Mix a magical boarding school with a cooking competition, season with queerness, braise in the warmth of friendship, add a dash of romance, and you’ll serve up Basil and Oregano.
Basil Eyres, who has two dads, is a young witch starting her senior year at the Porta Bella Magiculinary Academy. Arabella (“Bella”) Oregano is a new student joining the school after having studied abroad. She’s the daughter of an acclaimed magiculinary chef who expects her daughter to excel. Basil, however, must maintain her status as top student or lose the scholarship that has allowed her family to send her there. But Basil and Oregano are instantly smitten with each other even as they work to prove themselves. The two are also paired for the school’s Senior Festival, a cooking competition. But is Arabella hiding a secret that could endanger their chance for success and Basil’s future?
This is such a sweet, fun graphic novel with a refreshingly uncomplicated queer romance. The story’s complications and suspense come in other ways: from a rich girl who looks down on scholarship students like Basil; from Basil’s stress over needing to keep her scholarship; from Bella’s overbearing mother; and from Basil’s two closest friends, Villy and Addy (who happen to be nonbinary and trans, respectively), and their own career aspirations and financial challenges.
Author/illustrator Melissa Capriglione weaves queerness seamlessly and plentifully into this world. In addition to the queer characters above, one teacher uses they/them pronouns and another is a queer man. The theme of financial insecurity and inequity forms a key part of the story, but never becomes pedantic, in large part because of Capriglione’s delightful worldbuilding and the characters’ engaging, sympathetic relationships.
Readers should eat this up. My only question is: Will there be a second course?
Basil has light skin and black hair and could be read as Asian; one dad reads as Black and the other Asian. Willy is White and Addy Black. Other characters represent a range of racial/ethnic identities.
