Determined to fix the mistake, Syd teams up with Harley, a transmasculine, demisexual bike delivery person, to find the brownies’ victims, starting with the Proud Muffin’s owners, and cure them with more baked goods. Like the contrasting flavors in a peach strawberry basil pie, Syd’s journey of self-discovery melds perfectly with the quest to find and repair the brownies’ damage.In the wake of being dumped, 17-year-old agender baker Syd-who works at the Proud Muffin, South Austin’s best queer bakery-accidentally infuses a batch of brownies with heartbreak and confusion, causing every couple who tries them to break up soon after. Capetta offers a multitude of ways to use and share one’s pronouns, as well as techniques for avoiding pronouns altogether. Among its customers, a range of identities and relationships are modeled and celebrated. The Proud Muffin’s welcoming atmosphere provides Syd a home away from home. Syd’s earnest musings about gender, bodies, performance and identity are likely to resonate deeply with teens who’ve shared those thoughts and experiences, while offering cisgender teens an approachable lens through which to begin to understand their peers. Syd, who is agender, is an expertly constructed protagonist and a notable step forward in representing the full spectrum of gender identities in YA fiction.
The book’s sumptuous recipes combine real directions with Syd’s colorful commentary the first ingredient in Breakup Brownies is “4 oz unsweetened chocolate, broken up (I mean, it’s right there, how did I not see this coming?).” Plus, Capetta folds in food metaphors throughout: An awkward situation feels like a crumbling sheet of pastry dough, and at one point Syd’s heart “wobbles like an underbaked custard.”
Capetta describes both baking and the excitement of first love in luscious, sensuous detail. Getting the right treats into the right mouths turns out to be more complicated than Syd thought, and then Harley begins to look awfully cute in their (or sometimes his pins on Harley’s messenger bag signal Harley’s pronouns that day) bike shorts and Western boots. So Syd and Harley, the bakery’s bicycle delivery worker, embark on a mission to serve everyone who ate the brownies an antidote, like a piece of Very Sorry Cake or a slice of Honest Pie. To Syd’s horror, everyone who eats the sorrow-laden sweets soon finds their love lives in disarray. One hot summer day, Syd storms into work at the Proud Muffin-the best queer-owned bakery in Austin, Texas-full of breakup woe and ready to channel it into baking delicious treats, including a spur-of-the-moment special, Syd’s Unexpected Brownies.
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