Book Review

Deadly Sweet by Lola Dodge

This is a difficult book to grade. I finished it because I wanted to see what happened. At the same time, I was easily distracted while reading because I got bored being told everything. I was curious about the rules of the magic and the roles of difference characters, but I was also really uneasy and at times repulsed by the portrayal of those characters. Some existed without connection to context or larger meaning, even as the story included other elements to connect it to the real world that I as the reader live in. That disconnect revealed other flaws to the point that the more I thought about the story, the more it fell apart.

The cover copy is what grabbed me first about this book – and the cover, too. It’s really stunning isn’t it?

For fans of Hex Hall, The Magicians, Practical Magic, and Food Wars!

Anise Wise loves three things: baking, potion making, and reading her spellbooks in blissful silence. She might not be the most powerful witch, but enchantment is a rare skill, and her ability to bake with magic is even rarer. Too bad one wants witchcraft on their campus. Anise’s dream of attending pastry school crumbles with rejection letter after rejection letter.

Desperate to escape her dead-end future, Anise contacts the long-lost relative she’s not supposed to know about. Great Aunt Agatha owns the only magic bakery in the US, and she suddenly needs a new apprentice. Anise is so excited she books it to New Mexico without thinking to ask what happened to the last girl.

The Spellwork Syndicate rules the local witches in Taos, but as “accidents” turn into full-out attacks on Anise’s life, their promises to keep her safe are less and less reassuring. Her cranky bodyguard is doing his best, but it’s hard to fight back when she has no idea who’s the enemy. Or why she became their target.

If Anise can’t find and stop whoever wants her dead, she’ll be more toasted than a crème brûlée.

Sounds pretty nifty, huh? You’ll notice a repeating theme in the copy: “Anise books it to New Mexico without thinking to ask,” “She has no idea who’s the enemy,” “their promises are less and less reassuring.” Anise does not ask nearly enough questions, nor think long enough to put obvious clues together. There are few surprises in the plot, but there are a lot of mysteries. For me, they weren’t the good kind.

There’s a scene in the book where the characters recreate magical wards around a bakery, and they do so by walking in a large circle around the bakery one by one, each witch adding her power. When they’re done, a magical bubble exists around the bakery building, designed to protect the place and the people inside from a warlock bent on…some kind of badness that I didn’t fully understand. That’s kind of how the worlds inside of this book existed: individual bubbles that could hold for a moment a deep and specific connection to reality while simultaneously being disconnected from larger realities and also from one another.

Anise Wise is trying to get into pastry school while working in supermarket bakeries. She’s a baking witch, but has to hide her immense powers because witches are looked upon as suspicious, scary, and not to be trusted. (More on that aspect in a moment). She and her mother scratch out a life as best they can. Her mother is also a powerful witch, but was cast out (literally and magically) by her family for doing something big, heinously wrong (not much detail on what that was so I presume that’s a future book) and has suppressed her own powers while teaching Anise to suppress hers, too.

When Anise is rejected by yet another culinary program, she emails her great aunt Agatha, who owns a magical bakery in Taos. But Anise is still really upset at where her life is, and when her upset causes her to make a few bad decisions which then cause her to lose control of her powers, she gets arrested. When her mother bails her out, she learns her great-aunt has invited her to Taos to be her apprentice, so Anise leaves town and her mother says she’ll use magic to handle the police (again, more on that in a moment).

Anise arrives in Albuquerque, and on the drive to Taos experiences the physical effects of her proximity to the Vortex, a massive source of magic that the witches all exist near but not too close to, and there’s not a lot of explanation as to what it is specifically or what it does (are you sensing a theme?). She’s welcomed, sort of, as Agatha’s new apprentice, but she knows very, very little about advanced-level baking and about the application of magic to different baked goods. All the confections sold in Agatha’s bakeshop are magical in some way – cookies imbued with confidence charms, cakes to enhance happiness, that sort of thing. Anise is talented but she’s not on the same level as Agatha nor the people working for her.

