, and practically everything in between, it’s very easy to fly through its five hundred plus pages in no time at all!

Author: Margaret Owen, 2025

Published: Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette Uk Company, Great Britain, 2025.

A Rising of the Lights

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I wonder if there is a term for fictional works that chronicle a narrative but also a mental journey of its characters. Considering the existence of the omniscient narrator, the ideas that fictional characters are a means through which the author communicates/examines a multitude of thought processes, and then stories in which absolutely everything happens within the confines of a mind, ‘mental-fiction’ or ‘psych-fiction’ is probably too broad and flimsy to act as a binding label to a subgenre…

Sorry, my own thought process are running away with me; a side effect from just finishing Steve Toltz’s A Rising of the Lights.

Russell Wilson’s world has never been like that of other peoples’, but that hasn’t stopped him trying to secure love and normalcy. However, it’s incredibly hard to find security when everything that happens to you feels like having the ground disappear from beneath your feet. In quick succession, his wife confesses to an affair and leaves him, his elderly parents decide they no longer wish to see him, and he loses his job to an AI system. When his childhood friend Edwina sets him up with a job as a high school guidance counsellor, the dilemma of trying to inspire young humans to care about their future becomes the next mystery for Russell to grapple with. After all, is it worth crafting a future for yourself when the horizon is populated with robots and AI? Is the future even worth considering when it’s only the present that really affects the human condition? And then there’s the contradiction of the human condition: the cure for loneliness causes loneliness…

My immediate thought upon closing this book was that it reminded me of The Great Gatsby. Despite being written in a nonchalant and cynically humorous way, it’s a book that is really a lament for an age of uncertainty. With the rise of AI, generational attitudes are crashing upon each other, culminating in a person that has no static sense of self and is wholly influenced by external events and the behavioural messages that they have absorbed through media on how to deal with them. While the overarching cloud of gloom and doom (a la Great Gatsby) definitely left me feeling that something had been scooped out of my brain with a melon-baller, it was quickly smoothed over with the clever prose, intellectual dialogue, and leisurely rapid-fire pace in which disasters befall the protagonist (like the author forgot their finger was holding down the trigger).

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To say this book is ‘thought-provoking’ is putting it mildly. ‘Mind-exploding’ might be a better way of phrasing it. Imagine that it only blows up a portion of your brain and the shrapnel just continues to flutter about: thoughts chasing each other. Like when you kick up sand underwater. The brilliance of it really is how it makes you aware of the cloudy, chaotic, undefined swirling of your identity. Especially in this day and age where we're constantly absorbing so many messages through media and machinery. The dynamic, wavering, fragility of the sense of self - we see this reflected in the entire cast of characters; an ensemble that I still don’t know if I liked any one of them, but they all work together to tell a most interesting story.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Rising of the Lights and would absolutely recommend it. It's deep, funny, chaotic, and slightly unbelievable, still with a nice hopeful nugget at the end. 

Author: Steve Toltz, 2026

Published: Penguin Random House Australia, 2026

Helm

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While there is absolutely nothing fun about being in a ready slump, the inflating sense of accomplishment that comes from finally finishing the book that you were struggling through is nothing short of magnificent. It’s a different kind of reading experience that comes from encountering a book that provides challenges, takes you out of your comfort zone, makes literary/character/narrative decisions that you can’t really fathom... or a mélange of everything heretofore mentioned.

This month’s book for Bookclub was Helm by Sarah Hall, a book that is about everything and nothing, is enlightening and confusing, and took me over a month to read because once I had put it down, I struggled to aspire to pick it back up again.

Helm is a ferocious wind that presides over the southwestern slopes of the Cross Fell range in Cumbria England. Helm doesn’t know when Helm was born or when Helm will die, nor does Helm really care. But humans do: the Neolithic tribes that tried to placate it, the Dark Age zealot who attempted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who tried to capture it, the free-spirited little girl who loved it, Dr Selima Sutar who is trying to study it, and a whole bunch of other people all have stories connected to Helm.

The blurb advertises that this is a life story of Helm, though that term is about as unstable as the subject matter. The novel is a collection of individual stories, spanning throughout the ages of human history, that all have some tie-in with Helm. They are stories without closure, that raise questions about their narrators, and teach us little to nothing of Helm.

The sensual reading experience of this book was funnily enough like being caught in a multidirectional wind. With the exception of the 4-6 central stories, there is nothing that grounds the narrative or keeps you fixed and focused on a cemented path. The tone, the tales, the characters are discordant and higgledy-piggledy and it feels like there is no real space to breath and take in the sights before another blast from the narrative wind (either the ‘character’ of Helm or the narrative devices that Hall employs) scoop you up and deposit you somewhere else; like Dorothy and Toto.

