Baking Science

How does a cake bake? What’s the difference between baking soda and baking powder? And why is it so important to measure the different ingredients in a recipe? Ada Twist, Scientist: The Why Files is the perfect nonfiction resource for all these questions and more. Based on the bestselling series and the new Netflix show, this nonfiction series is perfect for the youngest scientists of tomorrow, as they learn along with Ada.

Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter, and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance. But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries.

At best, she's expecting a kitschy candy dish, at worst a beloved taxidermied pet, so when Cassie—newly divorced, single mom with zero prospects—discovers she's inheriting a fully stocked bakery along with a beautifully furnished apartment from a mysterious great aunt, she's convinced she must be dreaming. The apartment that bizarrely adapts itself to her whims, and the friendly neighbor floating fireballs over her head, aren't helping.

A simple case - or it should be. But all clues point to the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute, and Detective Inspector Adams is about to discover there’s much more to the W.I. than just bake sales and jam-making. Alice Martin knows the ladies of the W.I. are not guilty. But she has a bigger problem. Toot Hansell has a large and dragonish secret, and she needs to keep the police well away from it. Beaufort Scales, High Lord of the Cloverly dragons, knows even better than Alice that the modern dragon only survives as long as no one knows they exist.

Over the course of six months, Cassie has gotten divorced, inherited a magical bakery, discovered she’s a witch, gotten stuck in a secret passage, gotten kidnapped, rescued her daughter from the worst of all horrors (a stuffy all girl’s boarding school), and has made the best friends anyone could ever ask to have. She’s well overdue for a break. It’s too bad that the oldest witch in town is determined to make her life as challenging as possible, in the most annoying ways imaginable. Or that a fortune teller has foretold someone from her past is coming to shake everything up.

She owns a magical bakery and has the greatest friends, so why isn’t Cassie enjoying life as much as she thought she would? It could be because her daughter is miserable and plotting ways to go back to Georgia to live with her dad. Or it could be because she’s working so hard she can’t enjoy the fruits of her labor, let alone find time to connect with her kid. There’s also the magic. Between the pre-teen drama and the bakery, she’s barely had time to come to grips with being a witch, forget about mastering her growing magical powers.

Mona tiene catorce años y no es como los magos encargados de defender su ciudad. Carece de la habilidad para controlar las tormentas o hablar con el agua. Su tótem es una porción de masa madre y su magia sólo funciona con el pan, pero tiene una vida cómoda trabajando en la panadería de su tía y haciendo bailar a los muñequitos de jengibre. Pero un día, la vida de Mona da un vuelco cuando encuentra un cadáver en la panadería. Un asesino acecha las calles de su ciudad buscando a todos aquellos que posean magia y parece que Mona es su próximo objetivo.