Review: Secrets, Spells, and Chocolate

Secrets, Spells, and Chocolate by Marisa Churchill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven't read a lot of "magical academy" books, because they all tend to be the same: Harry Potter redone ineptly, with the serial numbers lightly filed off (but often hitting the exact same plot points with suspiciously similar characters). Frequently with extra cruelty, because what would YA be without some cruelty?

This one is clearly heavily influenced by HP, but it isn't just a bad fanfic or a rewrite. It's a book by someone who has read HP and thought, "Well, sure, but what if it was a magical cooking school? Also, female main character, ditch the Dark Lord, and amp up the whimsy." It's cozy in tone, though there is a bit of a dystopian situation going on.

It has, in other words, a little more originality than some, and since the author is a chef, the cooking aspect is done thoroughly and plays a key role.

The magic world is all related to cooking, and the worldbuilding is largely edible. Magical people ("Sages") go through a ritual when they're young that gives them a Blade, a chef knife which acts like a wand; for unknown reasons, you can only do this once, so if your Blade is destroyed or lost, you can't get another one. Spells are part recipe, and a lot of magic is infused into food and drink. It's reasonably well thought through, and well sustained throughout.

The main character is Sylvie Jones, whose mother was accused of cheating at the big magical cooking contest, the Golden Whisk, some years previously. There wasn't sufficient proof (partly because she didn't actually do it), and now she has been allowed to come back for Golden Whisk All-Stars, while Sylvie is being allowed to take the six-week course that can grant her entry to magical cooking school if she finishes successfully and manifests her Blade at the end. However, a dystopian Minister of Magic - uh, I mean, President of the CCS, the international authority over all magical cooking people - I forget what the abbreviation stands for - is setting them both up to fail. (Unfortunately, this is partly explained in a document which, because of a formatting issue with my review copy, I was unable to read, along with a couple of other documents that were important to the plot.) He's also introduced a hierarchical ranking system for Sages, is prejudiced against people who are from a Scullery (Muggle) background, and his daughter, who's at the school, is a cheat and a bully.

Sylvie's roommate is the daughter of Scullery parents who are not only magical, but can't cook. They're from Louisiana, but not at all participants in the rich Cajun or Southern cooking traditions. The two girls get off on the wrong foot at first, but then manage to get over it and form a key alliance.

Sylvie has a lot of trouble, in fact, deciding who can be trusted and who can't; most of the people she meets come under suspicion at some point, and the final culprit is someone she hadn't suspected, because their motive was, frankly, insane. This makes for plenty of suspense and some surprise reversals.

We're not spared from a few tropes at which I rolled my eyes. Sylvie's name appears on a magical apple that indicates that she is prophesied to do great deeds, so she's sort of a Chosen One, although as it turns out, not a full-on Chosen One, and, thankfully, not one of those spoiled characters who refuses to do any work and then gets their powers at the last moment by sheer plot convenience. She's smart (for a 14-year-old), she's a great cook, and she's creative in her solutions, though sometimes that creativity takes a somewhat destructive turn and causes chaos.

There's also a Convenient Eavesdrop, my absolute least favourite plot device, but it's brief and not pivotal.

What ought to be pivotal to the plot, given how much time and how much risk by Sylvie gets invested in it, is the subplot where she has to deliver a written message from the Resistance to the school's principal at a particular time (the day of the Golden Whisk competition). Because of the formatting issues, I didn't see exactly what was in the message, and unless I missed something the delivery was never shown to have happened, although there's a scene in which it's assumed that it was delivered. It also wasn't ever clear to me why it made more sense for Sylvie (a relatively low-powered kid with a big target on her back) to hang on to the message for several days, rather than giving it to the powerful and canny principal straight away and having her protect it from the suspected mole in the school in any number of ways, including just keeping it to herself and not telling anyone.

The book has a number of small flaws like that; things that don't quite make sense, like the school at night being protected by a number of magical traps but not locked, and scattered examples of a lot of common editing errors, particularly apostrophe errors, lack of a comma before a term of address, missing question marks from questions, missing opening and closing quotation marks and missing past perfect tense. There's a scene early on in which Sylvie goes into her and Georgia's shared room and there are "two boys and a girl" in there with Georgia, but only one of the boys ever gets mentioned or described, suggesting one had been revised out and then the earlier mention had been overlooked. It's just a little scruffy, and needs another pass or two, in other words. Since I saw a pre-publication version from Netgalley, perhaps it will get them.

All these small issues add up, and along with the fact that it's so very based on HP (though with more originality than some I've seen) keep it down in the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list. Still, if you enjoy cozy, like cooking, are a fan of Harry Potter/magical school stories, and don't think too hard about the plot, you'll probably enjoy this considerably. Sylvie is brave and clever, her motivation is clear and compelling, and all her mistakes are honest ones.

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