Dear TBR
Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop came out in 2024, and like tons of people, I loved it immediately. We’re old Durst stans here, and have been reading and reviewing her books since she first started writing them, but this one was for adults, so we expected …something different? We were excited to find that, writing for adults or teens, her books are always the same – full of eccentricity and enchantment. In this case, the eccentricity is at first the main event – the main character, Kiela, has a talking spider plant (as one does). After the fall of her government, Kiela has has fled her job at The Great Library – taking as many books as she can cram into her boat as the city is engulfed in flames behind her. With nowhere else to turn and zero ideas, difficult, prickly Kiela goes home – and “home” – a weird place full of weird people she never thought she’d have to go back to. But, while the saying goes that you can’t go home again, it turns out that you can – because not only does going away change you, sometimes with your new eyes, you can see that home often changes, too. This book was the low stakes, low angst book that a difficult 2024 needed, and I was surprised when I saw that she’d written a companion book. What, I wondered, could still be left to say about that tiny, perfect microcosm of a book? As it turns out, nothing. And yet –
THE ENCHANTED GREENHOUSE: Caz, the sentient spider plant has an origin story which is only mentioned briefly. Terlu, his maker, was not a magician, but a librarian – and thus was turned into a statue for her crime of unauthorized magic use. The second novel in the duology begins with her trial where the reader discovers her crime stemmed from sheer loneliness, and the reader gets a sense of how horrible her sentence will be for her – she only ever made a talking plant to have someone to talk to… Six years after being entombed, Terlu experiences a sudden awakening in a wholly new place, one filled with snow, but nearly empty of people, save one. Best of all, this empty place is nearly overrun with… greenhouses. Ten thousand of them, or nearly so. Who would have sent her – in statue form, no less – to a deserted island filled with greenhouses? What is she supposed to do there? And, how safe is she? Will the magicians run her down and drag her back to the endless slow silence of being a statue? And, whatever happened to Caz?
This may seem like a book where nothing happens – and in a manner of speaking, this is true. Terlu sleeps and wakes, she eats – a lot, because she’s missed a lot of meals being an enchanted statue, and food is amazing – and she …worries. She tries to help keep up the greenhouses. She tries to be… useful. But there’s only so much you can do if you’re afraid of doing anything wrong for fear of …everything. This journey depicted here is small – Terlu moves from being a frightened, shamed unauthorized magician to being a determined person who makes choices not out of desperation, but with a clear mind. It’s a book about second chances – mainly giving yourself one. And it is cozy and kind and lovely, and a slow read with descriptions of beautiful plants, beautiful food, and the beautiful sense of belonging.
THE FARAWAY INN opens with the same sense of sweetness, though with a considerably tarter and more modern angle. Calisa is sixteen and going into her senior year, and very, very, very unhappy with her erstwhile exboyfriend, who she caught literally with his hands…where they ought not be. In a bid to get herself some distance from the disaster, Calisa heads away from New York to the wilds of Vermont for the summer, and for her Great Aunt Zee’s house. She’s not been there since she was quite small, and barely remembers it. It’s certainly not the floral extravaganza she recalls – it looks rundown and really awful, and to make matters worse, her Auntie Zee tells her she can stay exactly one night, and go home. As it turns out, Calisa wasn’t exactly invited, her mother and her aunt are in the middle of something that’s gone on for years, and Calisa is now the unfortunate recipient of a lot of unresolved feelings.
The thing is, the place clearly needs her help. And, Calisa really needs to not go home back into the orbit of the cheating, lying exboyfriend. In a blatant attempt to make herself useful enough to stay, Calisa begins to clean and organize and bustle – and discover that not everything at the rundown old inn is straightforward as it seemed… The guests are more than a little strange, and there are things no one will explain. As it turns out, nothing about the Faraway Inn is at all as Calisa believed…
Like many fantasy books, the age of the main character doesn’t matter as much as it would in many YA novels. Within the realm of the Hero(ine)’s Quest, the call to adventure simply… comes. Calisa arrives at the end of this book well beyond where most high school seniors would be, with her mind on a future that is already a bow-wrapped Happily Ever After. It’s a lovely, effortless, escapist read in the best of all ways. I appreciate that the author puts in an afterword about the idea of escapism, and what a gift it is – a deep breath before the plunge. If you can get your hands on either of these books, do – the respite is lovely.
Fresh onto the TBR:
- The Testimony of Mute Things, Lois McMasters Bujold
- The Saltwater Curse, Avina St. Graves
- A Blacksmith’s Guide to Dragon Rearing, Julia Huni
Until the next book, 📖
Still A Constant Reader
