Kathryn Rose’s The Dazzling Magic of a Petit Four is an adult historical fantasy romance steeped in 1920s Paris, witchcraft, champagne, flowers, jazz, and an impressive amount of cake. Serena Vandenbusch arrives in Paris carrying ashes in an urn along with her wonderfully opinionated black cat Sphinx perched on her shoulder. She’s there to find a hidden mausoleum and fulfill a promise, but the search quickly draws her into Paris’s secret magical community and the growing danger posed by the anti-witch Holy Crosses. Rose gives this witchy historical fantasy a strong sense of place, from glamoured flower shops and candlelit gatherings to wintry streets, pâtisseries, speakeasies, and late-night train stations.

The novel’s most distinctive idea is Serena’s magic. She’s a potions witch who works through baking, using ingredients and intention to create enchanted cakes and petit fours that can influence thoughts, emotions, luck, health, and other parts of a person’s life. That makes the food more than atmospheric decoration. Baking becomes part of Serena’s identity, her ethical struggles, and eventually her understanding of what she wants her life to become. The magical system feels tactile because Rose pays so much attention to herbs, flowers, citrus, chocolate, champagne, buttercream, and the properties Serena associates with them. Readers who enjoy culinary fantasy, witchy romance, and cozy magical settings will find plenty to savor, even as the story moves into darker territory involving persecution, death, and grief.

At the center of the book is Serena’s relationship with Astrid, and that friendship gives the story much of its emotional weight. Flashbacks to their life together in New York gradually reveal the history behind Serena’s guilt and the urn she refuses to let out of her sight, while the Paris storyline shows her trying to build a future without pretending the past has disappeared. Her growing relationships with Marie, the Paris coven, and Alexandre turn the novel into a story about chosen family as much as magic. The romance with Alexandre has real heat, but it also grows naturally out of their shared connection to Astrid and their need to decide what comes after loss. That blend makes the book work particularly well as a queer historical fantasy romance with found-family themes rather than treating romance, friendship, and grief as separate parts of Serena’s life.

What stayed with me most was the way The Dazzling Magic of a Petit Four pairs indulgence with emotional consequence. The beautiful dresses, cocktails, Parisian food, flirtation, talking cat, and enchanted desserts give the novel an inviting sparkle, while Serena’s grief keeps the story grounded in something much more vulnerable. Sphinx supplies plenty of dry humor, Marie brings warmth beneath her prickly personality, and Serena herself is allowed to be clever, impulsive, sensual, guilty, frightened, and determined all at once. By the end, the novel’s 1920s historical fantasy, romantic fantasy, magical baking, and witchy found-family elements come together around a satisfying idea: carrying love forward can be its own kind of magic.

Pages: 381 | ASIN: B0GDSTVL4G