I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this redemptive tale of a family saved by baking! However, I was entirely won over by the warmth and humour of a family whose crisis was a teenager going through a very difficult period of confidence issues. They belong to a small community which rallies round and also enjoy the fresh bread they bake. I was quite jealous actually, as finding a really good baker, who doesn’t charge a fortune, is no small thing. It is challenging for them, but it is an entertaining story of the hoops they jump through to achieve their goals. I loved the quirky stories of what happened on the way, and the recipes were an added bonus, I may even have another crack at baking bread myself. A must buy, and I loved the illustrations too.

Never thought I would see an inspirational recipe book, although that's a misnomer as this is just so much more! A remarkable true story backed up by some delicious recipes.

Wow, what a lovely book! I started off feeling a bit concerned as although the book sounded interesting and relevant to me, I really wasn't in the mood for reading a non fiction book. As it turned out, I devoured it in a day. Breadsong is co written by father and daughter Al and Kitty Tait and chronicles the deep dive into depression that Kitty suffered at age 14, and the desperation her parents felt at trying to help her. After many failed attempts at engaging Kitty in different activities, Al makes some bread and it piques Kitty's interest. What follows is an adventure in breadmaking with trials and tribulations, chance discoveries and serendipitous encounters. Having plunged headlong into baking, the two successfully forge ahead with the creation of their business. The book is interspersed with photos and quirky drawings which add to its charm. It is well written, very easy to read and an uplifting and inspirational story. I like the description of the characters in the local community and the support and kindness they provide as well as Kitty's gradual increase in confidence. I enjoyed hearing about the encounters with other bakers both in the UK and overseas. For me, having also suffered from depression and anxiety as a teen (and adult), it's a pretty emotive book, and there were many tears as I read. It also spoke to me as a baker and I was able to get really excited for Kitty as her journey unfolded. I will definitely be trying some of the recipes and I wish Kitty the best of luck for the future. I recommend this book to anyone who likes autobiography or memoirs, real life stories, triumph over adversity, community spirit and of course baking or consuming baked goods. Many thanks to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this advance ecopy.

Thoroughly entertaining and interesting!!
Loved the tales associated with the love of bread, and the life journeywith bread!!
Itching to bake some bread this weekend and trying out a recipe or two!!
Thank you NetGalley for the early read!!

I am so glad that this book is going to be published later this month as I am looking forward to owning my own hard copy. I also know what I will be buying friends and family for Christmas! Thank you Netgalley for letting me read this story in exchange for an honest review.
I chose this book because on the surface, it is about anxiety and depression, something I suffered from at a similar age to Kitty. I am always interested in how people cope with a mental health issue especially when you are still in your teens and in full time education. However, there is so much more to this book. Kitty is a strong woman with a wonderfully supportive family who not only allow her to recover in her own way without worrying about her schooling but help her every step of the way. It was a brave move for her father to give up the job of teaching to become a baker in partnership with his daughter. It is clear he knew he had no option. He writes about his amazing journey in this book and Kitty writes about hers. It doesn’t surprise me how much support this family received on their journey including from teachers at Kitty’s school.
Much of the book is about baking and a career change but family life is described - the importance of Christmas, family dogs, meeting other families such as a wonderful family living in Copenhagen.
I loved the illustrations and the use of photos. Was the choice of an old copy of “What Katy did” made on purpose?
The recipes are amazing hence the Christmas presents! I too found baking therapeutic as a teenager. My passion was making fudge. There is a fudge recipe in this book. I think beating the fudge to help it to set properly helped with my anxiety. This wasn’t mentioned in this recipe but we are all different.
During covid and lockdown this family helped to keep the village going even supplying ingredients for those wanting to make their own bread. A real community.
It seems the bakery needs no publicity but I would imagine this book will bring many people to Watlington!

I requested this because I love bread. I fell for this book because of the heart that shines out of it. Part autobiography, written by Kitty & her dad Al, part recipe book, Breadsong is the recounting of how baking bread helped save a 14 year old girl from depression & anxiety opening up a whole new & delicious world. At times this is emotional, humourous & hunger inducing all within a few lines.

Breadsong can be read from so many different perspectives for me: as a parent; as someone who has struggled with dark times; as someone who loves baking bread & pastries, then eating them.

