Bliss

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Author(s)

Kathryn Littlewood

Publisher

Katherine Tegen Books

Genre(s)

General Fiction

Age Range

Release Date

February 14, 2012

ISBN

978-0062084231

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Rosemary Bliss’s family has a secret. It’s the Bliss Cookery Booke—an ancient, leather-bound volume of enchanted recipes like Stone Sleep Snickerdoodles and Singing Gingersnaps. Rose and her siblings are supposed to keep the Cookery Booke under lock and whisk-shaped key while their parents are out of town, but then a mysterious stranger shows up. “Aunt” Lily rides a motorcycle, wears purple sequins, and whips up exotic (but delicious) dishes for dinner. Soon boring, nonmagical recipes feel like life before Aunt Lily—a lot less fun.

So Rose and her siblings experi-ment with just a couple of recipes from the forbidden Cookery Booke.

A few Love Muffins and a few dozen Cookies of Truth couldn’t cause too much trouble . . . could they?

Kathryn Littlewood’s culinary caper blends rich emotional flavor with truly magical wit, yielding one heaping portion of hilarious family adventure.

So Rose and her siblings experi-ment with just a couple of recipes from the forbidden Cookery Booke.

A few Love Muffins and a few dozen Cookies of Truth couldn’t cause too much trouble . . . could they?

Kathryn Littlewood’s culinary caper blends rich emotional flavor with truly magical wit, yielding one heaping portion of hilarious family adventure.

Editor reviews

2 reviews

Food and Magic Combine in Deliciously Fun Middle Grade

January 16, 2014

Overall rating

4.0

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What I Liked:
The bakery setting is a lot of fun. Who isn’t happy picturing a whole bunch of delicious cake in their head? It doesn’t hurt that my friend gave me some cookies today, so I got to do more than just read about desert. The Bliss family runs a bakery which literally serves up a bit of magic along with the muffins and cakes and tarts. The kids, Parsley (Leigh), Sage, Rosemary (Rose), and Thyme (Ty), all have distinct personalities and roles in the family. The heroine, Rose, feels like her role is to be the boring, responsible one who does all the work but whom no one much likes.

When the Bliss parents are called out of town to solve a crisis in another city with magic pastries, Rose is left in charge, even though Ty is the oldest. She’s thrilled to get to try magic recipes for the first time ever, but she’s left with the admonishment not to use the key into the room with the recipe book for any reason. Yeah, that works about as well as telling Castle to stay in the car.

What Bliss reminded me of was Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. In episodes of that show, Sabrina would work a spell and it would have unintended consequences. A love spell, for example, might infect the whole student body, causing rampant chaos in the halls. In this case, a magical batch of cookies might result in the whole town going bonkers. As magic is attempted to correct problems caused by earlier magic, the situation snowballs. There are a lot of entertaining scenes, and I’m sure younger readers will be thoroughly amused by the absurdities, like the town doing everything backward.

What Left Me Wanting More:
For an older reader, the plot is incredibly predictable. From the first appearance of Aunt Lily, I knew what was going to happen for the rest of the book. It doesn’t stop the individual scenes from being entertaining, but, as a whole, I was less impressed. I also really could have done without Ty’s crush on Lily, as well as his seemingly random use of Spanish phrases.

The Final Verdict:
Kathryn Littlewood’s Bliss is a quick and fun middle grade read full of magical mayhem. I liked it enough to try book two, so I might even get to that ARC.

Christina Franke, Staff Top 10 Reviewer 677 reviews

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Magic In The Bakery?

October 02, 2014

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4.0

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This book is recommended to 12+ and in my opinion you will enjoy it for all the readers out there who ever like books that are written about fantasy, if we go in more detail it really all about magic and baking.It about how this Bliss family owns a family bakery and it past down to every kid in the present family who wants to become the next owner and/or baker. The special thing about the bakery is that whenever they bake muffins,cookies, or cakes...etc, they use magic that they collect from rain or anything that appeals to the secret formula to create it or the Bliss family has it stored already in a protective room they have in the bakery. But the strange thing is that if you are ever sick the food they baked or it displayed outside and it's a tray that is ready to go it cures your sickness. the reason it does that because magic is contained in the bakery foods.So it start as the Bliss family goes on trip when a thunder storm is happening and they went out here to put magic from the thunder on a specific location . Then after that the next morning they get a visit from the mayor Janice 'The Hammer' of a Humbleton. She has come all the way down to the Bliss Bakery to tell Albert and Purdy to come to her town to cure a summer flu because it going to be a disaster if they don't come to the town to help cure them with their baked foods. Of course Albert and Purdy go because they feel it he nice thing to do.In a couple of hours their Aunt Lily arrives but Rosemary or Ty didn't know she existed. After Lily has arrived she spent a couple of days with Rosemary,Ty, Sage and Leigh before their parents come. Meanwhile she was spending her hours with them she was really getting closer to the recipe book she wanted to steal. Without anybody looking she just took it from it place and ran away without them noticing. But then Rosemary take a look if the magic book recipe is till there and see it not there anywhere, her parent had not arrived yet but she makes a call to them and tells them what has happened. Now their only problem it take to take it back before it becomes more exposed than what it already is.