A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking

Winner of the 2021 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

Winner of the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction

Winner of the Locus Award for Young Adult Fiction

Winner of the Dragon Award Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel

Winner of the Mythopoeic Award for Children's Literature

Winner of the Cóyotl Award for Best Novel




Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance.

But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries...