The Patron Thief of Bread by Lindsay Eager. Candlewick Press, MA, 2022.

At eight years of age, “Duck” is the youngest of the Crowns, a gang of dirty, thieving orphans. “Gnat” is the leader of the group and on this day, he chooses “Duck” to steal bread from Master Griselde’s bakery. The Crowns have just moved to Odierne, a town new to them. Once they have “used up a town” and find themselves pickpocketing the same people over and over, they move on.

Gnat hands Duck a “coin” to take to the bakery. But this is not real money. It is money they have fashioned out of an old wagon wheel to look exactly like real money. Only on Saturdays does the baker have fresh bread, hot out of the ovens. To this group of children, it is the best food they have all week, as they are usually reduced to eating “rotten onions, unripe berries and the occasional squirrel.”

This is the first time Gnat has entrusted Duck with this responsibility. She is the quietest  of the gang. In fact, Ash, another member, has always spoken for her. He had fished her out of the river when she was a newborn, fed her goats milk and has always looked out for her.

Duck is terrified of this new task Gnat has given her, but she must do it. No one turns down Gnat. When she realizes the baker is mostly blind, Duck has no problem fooling the woman with the fake coin. As she walks home with seven loaves, “Their scent was so intoxicating, their crusts a hard warm comfort against her body as she walked out of daylight and into the chilly morning shade created by the towering cathedral. She inhaled, and a note of something unexpected hit her nose. Rosemary. That was the herb that always found her. Rosemary.”

When the baker eventually hires Duck, she is expected to steal from the woman for the Crowns and Duck does so, but there comes a point when she must decide who to be loyal to and whom to betray. Meanwhile, an almost human gargoyle, who acts as narrator, watches over the town and the people in it from atop a never finished cathedral.  

The Patron Thief of Bread is a wonder of a middle grade novel. The world building is so real the reader believes there really are gargoyles who argue among themselves. The cathedral, in which the Crowns have made their home, is a character in itself. Run down, full of crumbling bricks and rats that scurry about, it is always there, in the background with the gargoyles looking down.

There is a lot more that could be said about this novel, but then I’d be giving too much away.

This is a tale of loyalty and betrayal but ultimately empathy. The description of the bakery is in such vivid detail the reader can almost smell the baking bread.