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Similar to A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, but a tighter story, with better-defined secondary characters and internal story logic.

Again there's a young apprentice with small, oddly specific magical abilities, who gets drawn into a caper, blamed for it, and finds herself as the only person who can resolve it, and has to both stretch her magic and convince the adults around to help her (and let her help them).

This time the magic is art. Paintings and drawings, if done the right way with the right details by by someone with the right ability, can become magical objects. Rosa was born into a family of Illuminators. A very eccentric family. Each with their own eccentricity. And that's before she encounters the magical talking crow (who is very taken with shiny objects) and the malicious creature he was guarding.

The stakes are more personal: the Scarling has it specifically out for the Mandolini family. But there's a clear potential for it to spiral out of control. Like Mona, Rosa makes mistakes, but again they're believable mistakes. And in this book the adults have character reasons for finally believing her, not just plot reasons.

There's a lot of mischief and magic, though only one mandrake as I recall. And because Rosa doesn't need to leave home on her hero's journey like Oliver (Minor Mage) or Mona, everyone in her family takes part in the story instead of just being window dressing for the framing sequence.

It's aimed at kids, yes: kids who appreciate not being talked down to. And it's written so that adults will have fun with it too.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

Minor Mage is firmly in the "kid goes on scary quest and comes back stronger" genre. The 12-year-old protagonist is cast out to complete a nigh-impossible quest alone (aside from his armadillo familiar), facing ghouls and starvation and bandits and ghosts and murderers. He's a wizard, yes, but he's barely half-trained and only knows a handful of spells (though his herbal lore is pretty strong). Like the young heroes of A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking and Illuminations, he has to learn how to make the most of his limited abilities in order to survive -- only this story takes place not in a city but mostly in wilderness an abandoned farmlands.

From an adult perspective, Oliver's constant lamenting that he's "only a minor mage" starts to grate after a while. But that's not the perspective it's written for: it's a kids' book, and operates on kids' fantasy logic.

Speaking of the target audience: In the afterward, Kingfisher/Vernon talks about trying to convince editors that yes, this is a children's book, and getting constant pushback that it's "too scary." (This is how she ended up publishing it as Kingfisher rather than Vernon) It reminded me of similar comments Neil Gaiman wrote about Coraline, remarking that it was too scary for adults but not too scary for children.

Sometimes I wonder: Do these editors remember being 12?

(Cross-posted at my website.)