A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
The Spellshop
Sarah Beth Durst
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
If anyone is keeping score, I am now triggered by inspectors.
Let me explain. Last year I worked at a bakery during a period historians are now calling the worst four months of my life. If I’d gone in as an undercover boss, there would’ve been some changes made the second I got out. The place fucking sucked. But it also sucked at a level none of us could control, because company policy mandated monthly inspections by corporate staff. Every friend who heard about these inspections assumed they were regular health department inspections. They were not. They were internal QC inspections to ensure we were meeting brand standards, and the inspector – though a nice person – seemed to have instructions to take off as many points as possible, which is no doubt why they went out of their way to find new things to mark down every time they came in. I don’t blame them for doing their job, I’m just saying it really started to feel personal after so many failed inspections. While I was going through it I told all my friends that the next shitty minimum wage job would be with an American company, which could at least be counted upon to prioritize profit over brand image, and this was not even close to a joke. I promise this is relevant.
Amidst the flames of a revolution, people-averse librarian Kiela Orobidan flees a burning city (which has nothing to do with the inspector) in a small boat owned by the Great Library of Alyssium, where she has buried herself in her work for the last eleven years. Though her customer service skills are somewhat lacking – she has a history of making academics cry when she invalidates their research topics – she has been quite happy, alone in her section of the stacks with no one but her assistant, a sentient spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum) named Caz, for company. She has lived among her books and had all her meals DoorDashed by the Library’s small army of servants, which means her contact with the outside world has been nonexistent. Now, however, rebels have defenestrated the head of the Crescent Islands Empire and the outside world is banging on her door, and reality can no longer be read away. After packing their boat with as many spellbooks as they could save in the time that they had, Kiela and Caz escape just barely ahead of the revolutionaries and make their way to Caltrey, the remote island where Kiela was born. Here they reclaim the cottage owned by Kiela’s now deceased parents, who did not relinquish ownership upon leaving the island for the city, and find it in at least mostly livable condition.
This seems like an ideal getaway, but there are a few problems. Caltrey is quite grim when they arrive, nothing like the cheerful, prosperous island of Kiela’s childhood memories; even the winged cats who live around the village seem thinner and unfriendlier. The use of magic is restricted to a handful of chosen elites, making the liberation of the spellbooks deeply illegal, and the island has been on a downslide because it has been abandoned by the imperial sorcerers who used to calm the storms and perform other maintenance-related magics. Perhaps worst of all, they learn on their first morning that they have a handsome neighbor named Larran Maver, who raises merhorses just down the cliff from them and is nosy as hell. His friendly golden retriever energy rubs Kiela wrong in every possible way upon first acquaintance, but she finds herself being befriended somewhat against her will, and gradually comes to even like him.
As she cautiously settles back into the community, Kiela makes friends with Bryn, the talkative, antlered woman who owns the bakery; revives her parents’ garden and begins to sell fruit jams (and small spells) from her living room; helps a mermaid whose child is in desperate need of medical care; saves the life of Sian, Larran’s favorite merhorse; accidentally creates a sentient cactus (they/them), who becomes fully self-aware and is named Meep; and even befriends a flock of cloud bears, ethereal creatures who guard the trees and take great interest in Kiela’s tree-reviving spell. Despite her persistent fear of imperial retribution, which is more than reasonable considering the librarian who illegally created Caz got turned into a statue and is presumed to have burned when the revolutionaries got their hands on the library, these small magics prove so popular that Kiela runs into some basic supply-and-demand problems and passes the recipe for the “plant-family remedy” to a small group comprising Bryn, a centaur named Eadie, and a four-armed harpist named Ulina. Together they create a batch of remedies to be distributed as needed, and name themselves the Pine Cone Coven.
