Here’s the final book from my Baking Fantasy list – I enjoyed it just as much as I was hoping. 

Just a Pinch of Magic
by Alechia Dow.

Read by Renee Dorian
and Amber Dekkers.

Feiwel & Friends, 2023

ISBN 978-1250829115

Listened to audiobook on Libby. Ebook and print also available. 

Wini has grown up helping in her family’s magical bakery in the tiny magical village of Honeycrisp Hill*.  Her dream is to use her own food-focused magic in the bakery for the rest of her life- but for that to happen, the bakery has to stay open.  She’s hoping that if she alters one of her grandmother’s old spells, she’ll be able to make their own supply of bottled love instead of needing to purchase expensive bottles of it.  

Kal has grown up in Boston with her single journalist dad, waiting for the day when he’ll say it’s safe for her to try the word magic she must have inherited from him. Finally, they’re moving to Honeycrisp Hill to open a bookstore there, and Kal hopes to have more time with her father to herself, instead of him being traveling most of the time.  Trouble soon intrudes on this dream, as her estranged grandfather insists on joining them, and way too many people in Honeycrisp Hill ask her if the bookstore is really haunted.  

As the bakery and the bookstore are across the street from each other, Wini and Kal meet right away.  They might not hit it off immediately, but they both have an incentive to make a friend who isn’t familiar with their histories – Wini is the daughter of the now-banished witch who cursed Honeycrisp Hill, and Kal struggles with anxiety.  

Then Wini’s slightly illegal, definitely above her spell grade enchantment goes spectacularly wrong.  Now there’s a dark shadow swooping around town, and the Enchantment Agency sends investigators to find out who might have called the evil into the town.  Meanwhile, Kal is struggling as the new girl in magic classes where everyone else has been practicing their spellcraft for years.  And even if the spell didn’t work all the way – could it be coincidence that Wini and Kals’ dads are flirting with each other?  

The dual narrators are a perfect choice for this two-perspective story, helping to keep the two characters distinct. This is a book filled with sweet treats, magical books, family secrets uncovered, and kids learning to make friends – in other words, delectable.  

*Here I find myself wishing that a town that the story claims to be over 200 years old wasn’t named for an apple variety I remember being new in my lifetime, and go down a rabbit hole of researching more appropriate apple names.  Winesap Way?  Russet Knob?  Roxbury? (the name of a real town in Massachusetts where the first American apple cultivar, the Roxbury Russet, was developed.)  Do you have a great alternative name?