This book was very, very much a pilot episode. There was enough to keep me curious, and enough pieces of the world to entice me to keep reading, but it was such a shallow exploration. It’s an interesting, very populated but overall superficial world because things happen, the reader is told about them, then more things happen. Anise is thrown into situations that are way beyond her abilities by people who ostensibly are there to guide her, so she spends most of her time reacting or hiding while telling the reader about it.

Each character – Anise, Agatha, the first friend Anise makes who is rarely mentioned afterward, her other new friend Blair who has a more important role in the plot, the women who work in Agatha’s bakery, Anise’s Shield/bodyguard (more on him in a moment) – has one role, one thing they do, one piece of information they give out, and zero nuance. The baker who hates her hates her a LOT but there’s not a real reason given, nor does anyone intervene when that person and others ostracize or emotionally abuse or manipulate Anise.

That was one of my largest problems with this book: Anise has very little protection from emotional manipulation and abuse, nor is she taught how to manage her own potential ability to abuse others. Someone’s trying to kill Anise. She’s got a bodyguard from the minute she arrives because something happened to the apprentice before her. Her safety is a big deal pretty much from the minute she arrives. But does anyone TELL her why or what happened, or allow her to ask questions? Nope. Does Anise ask questions? Not really. The cover copy wasn’t lying about that.

But even though her life is in danger and she’s attacked several times, she’s kept uninformed about things that pertain to her. When her inexperience or ignorance cause her to make mistakes, other bakers and employees are outright mean and cruel to her. When Anise finally speaks up for herself and tells Agatha about one person in particular, Agatha dismisses the behavior and does nothing about it, except to tell Anise not to accuse them directly, lest that person quit and leave Agatha short-staffed. And yet Anise is supposed to trust Agatha with her safety, since someone’s actively trying to kill her? Really? Watching characters being emotionally tormented and gaslit is really not fun for me.

There isn’t enough explanation of the foundational rules of magic or of the baking they do. Anise spends a lot of time looking at baked goods and trying to learn the proper technique for creating them from her position at the bottom of the pecking order, where she’s peeling peaches, chopping nuts, and trying to imbue her actions and therefore the food with magical charms and intentions. I don’t advise you read this book while hungry. But the specifics of how that incantation works, or of the development of Anise’s baking skills and her knowledge thereof is missing. She makes an entire cake for Agatha as a kind of audition – a candy cake, with multiple layers and fillings that reference different kinds of candy bars – but the making of it is glossed over. As someone who has an embarrassing addiction to watching time lapse videos of cookies and cakes being iced and decorated, I wanted to witness more detail.

The magic is, as I said, also paltry in its explanation. It exists, and Anise has some. She has magical earrings in multiple piercings that were charmed by her mother with different abilities – a well to replenish her energy, a charm to make a car start on command, a protection spell. Anise can draw on her own magic and make things burst into flame. She can bake simple charms and spells into food. How? I am really not sure.

Then there’s the part about bespelling food. The more I thought about it, the more troubling it was as a concept and as a plot point. She bakes cookies charmed with a friendship spell to help her grow closer to her new friends. While she does tell said friends that they’re eating magic cookies, she only tells them after they ask what’s in them, and still it doesn’t seem odd to anyone that she’s magically manipulating people through food. Agatha’s bakery sells all manner of confections with magic, selling both to magical practitioners and to humans who are so desperate to try the magic cakes and cookies in such numbers that there’s a bouncer at the door of the bakery for crowd control. But there isn’t any examination about what those baked goods are used for in terms of coercion or influence of other people who may not know what they’re eating.

Click for spoilers about the villainy

When the person who is Up To No Good who wants to harm Anise interacts with her, several times that person gives her food to eat, which she loves because that person is a very talented baker, and it NEVER OCCURS TO HER that maybe she’s being given bespelled food and should be careful.

There’s tons of bespelled food around, but no one talks about the idea of consent, that any food given to you by a cooking witch should be questioned first. There aren’t rules or guidelines for when it’s appropriate to accept and when one should question. There are not enough questions asked in this story, honestly. The idea of influencing people through bespelled food has a number of consequences, but none of them are explored at all.