Though Kiela is careful about her spellbooks and cagey about the branding for her “remedies,” potentially lethal consequences show up on her doorstep when Larran dramatically rescues a drowning woman named Radane, who claims to be an imperial inspector authorized to sniff out any hint of illegal magic. This sparks joy in no one except Fenerer, an utterly miserable excuse for a man who has been against Kiela since day one and now tries to lead a witch hunt against her. With no real reason to doubt anything Radane says, things start looking pretty bad until the day Caz and Meep catch her trying to steal the spellbooks and forcibly detain her, to Kiela’s absolute horror. Having been captured by a librarian, two plants, and a farmer (Larran), Radane quickly confesses that her real name is Ravandil Etra L’sari, and she is the sixteenth heir of the defenestrated emperor. She fled the city when the victorious revolutionaries started executing anyone even remotely connected with the throne, though she has no interest in ruling and in fact was studying wind-speaking sorcery when the revolution swept the city. Her original plan was to steal an invisibility spell and disappear, but Kiela and Bryn offer her a fresh start on Caltrey, starting with a job in the bakery (so she can repair the damage she did during her “inspections”), and she agrees. In spite of her rocky arrival, Radane quickly settles in, and even helps Kiela and Caz create a spell to revitalize Larran’s merhorse herd.
Of course, this isn’t the end of things: an imperial warship follows on Radane’s trail, captained by Varrik, the man she was supposed to marry before Emperor Mevorin got tossed out a window. Varrik is now in charge of the hunt for Radane, but he secretly wants her to be free and doesn’t try too hard in his investigation, while the good Caltreyans close ranks and stoutly insist that Radane has already left the island. (She is actually being hidden by the cloud bears, but close enough.) Fenerer’s best efforts unavailing, Varrik leaves mostly without incident, though Kiela nudges him into taking Fenerer back to Alyssium with him. They leave just in time to sail into a terrible magic storm, but are saved when Radane and the Pine Cone Coven dispel the storm. Varrik returns at once upon seeing this unignorable burst of illegal sorcery, and seems ready to revive his search for Radane. Caz and Kiela convince him to choose kindness over his mandate, and he again leaves empty-handed, for good this time, after quietly confirming that Radane is exactly where she wants to be.
Four months later, Radane is officially a member of the Pine Cone Coven (and also in a relationship with Bryn), and Kiela’s family has grown by one: she was chosen by the winged cat distribution system shortly after the storm and is now the proud mother of a tabby cat with green parrot wings, who loves music and is sleek and plump from the fish Larran gives him. Over the last few months the coven has been hard at work learning new magic to tend the plants and trees, gentle the weather, and improve fishing. Today they make a beeline for the sea when Larran’s merhorses go into labor, and help him deliver the first foals seen in years. With his merhorses healthy and the foals all hungrily nursing, Larran asks Kiela to marry him. She accepts, and tells him she is happy to be home.
I love this book, and am mildly offended that it got me to love Radane. She improves tremendously when she admits that she is nothing like the callous, cold-hearted inspector she attempted to portray. With the obvious exception of Fenerer, I love all of the characters, particularly Kiela and Larran. I cannot overstate how much I like a character who has known tremendous privilege but isn’t even slightly afraid to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. Though an indoor creature by nurture, if not exactly by nature, Kiela doesn’t hesitate to plunge into her parents’ overgrown garden almost the minute she arrives. I am an unapologetic lifestyle girlie, and I would absolutely eat up a whole ass YouTube channel – if YouTube were a thing in this world – in which Kiela does nothing more than vlog her daily life as she cleans her cottage, builds her own library with Larran’s help, cooks jam, makes spells, visits the bakery, and revives her garden. The cottage clean-up is immensely satisfying, and it gives me the nest-building bug like nobody’s business. Her relationship with Larran is so sweetly supportive, even if she is uninterested and a bit rough-edged in the beginning.
This is the kind of light romance I adore: there are no tearing fights or angry confrontations, not even when Larran learns that she has been withholding some important information regarding the state of the empire. He doesn’t ask questions or waste time arguing about the decisions that she’s made; he asks her how he can help, and manages to protect her quite well by anticipating future problems before they come to pass. At one point his first question has to do with the protection of the books, and Kiela and I both love him for it. Caz approves of him almost instantly, and his exasperation with the more oblivious Kiela is hilarious. She tries to push Larran away when she first meets him – he is a bit of a shock after the extreme isolation she experienced at the library – but he is gently persistent, and he isn’t put off by her hermitty ways because he remembers her as one of the kindest parts of a very difficult childhood. And it takes her a while to step out of the shell that she built for herself, but her kindness is never gone. Despite her abrupt manner and her awkwardness around people – traits that appear to be entirely learned from her time in the city – she always chooses the kindest path, even when faced with, say, a former fake inspector who stole a treasured cookbook and tore the island apart looking for illegal magic.
