Blog Archive

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Sarah Beth Durst is the award-winning author of over twenty-five books for adults, teens, and kids, including The Spellshop, The Lake House, and Spark. She won an American Library Association Alex Award and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has been a finalist for SFWA's Andre Norton Nebula Award three times. Several of her books have been optioned for film/television, including Drink Slay Love, which was made into a TV movie and was a question on Jeopardy! She is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband, her children, and her ill-mannered cat. Visit her at sarahbethdurst.com.

FORMAT/INFO: This title was published by Pan Macmillan in the U.K. in July 2024, and by Bramble in the U.S. in July 2024.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: Kiela, a reclusive librarian, has to leave the library she never leaves after a group of revolutionaries throw the emperor out of a window and set the place on fire. She gets on a boat with no personal possessions but the clothes on her back, crates of precious books that she had the foresight to organize, and her spider plant companion. Having nowhere else to go, she heads to an outer island with her family’s old cottage, the one her parents left to go to the city to make a better life for themselves and her. There, she opens a spell shop masquerading as a jam store.

If this is anything but the first slice-of-life fantasy book you’ve read, you know the drill, and this doesn’t veer far from the standard template. It’s not groundbreaking, but to give credit where it’s due, the author does showcase her strengths. The pacing leaves little to desire, and the author is so good at describing the setting, so good in fact that I felt like I was reading the book in the island, and with the mentions of the jam that Kiela made or the baked goods she was offered, I swear I had those smells wafting into my nose. Every indoor place in this is nothing but cozy, and are of the kind that would make popular Pinterest boards (have we moved on from Pinterest yet?).

Kiela’s personality has a lot I related with. She’s kind of like me when I get into a reading spurt, everything but that becomes a bit of a chore if not an unwanted activity. She’s also anxious, constantly worrying that she will be persecuted for “theft” of the books, when all she wanted to do was keep them safe from the revolutionaries and return them as soon as things cooled down. She impulsively makes commitments and then thinks them through, and thankfully they’re not bad at all, but only add to her mounting sense of dread that a future chargesheet against her would be quite horrendous.

The romance in his romantasy is underwhelming, with it being drawn out to the point where I stopped caring. It feels a bit forced, but there’s also an added history there. It was kind of annoying how decidedly daft she was, refusing to pick up hints and even pointed statements. I like my protagonists intelligent, and she lacks in that department, taking forever to put two and two together.

There’s a lot of things that the book lightly touches on, like book banning, as well as corruption in power structures while the common man suffers, but without being very heavy handed. They do make sense in the plot, and that I appreciated. The stakes are personal and high, but the resolution at the end seemed a bit too easy. It lacked something, though I’m not sure what. As for the magic, you probably already guessed it. It’s standard spellwork.

CONCLUSION: Anyway, this book is a fun, cozy read that can help you pass the time. The vibes in parts of it are just as lovely as the cover suggests, but it does nothing new. And while not all books have to be groundbreaking or do everything original, they do have to work, and parts of it did not. Despite these shortcomings, I read it cover to cover, so you might want to give it a shot.