Another element that was inconsistent and underdeveloped is the role of Servants, Hands, and Shields. Anise has a Shield, a taciturn, grumpy bodyguard named Wynn who sleeps all the time except when Anise is moving around or is up to something she shouldn’t be. He’s big and cranky and his contract requires him to protect Anise with his life. He comes from some sort of otherworld, and it doesn’t seem like he’s signed or entered the contract entirely willingly, but Anise is mostly annoyed with having a bodyguard. Anise does not question the idea that he’s bound to her possibly against his will, and neither does anyone else. It doesn’t come up until the end, and then it was a surprise to me that she thought of it at all.

Servants are necromanced reanimated dead people. Anise makes friends with two girls whose mothers were best friends with her own, and one, Blair, is the daughter of a powerful necromancer. Of course they run a funeral home.  Their home is staffed by Servants, some of whom are body guards for Blair when she’s in classes at the local college. All of these Servants are dead people, and are chosen for different roles by the skills they had when they were alive. Some Servants perform domestic chores, some have other tasks, but Blair and the others order them around with indifference, even though Servants can express annoyance, such as being stopped from doing the job they were told to do. They do seem to have some feelings and awareness, but they aren’t given much consideration as humans or former humans. There is no explanation if they are also animated willingly or if Blair and her family can pick and choose who to reanimate. Anise doesn’t question any of it even though she wants to at one point, but she stops herself. She’s pretty happy the Servants do her laundry for her, though.

The idea that there are Servants who call Blair, her mother, and then Anise “Mistress,” who don’t seem to have any choice in their servitude made me feel increasingly uneasy. Much as with the Shields, no one questions the idea that they are reanimated corpses, bound to their animators, possibly without choice.

Click for a few more spoilers about the villainy:

When contrasted with one of the villain’s actions, this proliferation of indentured servitude is even more uneven and unsettling. The villain is a warlock, and has Hands, also reanimated corpses, only these Hands have tremendous power, and when they’re sent on a task (“go kill Anise”) they will not and do not stop. They can carry magical weapons and regular ones, too. They can be compelled to do things that are painful, such as moving through wards designed to hurt them or injuring themselves, again with no choice or option. When the villain is done with them, the Hands die after a dark, oogey magic is pulled from their bodies.

I struggled a lot with the idea of Shields, Servants, and Hands, that two are acceptable forms of servitude while one has to be stopped. Anise mentions a few times that the Hands were people, that they were being used for evil against their will, and how terrible that is. I have no idea if the Shields and Servants agreed to the state in which they exist, because Anise doesn’t ask and everyone accepts their existence. Blair’s casual disregard for and condescension toward the Servants was particularly repellant, as was Agatha’s comment that while Shields cost money in some way, “Servants are free and rechargeable.”

“Free and rechargeable?” What the whole entire hell?

Of course, Anise “let that one slide to focus on the other weird thing.” Why ask questions? Or, more specifically, why start asking questions now, when it makes sense to do so?

I mentioned connections with reality in the story, and those I found pretty engaging. For example, in one scene, Anise enters a bookshop:

Whoever curated their collection knew their witch books. Harry Potter. The Chronicles of Chestomanci. Hex Hall. Prospero’s War. The Brooklyn Brujas. Basically every story I’d ever loved. Practically drooling, I edged over to the cookbook section, where Mary Berry’s newest baking bible had its own display.

I was (forgive me) so charmed by the idea that real books featuring witches that I knew of  were in the bookstore in Anise’s world. I liked the close melding of fantasy and witchcraft with the realistic and the mundane, like bookshops of real books and baking brownies for a sleepover.

Alas, that connection to reality also made me question the story’s selective exploration of marginalization. Witches in the world outside of Taos hide and suppress their powers and identity because they are treated as presumed criminals:

I was Exhibit A for bad witch behavior. When emotions ran high, magic would do what it wanted…. Before I could come up with a lie, he was already scampering away. He was probably running to tell his parents a witch was stalking the apartment complex. I couldn’t stand around waiting for them to dig out their torches. Or call the cops. Not that witchcraft was technically illegal, but enough complaints by jumpy soccer moms and I could be locked up for “questioning” for days without being charged with a crime.