This is the best and most inspiring book I have read in a long time and is an easy five stars from me. It's written by Kitty and Al Tait who are daughter and father. In 2018, when she was 14, Kitty was struggling with mental health issues and found making bread helped her. Soon she was making loaves for the neighbours and orders for more starting pouring in. Kitty's father was taking time off his career as a teacher to be alongside Kitty and support her during this difficult time..

Kitty is clearly very focussed and determined and before long their small home was filled with an industrial oven and other bread making paraphernalia with flour dust everywhere. Within a year of so Kitty and Al had opened The Orange Bakery in their village of Watlington near Oxford and one day Al realised that he was no longer a teacher but a baker.

This book is written in the voices of both Kitty and Al with lovely illustrations by Al. Both have a delightful and slightly quickly way of communicating which bring joy to the reader. The first half of the book is their story of building up the business from that first loaf and the second half is recipes by Kitty for bread and bread related products. As someone who got into making sourdough bread at the start of the pandemic due to the lack of availability of yeast I had an interest in this book for the recipes but actually the story won me over and charmed me completely. I'm going to be near Watlington later this year and I am already planning my visit to The Orange Bakery.

Having looked at many recipes these past two years as I got to grip with making sourdough bread I can 100% recommend Kitty's recipes. They are clear, simple and sensible. I have seen so many sourdough recipes elsewhere which have so many unnecessary steps in and make such a palaver of the process that you wonder why anyone bothers. 10/10 to Kitty for the clarity of her recipes. I am still only making basic sourdough loaves with the occasional foray into crumpets, bagels and doughnuts. Kitty's recipes have inspired me to try a lot more and I shall be heading into the territory of puff pastry, pains au chocolate and anything with a segment of a Terry's Chocolate Orange inside.

The photographs of the finished products and in the whole of this book are gorgeous. I love the use of old and nostalgic items to display the bread products, I even rushed to my bookshelf to check my Enid Blyton red hardback books from the 50s and 60s as I have some of the ones used in one of the photos!

This is not just the story of Kitty and Al but her very understanding and supportive Mum and older brother and sister. And also all of the population of Watlington which seems like a wonderful community to live in.

I can thoroughly recommend every aspect o f this book and will be going back to it time and time again as I try out the recipes and just look at the beautiful illustrations and photos.

With thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

There is no way that this book can fully describe the trials and tribulations of Kitty, her Dad and the rest of her family in all its brutal detail as the book needs to be a success.

Having said that, I am not attacking their approach, more like rationalising for myself the "actual pain" that the past few years must have caused the family. I can certainly imagine how much worse things things likely were.

All in all, the book is a testament to what they have jointly and as a family achieved over the past few years, through the added love and support of folk from Watlington and around the world. Thank heavens not everyone is squeamish when it comes to mental illness.

Add into this mix what actually made me want to read this book - a sourdough baking project that, like all good starters, blossoms into something delicious and Breadsong hit the top of my reading list.

Now that I have all that off my chest, it only remains for me to say please read this book, enjoy this book, get very emotional with this book and visit Watlington if you can.

What a lovely uplifting book. Kitty is an amazing girl managing her mental health through her passion for bread making. She has a lovely,supportive family who are trying their best to help her. It struck me that maybe mainstream school and expectations aren’t for all children and this family possibly stumbles on something that may help. I can’t wait to try some of the recipes . Kitty’s passion for baking is infectious. Thanks to Netgalley for chance to review.

I never knew I could care about bread but this book managed to make me.

Half of this is a cookbook of homespun recipes to bring comfort and charm to a home kitchen. The other half is an honest account of the struggles a fourteen-year-old girl went through and how baking with her father, and with the support of her family, community and the baking world, she managed to improve.

It's such a sweet tale, the type you can't help but wish you'd been a part of. It's full of endearing acts that show the heart of people, like a sister seeking out new recipes because her brother doesn't like that butter seeps through the holes in some breads.

The turkey story is thoroughly heart-warming.

Also, it's nice to learn a story of someone gaining from social media and other online avenues, rather than the familiar doom and gloom narrative. It feels like it addresses an unfair imbalance.

Struggle to review it as would not work on the NetGalley app and the kindle option was not available.

Part memoir, part cookbook, Breadsong tells the story of how baking pulled Kitty Tait back into the world after her depression and anxiety paralysed her for months and how she set up a successful small business from scratch. The twist? Kitty is 14 years old.

