Angol
The fast kind is the sort you have heard about. Lightning out of a stick. Fireworks. People write songs about it.
The slow kind is bread.
Ten-year-old Tariq lives above a bakery in the village of Pebblebrook with his two adoptive fathers - a pair of very large, very retired paladins who are excellent at carrying pianos and hopeless at pastry. Tariq bakes intention into his bread: you are welcome here into the flatbread, sleeping in a warm room into a loaf for a neighbor who cannot sleep.
Then the rain comes. Six days of it. And a brilliant thirteen-year-old storm-mage from the Academy of Bright Weather arrives to fix it in four minutes - which she does, beautifully, and which goes catastrophically wrong.
With the Harvest Dance drowned, the barn roof gone, and the whole village shut indoors behind its blue doors, Tariq has one night, one recipe card in his birth mother's handwriting, and no idea whether he can make the thing she wrote down for him before she let him go.
Sun-Warm Brioche. For the coldest day. Use good butter. Do not rush her.
The Bread-Mage of Pebblebrook is a cozy fantasy for readers who would rather understand a problem than fight it - about slow magic in a fast world, about a boy who is big and gentle and never once apologizes for either, and about the truth every baker eventually learns: that bread is not bread until it is broken with someone.
Perfect for readers ages 7-10 who love:
Ten short chapters. A boy, a bakery, and one night to get it right.