Who had time for that?

Who, indeed? I know I don’t need to state this outright, but being locked up for “questioning” without being charged for a crime is a thing that also happens in real life to marginalized individuals, some of whom die in custody. But, I mean, gosh, who has time for that? Her cavalier mention of a much larger issue really rubbed me wrong.

Then, shortly after that scene, Anise is indeed arrested for setting a fire (accidentally but she still set the fire). She’s handcuffed with metal that covers her hands and wrists and put in jail. Her mother bails her out, and Anise learns that Agatha has set up her transportation to Taos. Her mother is somehow going to handle the arrest and the potential charges. With magic, I’m led to believe, but no details beyond that are given.

The plot interacts with several major, painful issues in such a casual and shallow way, and then the issue is dropped entirely. Who has time for unjust imprisonment? And oh, gosh, it was only a major fire. Better to skip town after posting bail and let your mother magic away the problems.

Once Anise gets to Taos, the police aren’t seen at all, as the Syndicate of witches handles things (badly, I think – for example, if the protective wards weren’t enough protection the first time, why is the answer “more wards”?). Anise’s leaving town after her arrest is never mentioned again. I don’t think she has any outstanding warrants, . This was an uneasy brew of selective elements of marginalization meant to build sympathy for the character, all of which are then solved by immense powerful privilege offscreen, and I did not like it.

Once Anise leaves town, her mother shows up in the story intermittently, with minimal awkwardness despite her being disowned and cast out – to the point where none of the witches can be in her presence when they’re in the same place. The story overall contains themes of belonging and rediscovering family, of being taken in and cared for by people one doesn’t know well purely on shared history and shared abilities because “you’re one of us,” which was lovely to read, but Anise’s mom gets dropped in a hurry from the narrative, even though Anise insists she misses her mom a great deal. (At one point I made a note in my book, Is her mom ok? Where is she?)

Aside from plot holes that grew the more I thought about them, the uneasy connection to reality on top of anemic character development left me ultimately unsatisfied. Even the motivation for the villain was overly simple, under explained, and insufficient given what the character is capable of and did during the course of the story. When there was an opportunity for nuance or reframing a real-world problem or issue, it’s glanced at, then never mentioned again. I wanted more magical rules, more consistent world building, more baking details, more specifics as to the issues of consent and marginalization, and more complexity and nuance. I wanted this to work for me, but alas, it did not.

I may take a look at the next book in the series, but I’ll approach with a lot of trepidation.

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Deadly Sweet by Lola Dodge

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  1. Lora says:

    “Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know…” Sorry, had to stop reading about Anise being taught to suppress her powers to sing songs from Frozen…

  2. Sarah J. says:

    I definitely agree with you on the pilot feel. I even felt like this was a Freeform/CW show that gets cancelled after the first season.

  3. Donna Marie says:

    Sorry your search for a good witchcraft story isn’t working out for you Sarah.

  4. Mona says:

    The heroine’s name bothers me; it looks like it should rhyme but doesn’t, assuming her first name is the spice. Anise Wise? Really? Why not Licorice Sage?

  5. kitkat9000 says:

    Heck, I had difficulty reading this, finishing the review took more effort than was pretty. Not that the review was bad or poorly written as it most definitely is not either. (Thanks, Sarah, for yet another thoughtful in-depth review.) No, it’s just that reading about all of the book’s various information & logic shortfalls made me grateful not to have picked it up.

  6. PJ says:

    I quickly glanced at the cover, and my first thought was “Why is RD2D all tatted up?” Then, I looked again.

  7. Louise says:

    Oh, dear. This review made me think of the articles in–of all places!–cracked dot com, pointing out that the “love potions” in Harry Potter are essentially just date-rape drugs by another name. It sounds like another case of Protagonist-Centered Morality.

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