Having so much happen (and seemingly nothing resolve) over the course of 300+ pages made this a very challenging book for me. So much so that I failed to really admire the scenic walk through the Ages or the Historic Tour of How Human’s Destroy the World that the author takes us on. The messages about climate change did not become present to me until they were literally voiced at the end.

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This book is a literary achievement. One that I think people smarter that me, able to see further than me, and more attuned to the subtle mechanics of narrative devices are able to appreciate more than I can. While I recognise the tricks and tropes that make this book different to other speculative fiction, and appreciate that the reading experience was reflective of the nature of the narrative subject, I just really struggled with it. I turned up to Bookclub having only made my way through half of it.

Author: Sarah Hall, 2025

Published: Faber & Faber Limited, London, 2025

Mother Mary Comes To Me

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Reading a memoir can be a daunting thing, especially if you know nothing about the author/subject. On the one hand, it could inspire you to find out more about the subject: read their books, listen to their music, watch their films, etc. On the other hand, it could also deter you from adventuring down this unknown avenue, depending on how well the memoir is written or if the subject’s story is one that is appealing or relatable.

And then sometimes you sit flat in the middle of the road between the two. This was my experience with this month’s book club read: Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy.

Mother Mary Comes To Me chronicles the emotional, environmental, and circumstantial events that shaped Arundhati Roy into the woman and writer that she is today, with many of her life’s most significant events either directly involving or drawing her mind to her mother whom she describes as both her “shelter and storm”. From a turbulent relationship stems an eye-opening and almost impossible mother-daughter love story between two strong, defiant, and inspiring Indian women.

I was not aware of any of Roy’s work before reading this book. And while I found Mother Mary Comes To Me to be an engaging and truly amazing book of love, admiration, and incredible narratives, I cannot honestly say that I am itching to get myself a copy of The God of Small Things or The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

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The book’s poignancy comes from the respect with which Roy writes about her mother, even when she is describing moments of abuse, drama, or neglect. Throughout its chapters, the book changes tone with the telling of different, incredible life narratives from Roy ranging from studying architecture, becoming an actress, and laughing off the ridiculous arguments that powerful men put forward for her arrest. While the tone changes from anecdotal, to mocking, to reminiscent, throughout the entire book there is this underlying current of love and respect for her mother that carries the book along and through it, the book also becomes a little bit of a memoir of Mary Roy as well. We learn about this strong-willed Indian woman who opened a school, took down/reshaped inheritance laws, and built a community around herself despite her loud and dramatic personality. What keeps you turning the pages is the way in which Roy writes about these seriously scary events that either she or her mother were at the centre of: there is a distinct lack of fear, almost nonchalance, in her descriptions of her court appearances, her traversing jungles with guerilla fighters, and way in which authorities tried to silence her or her mother. It’s awesome.

While it hasn’t completely inspired me to rush right out and acquire Roy’s fictional or non-fictional collection of works, Mother Mary Comes To Me has made me glad that I now know that these awesome women are real.

Author: Arundhati Roy, 2025

Published: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House UK, 2025

Unbury the Dead

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The crime novel is a genre that has been through a plethora of transformations over the years. From the sophisticated detective novels of Conan Doyle to the gritty noir of Chandler, names like Poe, Harris, Christie, Du Maruier, Larsson, Le Carre, Collins, etc. trample over each other as they traverse the genre landscape. When we pick up a crime novel, we are promised a challenge in trying to solve the mystery before the protagonists, as well as the added thrill of a race against time to tie everything up. We expect charismatic characters, immediate intrigue, and (often) a pace that keeps us on our toes. It’s thus, deflating when we get to the end of a crime novel and feel that it hasn’t delivered.

Unbury the Dead follows ‘heroines’ Alice and Teddy: best friends and hired hands with flexible moral boundaries who provide a variety of services from chauffeurs to bodyguards, to private detectives, to crime scene cleaners. Teddy is searching for a missing teenager while Alice is driving one of Australia’s richest men to his final resting place. When their individual cases suddenly collide, sparking a large and sinister mystery, the girls go rogue to find the truth about who is dead who shouldn’t be, who’s alive who should be dead, and how it all ties together.

