That is until the four Bliss children are put in charge of the bakery for a week. The recipes come from the closely guarded secret - the Bliss Family Cookbook - and with it Rose's parents make sure they keep their small town happy and trouble free - healing wounds and soothing troubles.

And with good reason: the pastries, cakes and muffins don't just taste good, they almost seem to have magical qualities! Well that's because they do. Suggested level: primary, intermediateĮveryone in the small town of Calamity falls loves the Bliss Bakery. But then her parents are called away so Rose, along with her three siblings, is left to run the shop and things quickly get out of hand. And when Rose Bliss sees her mother fold a lightning bolt into a bowl of batter to save a child's life, she realises that the cakes really are magical. Still, I’d like to think its intended audience is discerning enough to realize how predictable it all is.Everybody in the town knows there's something special about the cakes at the Bliss Bakery, which is why there's always such a queue outside the shop. It only became an even more foregone conclusion when Lily showed up at their doorstep and buttered Rose and her siblings up.Ĭlearly, this book wasn’t written for the likes of me. And her counterpart, the story’s antagonist Lily, also falls neatly into a type of her own, hers being the too-good-to-be-true outsider that, by story’s end, will be revealed to be an impostor of some sort.Īnyone, except maybe the middle-grade audience Littlewood wrote Bliss for, can see how things will play out when Rose’s parents, who’d never let Rose make any magic recipes, leave and give her the key to the place their special cookbook is hidden.

Rose, our main character, is pretty typical in her all-consuming desire to feel special and pretty. All the different magical recipes were so cute and clever I was sad there had to be a story to accompany them.Įspecially one that breaks so little new ground when you remove said recipes from the equation. Similar to Rose, I was in awe when I read about her mother folding lightning into one of her baked goods, all in order to save a young boy who’d been struck by lightning. In that case, it was the castle itself in this case, it’s the magical recipes Rosemary Bliss’s parents make for the townspeople. Not unlike with Tuesdays at the Castle, there was a kernel of something special here.

Bliss by kathryn littlewood