I will admit that I did not choose kindness and I was quite literally praying for Radane to get eaten by a sea serpent when I still thought she was an inspector because, you know, bakery. But the path the book actually took with her is so much better, and I am so glad she was given the chance to show us who she is. Bless the cloud bears, and bless Kiela and Bryn. I even love Varrik, who looks like an antagonist when he arrives but quickly reveals his own kindness, along with some snarky wit.
“You have a jam shop, run out of your cottage!” Fenerer cried. “Obviously a front for something shady. How can you survive just selling jam? Especially just one flavor.”
Captain Varrik turned to him. “Is your accusation that she’s a rogue sorcerer, a murderer, or a bad businesswoman? I am losing track of your complaints.”
Always here to watch Fenerer get smacked down. At least I can still hate him without guilt. I pray that he gets eaten by a sea serpent on the way back to Alyssium. But also he kinda has a point about the jam, and I wish it were that easy to make money. On the whole, though, the question of Kiela’s income does not bother me because she has most of what she needs onhand and is able to get sugar and wax from her partnership with Bryn. I’m not sure if she charges for the coven’s services, though the plant-family remedy was certainly lucrative in the beginning, but even if her jam business bottoms out she still has plenty of support in the form of her new family and community, which – with Fenerer out of the picture – will happily swear up and down that she has been on Caltrey all her life, nothing suspicious to see here, no sir.
My one question has to do with the biological diversity seen even in this briefest glimpse of a corner of this now former empire, because I am so very curious about the circumstances that could have led some members of the same species to evolve with four arms or antlers while others – Kiela herself, for instance – are blue-skinned and blue-haired. Is it a regional adaptation? Are they all still human, or do they belong to different species who happen to be human-shaped? Are they the result of intermarriage between, say, humans and fairies or elves or something? Is there a purpose to these adaptations, or was it done for the fantastical vibes, as seemed to be the case with the two-hearted people in Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer? Are there other people with purple skin, green skin, pink skin, etc? Not that it matters greatly, and it doesn’t detract from the story or the world, but I’m as nosy as any Caltreyan and I want to know.
It seems like every new cozy fantasy series I start makes me want to live in a different world, though admittedly that doesn’t take much these days. Legends & Lattes made me want to pack up my books and my cat and move to either Thune or Murk; Shady Hollow, of course, made me want to move to Shady Hollow. Well, Thune and Murk never spoke to me much as potential nest-building locations and Shady Hollow has a slight murder problem, but this, this wild and beautiful island with its bakery and its merhorses and its tree-guarding cloud bears and its bewildering body parts and skin colors, is exactly where I want to be. I want to wake up every morning in a cottage with bookshelves that I built myself, loaded with my not-quite-yet-a-library (it takes 1,000 books to be counted as a library), and walk through the woods and see the sea from the edge of the cliff. I want to visit the bakery and pet all the winged cats and spoil them silly with treats and fish. I want to set up a shop in my own house and conduct business through my front window. I have no jam-making skills and that niche has already been filled, but I’m damn good at making curry, which is easy to produce in large quantities and not too expensive. Surely the town could use a curry stand.
With all of that being said, I am proud to add the Spellshop books to my list of auto-buy series, even after having read only one book. It hooked me with the vibes: I bought the second book before I’d even considered starting this one, which has been on my shelf for over a year. (Gods bless my own blog for handily informing me that I picked it up September 2024.) Do all the books sound kinda the same? Sure. That is the literal attraction. I am hungry for a series where I always know exactly what I’m going to get, as I did with Redwall (Brian Jacques). If this book is a fair indication of the tone the rest of the series is going to take, I will happily preorder every installment. I am mildly regretting unhauling my copy of The Queen of Blood without even trying to read it, though granted the Queens of Renthia series doesn’t exactly sound like cottagecore coziness. I might still pursue it anyway: Durst has a new fan, I want to read all of her books, and I can’t wait to hop into The Enchanted Greenhouse.
