Maire crafts influential cake. I love Maire. She is a good person, or at least she is trying to be a good person. Even when we discover she is not who she thinks she is, even when we find out she messed up big time and broke the most important rules she seems to want to do the right thing. If she can figure out what that right thing is.
About the cake: Maire makes her cake influential by impressing the thoughts she has while mixing and baking it into the cake. She makes cakes infused with love, with hope, with wisdom – things like that. But she can only make so much cake, and Raea, like most worlds, is suffering from conflict.
The village of Carmine where Maire lives is invaded by marauders who kill many of the villagers and haul off most of the others, including Maire, to sell as slaves.
Just before the marauders came Maire saw a ghost-like man hovering above the ground in the woods beyond her shop. He implies that he knows something about her past, but before she can ask anything the precursors of the marauders appear and all he has time to tell her is “Run!” This ghost-man who looks a little like an angel, but then not, comes to her several times on her adventures over the next few months but doesn’t tell her much that is useful for a long time.
The marauders sell Maire to a very strange man who initially calls himself Allemas. He later changes his name two or three times. He is not kind to her, depriving her of food and water, beating her, and forcing her to do punishing tasks like moving rocks around for no reason. He then declares that he is a good master. One wonders where he learned his ideas. As the story progresses, it sometimes appears that some of his mistreatment is a result of ignorance rather than malice. But then again, he acts more like a malicious child than anything else.
He is convinced she has magic. This prompts him to hire her out for several strange jobs. Her unimpressive magic somehow becomes the most iconic of fairy-tale magics as she is contracted to make cakes to make someone grow larger or smaller and to cover a dilapidated cottage in gingerbread. When she is introduced to a childless woman who wants children, she once again thinks of gingerbread, but a clue to her past is revealed when she is suddenly revolted by the wrongness of this and runs off into the nearby town.
Eventually, Maire manages to piece together all the clues. The truth of her story is shocking, to say the least. But when the dust has settled from all the bits and pieces they have found out, the punishment for all her crimes seems to be absolutely the best thing for everybody.
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Top reviews from other countries
Baiba
i will keep thinking about this book for a long time
Reviewed in Germany on November 29, 2022
Andrew Whittaker
Even better than The Fifth Doll
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 6, 2017