Magically Delicious Books for Fantasy Foodies

Fantasy and mystery—two great tastes that taste great together! In this series starter, we meet Zoe Faust, an alchemist. Zoe has just moved into a new home, and while unpacking, she finds something she definitely didn’t put into a box: a living gargoyle! His name is Dorian Robert-Houdin and he needs Zoe’s help deciphering a centuries-old text. But soon trouble is literally on Zoe’s doorstep, and the two will have to work together to solve a crime. And did I mention that Dorian is also a master of French cuisine? The book even includes recipes! If you love this, you’ll be happy to know that there are seven more.

I adore this middle grade graphic novel with the heat of a thousand suns. Rutabaga is as advertised—he’s an adventure chef! He doesn’t just love to cook food, he wants to go out into the wilderness and forage for his own ingredients and create wild new recipes. While he’s out roaming around with his sentient kettle, who follows him like a dog, he meets several other adventurers and joins their quests. It’s a very Bone-like comic, but with much lower stakes, and it includes Rutabaga’s recipes for things like Ghost Mushroom Salad and Roasted Mud Leech.

This adorable fantasy is not available for a few more weeks, but it’s worth the wait. It will charm your striped socks off. Misha is pretty sure that she is unlucky. All her spells are disasters and she’s been ex-spelled from school again. (There was an incident with a frog. You know how it goes.) And now a rival teashop has opened its doors across the street from her family’s teashop, and if they can’t figure out what to do, they may have to pack up and leave. (Tea jokes, I got ’em.) So Misha finagles her way into the esteemed (es-tea-med?) Margaret’s Academy of Tea and Brewing to try and learn some magic to help her family. But a change of location doesn’t guarantee a change in luck, and Misha also must go up against the girl from the shop against the street. Can she turn her luck around when the stakes are this steep? (Lol, I hate myself.) Related: Pinto also has a scary middle grade book, Bee Bakshi and the Gingerbread Sisters, about a witch!

Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su

Motheater by Linda H. Codega

The Forbidden Book by Sacha Lamb

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook by Matt Dinniman

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes

An orange cat fits in perfectly with today’s fall theme! It looks like Farrokh is posing for his senior portrait. Jk, he’s so badly behaved, he would have been expelled long before his senior year. Unless all cats are badly behaved at cat school, which would track, because they’re cats. If that is the case, he’d definitely rule the school. I may have to think about this some more.