#72 in Young adult
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking
- 336
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book
- Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature
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Our view
“A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking” charms with a funny, inventive idea: a fourteen-year-old baker whose only magic works on dough. When someone begins hunting wizards she has to act, and the story turns sadder than the title suggests. Some readers find the heroine’s voice too grown-up for her age, or the adults around her oddly unconcerned for her safety.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking is a 2020 young adult fantasy novel by Ursula Vernon, under her pseudonym T. Kingfisher. It was first published by Argyll Productions.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 467 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 76% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Young adult average of 7.8. That is how 8.2 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.5 | 12 | 3% |
| Hardcover | 8.2 | 455 | 97% |
Frequently asked
What age is A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking for?
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 336 pages — shorter than 90% of the ranked books in Young adult.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Young adult — and a score of 8.2, the closest to this book.
