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Turtle Bread

A tale of Love, Life, and Baking



Book cover for Turtle Bread. The title text is rendered in a cartoony style similar to the turtle bread in the graphic novel. The background is orange with baking ingredients and implements spread on a counter, including flour, eggs, a whisk, a rolling pin, an oven mitt, a wooden spoon, food coloring bottles, a half completed turtle bread, and a notepad with the words Recipe for Turtle bread, as well as a barely visible plate of turtle bread behind the title. In the foreground is the main character, Yan, a young woman drawn in an anime style with medium length brown hair, brown eyes, and a white apron over a pink long sleeve tee and blue jeans. At the bottom is the text A graphic novel about baking, fitting in, and the power of friendship.

Author: Kim-Joy (Author); Firmansyah, Alti (Artist); Gil, Joamette (Lettering)
Year first published: 2023
Original Language: English
Genre: Drama

Gosh this was such a cute little graphic novel!

We follow Yan, a young woman in England with severe social anxiety, is doing her best to navigate life. She’s scared that everyone is judging and looking down on her, and it makes her interactions with others stilted and awkward. She has trouble finding a job and her mother nags her for it.

One day, while heading home from job hunting, she sees a flyer for a baking club that would be meeting just a short distance from where she was. She decides to take a chance and check it out. While meeting new people overwhelms her and she begins to spiral into thinking they all hate her, she does some journalling to help with her thoughts, and decides that while she’s scared, she wants to go back, because otherwise she’s just stuck in her shell.

Slowly, she starts to become more confident as she grows closer to everyone else in the club, eventually landing a job and moving out.

Without telling anyone face to face, simply leaving a letter to explain that she’s leaving, the woman who founded the club disappears, and Yan slowly starts getting lost in her anxiety again, assuming Bea left because of her, until her grief swallows her up and she loses control of her life. She makes the decision to find where Bea has gone.

The book is incredibly short, clocking in at 138 pages, but it’s full of heart and has some gorgeous character designs. Created by Kim-Joy of Great British Bake-Off fame and Indonesian illustrator Alti Firmansya, this adorable graphic novel has a few recipes for the treats they make in the story, as well as a very nice shortbread recipe in the back as an extra (it has both weighed measurements which is the proper way to make shortbread, and imperial measurements for North American readers who don’t typically keep a scale in their kitchen). Give it a read, it’s very much worth it.



Official Website

Review posted 2024/02/22

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