Baker Thief
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Adèle has only one goal: catch the purple-haired thief who broke into her home and stole her exocore, thus proving herself to her new police team. Little does she know, her thief is also the local baker. Claire owns the Croissant-toi, but while her days are filled with pastries and customers, her nights are dedicated to stealing exocores. These new red gems are heralded as the energy of the future, but she knows the truth: they are made of witches’ souls. When her twin—a powerful witch and prime exocore material—disappears, Claire redoubles in her efforts to investigate. She keeps running into Adèle, however, and whether or not she can save her sister might depend on their conflicted, unstable, but deepening relationship.
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I heard about this from the #RomanceSparksJoy book club. I've been pleasantly surprised by how their picks have pulled me out of my comfort zone.
I don't even know how to describe this book, other than it was different than anything else I've ever read and if you like cozy stories and fantasy elements and good pacing, you should check this out. It kind of defies categorization.
It's got a big mystery plot, and there's fantasy elements and romance elements, and magic and witches. But it's set in a fictionalized steampunk French-Canadian city where things are mostly normal but the representation is way better than IRL. Also witches are treated as an oppressed class, so they (a big corporation and some of the government) are trying to harness the witches' power using nefarious means.
The main characters are 1) a cop named Adele, who is asthmatic and demisexual. She is trying to arrest 2) Claire, who broke into her house. Claire is a super-strong magic badass by night, homey baker named Claude by day, who owns Adele's favorite bakery, and he is genderfluid as well as aromantic.
One of the really neat things about this book is how it treats representation as normal and doesn't require explanation. Characters have disabilities; characters are of many races; characters use a variety of pronouns and are open about sharing them (I learned a little about French pronouns from wikipedia); characters have a wide range of abilities and sexualities and gender identities and romantic spectrums. Characters are fat, and nothing more is made of it.
And, despite being a romance novel, there are no sex scenes. It's like reading the buildup to Adele and Claude/Claire's relationship; they're really sweet together. There's conversation about making their relationship fit their lives, not trying to fit into some prescribed relationship that makes other people understand it.
It doesn't fit any of my preconceived notions of romance novels, but I think it's worth seeing other types of relationships that don't fit into the “mold.” And this one was quite a well-done story, in addition to the relationship.
CW: There are some horrifying elements related to the witch oppression, and there's description of bigotry and mistreatment.