My overall thoughts on this novel is that it needed flavour. I feel like it maybe could make a very good TV series with the added spice of music, moody lighting, and diverting camera angles. The story, characters, and landscape are perfectly solid, but there is something about the prose that just leaves everything feeling flat and bland. Hardy writes in short, to-the-point sentences, many of which don’t employ the flavour-enhancing power of adjective or adverbs, and while this certainly lets people know what’s happening it doesn’t really lead the reader on a journey: instead it lets you sit still while it just hands you mounds of stuff to hold. It reminded me of Carl Hiaasen’s work, another crime writer with solid stories but a similarly nourishing but flavourless way of telling them.

But to give credit where it is due, there is enough intrigue in the mystery itself that inspires you to keep turning pages (after persevering with the 150-page setup). Classic genre tricks are employed to encourage the brain to store information and form theories: things like red herrings, repeated incidents, and vague dialogue.

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It felt that Hardy was trying to explore the nature of criminals and exploring the nitty-gritty of labelling people into the binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ when a person doesn’t really fall into either of those categories. She starts to build on this with internal monologues and emotional self-processing of the heroines during traumatic scenes and it finally comes to a more pronounced head in the story’s third act. Sadly, I feel like this social commentative part of the book just didn’t really gain any traction. Perhaps it’s because the blunt prose also served to dull down the charisma that the girls could have had. You know how Phil Spector was famous for the ‘Wall of Sound’ that managed to bury Tina Turner’s voice in River Deep Mountain High? This is the literary equivalent of that.

As crime novels go, Unbury the Dead leaves a bit to be desired, but it does provide an engaging mystery that does set the brain whirring and pages turning at a reasonable pace.

Author: Fiona Hardy, 2025

Published: Affirm Press, Melbourne Australia, 2025.

Painted Devils

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After the epic tome that was Don Quixote, I felt that I deserved to dive back into some mindless YA fantasy: my guilty pleasure. A few months ago, I discovered that Little Thieves by Margaret Owen was the first book in a trilogy, so I promptly picked up copies of the other two books and reread Little Thieves to reacquaint myself with the world and characters. It’s a joy to be back in the cold, Scandinavian setting with Vanja trying to navigate her way through encounters with nachtmaren, Low Gods, and maleficent spectres.

After leaving Minkja to start a life a little more on the straight and narrow, Vanja stumbles drunkenly to the small village of Hagendorn one night, accidently spilling her rubies into the river as she does. Rather than risk the frostbite of fishing alone, she scams the town into helping her retrieve them, inventing a goddess called the Scarlet Maiden and a promise to bless the town should they find all the rubies. When minor miracles of good fortune start to happen, a cult springs up for the Scarlet Maiden and the lie then spins out of control when Emeric appears to investigate the anomaly and Vanja’s fake goddess manifests and claims him as a sacrifice. Vanja, now accused of profane fraud, finds herself in another dangerous race against time to save Emeric, prove her innocence, and learn the truth of the Scarlet Maiden.

With the characters, setting, and lore established in Little Thieves, Painted Devils focuses on furthering the character and relationship development of the two romantic leads: Vanja and Emeric. Owen’s sassy and modern prose complete with snide asides that are almost metafictive but not quite, is still going strong in this book. Unlike its predecessor, I found this one to be a little bit of a slow starter, a gas stove on the fritz that is click-click-clicking with sparks before (finally) bursting into blue flame.

The central story is no less thrilling than the first one once it gets going. In fact, there actually proves to be a lot more in this one than just ‘break curse and bring evil prince to justice’. The to-do list of quests that make up Painted Devils is impressive: save Emeric, prove Vanja’s innocence, find alternate means to appease goddess, steal a sacred relic, find missing persons, expose a town-wide business scam, solve the mystery of the Scarlet Maiden… it goes on.

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Vanja and Emeric’s relationship definitely develops, still being reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. One thing that I did find myself hitching on was the introduction of sex. To be fair, sex is kind of integral to the story and the character development of both Vanja and Emeric and there are a couple of amusing scenes in which Owen very succinctly depicts the awkwardness that adolescents encounter when they are required to talk about sex. She also highlights a prominent point in her heroes’ obliviousness about sex and sexuality: sexual education during adolescence is ludicrously poor. It’s astounding that in such a modern age, open discussions about one of the most natural things that humans do productively and recreationally are still considered dirty and taboo. This was the little slice of hidden social commentary that I got out of this; you can always find them in fantasy.

Filled with action, adventure, drama, romance, and sex, Painted Devils is a fun and rollicking follow-up to Little Thieves that ticks all the boxes for a good, comfy, YA fantasy.

Author: Margeret Owen, 2023

Published: Hodderscape, Hodderscape & Stoughton, Hachette, Great Britain, 2023. Paperback edition published 2024.