While I bought Baker Thief back when it was first published, it’s been sitting on my e-reader since. What made me hit download again was my sapphic book club doing an “aces gone wild” month. Baker Thief fits the bill, haha.
By day, Claude is a hunky, handsome baker. By night, Claire is a thief trying to take down Montrant Industries, an energy corporation that may or may not be disappearing people. If that wasn’t stressful enough, the government is back on its anti-magic, anti-witch bullshit, with witches already driven underground in this alternate Quebec. If that wasn’t stressful enough, he needs to explain his aromanticism and genderfluidity before anything can happen with Adèle, the cute customer/earnest rookie cop assigned to capturing Claire (fuuuuuck). If that wasn’t stressful enough, his sister is kidnapped.
Claude/Claire’s under a lot of stress okay.
Stress which passed to me while reading–kudos to Claudie Arseneault on making my stomach clench. What stopped me from reading Baker Thief back in 2018 were the content warnings against police brutality and state-sanctioned violence/genocide. Ironically, wanting to be alive and politically aware in 2025 has encouraged me to develop coping and self-soothing methods in order to handle these triggering topics, because they’re much more common and real today. The work’s themes about police and state corruption land awkwardly with a detective protagonist. Adèle and her police team are supposed to be “one of the good ones,” in a station of bad apples. This exceptionalism is a more subtle form of copaganda, but copaganda nonetheless. The scene where SPOILER Adèle, acting in her capacity as a police woman, tackles Claire to the ground is played off as arousing to Claire, but I had to take a break END SPOILER. I wonder, if Arseneault re-wrote Baker Thief today, if Adèle would be a private detective, lawyer, social worker, or another investigative profession.
What was supposed to be a buttress against the darker mystery was the presence of croissants in a cozy bakery. Flaky, fluffy croissants don’t have the structural integrity to hold against such grit. Arseneault stares unblinking at the horrors of minority stress, human trafficking, and state oppression. Funnily enough, the same year Baker Thief published, a traditionally published book dealt with similar themes, but maintained the cozy, gentle vibe by side-stepping and shoving the horrific truth until the end. I’m not saying that CL Polk’s Witchmark is better than Baker Thief–they’re both excellent–but pastries and crêpes do not automatically a cozy queerplatonic make.
Speaking of the queerplatonic, Adèle and Claude’s enemies-to-partners arc is brilliant. As advertised, Baker Thief plays with romance tropes and re-structures them for a platonic relationship, and it plays with them well. I also enjoyed how language was re-structured to give it a French sort of cant. Learning all the names for trees was a treat! The representation of gender minorities and the queer community was brilliantly spot on, of course. In another time, in another place, I think I would have enjoyed this book more. One day I’ll tackle Painted Flock and we’ll see.