katee17's reviews
258 reviews

Thanks to Netgalley and Daphne Press for the e-ARC: book releasing 22nd July :)

A thoroughly enjoyable and very cinematic read, with a fun original magic system!

Picked this up because the cover is very cool and the cooking magic sounded like a whole lot of fun, and it certainly was! I really enjoyed the food-based culture and magic system in this; cooking encompassing everything from naming conventions, to social niceties, to religion was a great touch. The writing style was punchy and engaging, I enjoyed Paprick as a narrator, and I liked the framing device of

an older Paprick telling the whole story to the Archivist (though I do think it could have been woven in a bit more tightly in some places; it was a tad top and bottom heavy, you tend to forget about it in the middle and then get jarred by it when it did return).

I enjoyed the recipe epigraphs at the start of each part, they were a great touch, and I have to commend Rose's creativity and presumable passion for food, because you really do believe that cooking is everything to these people. I frequently thought 'I should get a snack...' while reading this, so I have to hail his ability to describe food so well. I did, also, eventually come around to the romance subplot too, despite not being massively compelled by it at that the beginning, and I really enjoyed the side characters like Rish and Cutler, they felt very real.

I docked a few stars for a bit in the way of pacing and structural issues; on occasion it feels as if this book wants to have its cake and eat it too (sorry... couldn't resist), with regards to it having both a magic-school style plotline and a rebellion plotline running alongside one another. Trying to juggle both meant it was harder to feel properly invested in either, and it ended up making both of them feel a bit thinned-out-- once we got used to one, we ended up heavily on the side of the other again. It didn't always make for massively balanced reading; the school felt like it belonged more to a fun bildungsroman than this book, and I didn't always find the rebellion plotline massively convincing either. I wondered whether it might have made more sense for Paprick to have just been recruited for Ilantra's restauraunt, or even brought on as a kitchen apprentice at the castle or something, rather than have that tacked on to the school. I wonder it might have been easier to fit the rebellion plotline around that, or to have more slowly introduced it as something that could feed more into the second book? 

Sometimes I was compelled by the revolution parts, but at other times it felt quite thin, and I never quite understood things like why or how Vanil had the influence and reach that he did, or how this was really compelling the people in Common. I also forgot that this was a series, and then realised as I was drawing close to the end that a lot of my questions weren't going to be answered, which was a tad frustrating, and I wish that this had had a slightly neater ending, rather than a pure cliffhanger; but that's more personal preference than anything. I wasn't massively impressed by the slightly hasty killing offs of characters nor by the pendulum swinging back and forth on who was or wasn't a traitor or who was or wasn't dead, since it often slightly undercut emotional beats. But lots of these things won't bug other readers, no doubt.

I think the comp titles and comparisons to anime are pretty accurate; not everything in it was my cup of tea, but I took a punt on it and enjoyed my read anyway! I hope people enjoy it when it comes out in July.