There were a lot of reasons I knew right from the start I was going to like young Conn, the protagonist of Sarah Prineas’s The Magic Thief. First of all, he has such a wonderful voice that’s just plain fun to read. You try it:
I swallowed. My head was telling me this was not a good idea. The old man was a wizard, clear as clear, and what kind of fool sits down to eat dinner with a wizard?
But my empty-since-yesterday stomach was telling me even louder that it wanted pork and peppered potatoes and pie. It told me to nod and I did.
Secondly, Conn is hungry (which earns him plenty of sympathy from me), and appreciates food (so do I). In fact, as you can see from the quote above, it’s food (and curiosity) that sets off much of the initial action in the book. Conn, “hollow with hunger”, aims to snitch coins for dinner from a strange old man one night, and ends up with the wizard’s locus magicalicus instead. His ability to touch this magical stone without keeling over dead interests the wizard, Nevery, and leads Conn into a new life as a wizard’s apprentice.
Prior to this change of circumstances, Conn has been living as a thief, scraping by most of the time, often desperately hungry. So this delicious first meal Nevery provides (“The pork chops were fragrant and crisp, the potatoes swimming in butter with a sprinkling of black pepper over their shiny brown backs.”) takes on an emotional resonance to me (and I suspect to Conn, though he may not recognize or admit it). Nevery is filling up the emptiness inside Conn — not the emotional emptiness of struggling to survive alone in a dark and dangerous city, but the basic physical emptiness he has endured for so long. It’s no wonder to me that Conn develops an attachment to Nevery right from the start, and it seems reasonable that he might begin to subconsciously or consciously expect the wizard to fill his emotional voids as well. Seeing how that relationship plays out was one of my favorite parts of the book, as it develops subtly in the background of the other mysteries and adventures.
Foodstuffs make a number of appearances throughout the remainder of the book, most notably the biscuits baked by Nevery’s man Benet, which Conn manages to eat in a variety of different configurations: with bacon, with cheese and jam, with butter. Every time I read one of the biscuit scenes, I have a craving for light, fluffy, buttery biscuits. Fortunately, there’s a recipe for Benet’s biscuits included in the back of the book!
And it’s remarkably easy (though not so easy as Conn’s recipe, but I don’t suggest you try that. Conn will eat anything). I turned out a batch yesterday and the only way I avoided scarfing down all of them was to leave most of them at home while I went to work. I had mine with some nice thick bacon and a little honey, and they were delicious!
So if you are looking for a fun adventure with an engaging protagonist and plenty of delicious food, you should definitely check out The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas (the paperback edition was just released!). And if you enjoy it, you’re in luck, because the second book in the series is coming out next month.
Comments
1 Sarah P // Apr 30, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Deva, this is so interesting! Thanks for posting about it. And I love that in the picture the biscuits are on a copy of Dairy Queen, in which food is also very important.
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