Told partly by Kitty and partly by her father Al who becomes an increasingly less reluctant baker as the tale goes on, this would make a beautiful piece of fiction in the style of Jenny Colgan - but even better, it's true and there are (professional, non-horrible) recipes!

I spent several years in Oxford and it was lovely to get glimpses of the Cowley Road and Soho Farmhouse as well as Kitty's home village who rallied round her and the family so well - I don't think I've ever been there apart from going through it on trains, but based on this book I am planning a visit! And I'm off to buy a massive casserole dish immediately to make Kitty's Miracle Bread for my family and friends.

This is part memoir/part cookbook except the recipes aren't interspersed, they come after the memoir portion. Al's fourteen year old daughter Kitty is struggling with depression and anxiety and he has the idea to bake to try and help her cope. They then basically build a business from this. It's told from both Kitty and Al's perspectives which I enjoyed.

It is lovely to hear how engaged the village is in the story and how it has helped them create The Orange Bakery. A very sweet book that's perfect if you enjoy learning more about a recipe.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the opportunity to review this book!

This is the heartwarming tale of how Al Tait helped his daughter Kitty (14) overcome depression using the joy of baking bread.

It is also the story of how the people of Watlington rallied round to support The Orange Bakery and Al and Kitty in their mission.

Unfortunately the lack of formatting made it hard to follow the recipes but an interesting book nonetheless

I really enjoyed Breadsong, though it certainly highlights a very particular kind of Britishness. I feel like things would have played out very differently in other parts of the country, without the opportunities encountered here. That said, this is a really uplifting and inspiring read - it was wonderful to see the village rally round the family, and to hear about a young girl discovering and developing her passion. It made me want to reach for my bread flour and immediately start experimenting!
The first half of Birdsong recounts how The Orange Bakery came to be, including Kitty's mental health struggles that led to her being introduced to breadmaking. I found the split father and daughter narration to be really engaging, with a good blend of (sometimes stark) emotional reality and humour.
The second half is full of the recipes we saw being developed during the bakery's journey. As I read through, there were some I made a note of, hoping the recipe would be there (the Comfort and the Albert in particular) - and they were! There are also some amazing flavour combinations that I can't wait to get my teeth into. The instructions are clear, and I liked how the recipes worked together as a collection - using bases covered earlier on to develop different flavours and bakes, for example.
I always appreciate a cookbook which blends the cook's story and experiences into the recipes, which Birdsong manages excellently.

'Breadsong' is a brilliant combination of memoir and cookbook written by daughter and father Kitty and Al Tait. I had heard a little bit about the story of The Orange Bakery and the story behind it from a friend who lives in Watlington but it was great to read the whole story in their own words. When Kitty was 14, she became seriously unwell with anxiety and depression, and somehow her father came up with the idea of making bread as a way of dealing with this.

In the first half of the book, they tell the story of how this went from hobby to cottage industry to a full-blown business thanks to Kitty's passion and enthusiasm and the lots of support of family, neighbours and strangers online. The second half contains a lovely selection of recipes for breads, pastries and other bakes, many of which Kitty has invented from scratch and carry deep personal significance. I enjoyed reading their story and am looking forward to trying some of the recipes, which are clearly explained and beautifully presented.

Overall, this is a delightful and rather moving book about food, family, pain and recovery. It would be great as a gift or bought for oneself! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

This was such a hear warming tale that really inspired me to go into the kitchen and actually bake some of the recipes while reading along how they came to be i then made the soda bread which was lovely and the instructions were very easy to follow and have been having a go at the sourdough starter , would definitely recommend to a friend to go out and try.

I, too, cannot download to Kindle. Why is this? I find the script far too small on my phone so would always prefer Kindle. Please could you confirm if this is a mistake or will be permanent ongoing.

The book sounds very good and I look forward to reading it sometime!

I cannot read this book as it won't download to Kindle.. I don't want to give it a low star rating on that basis however.

This is an uplifting story of how Kitty (age 14) and her Dad Alex start baking bread as a means to lift Kitty out of her depression. Starting at home, with very little experience, we read of the trials and tribulations of slowly getting better (Kitty) and realising that his work life is going to be very different (Alex). A mention must be made of the incredible support given by the people of Watlington from simply buying bread to providing locations where Kitty's bread could be sold.

Kitty's recipes end the book and now several years later she and her Orange bakery are thriving.

You don't need to be a bread baker or aspire to be to enjoy this book. But it will convince you of the magic of making bread