I’m looking forward to attending New York Comic-Con (NYCC) this week and started to look through the list of panels and attendees. NYCC is hosting a panel on cozy fantasy, with one of my favorite cozy authors in attendance – Sarah Beth Durst. Since I’m working through my back log of book reviews, I thought this would be a great time to catch up on reviews of a couple of her books that I’ve read this year.
The Enchanted Greenhouse is the second book in the loosely connected Spellshop series. You can find my review of the first book below, as well as one for a stand-alone fantasy novel by Durst that I recently reviewed:
Here is the blurb:
Terlu Perna broke the law because she was lonely. She cast a spell and created a magically sentient spider plant. As punishment, she was turned into a wooden statue and tucked away into an alcove in the North Reading Room of the Great Library of Alyssium.
This should have been the end of her story . . . Yet one day, Terlu wakes in the cold of winter on a nearly-deserted island full of hundreds of magical greenhouses. She’s starving and freezing, and the only other human on the island is a grumpy gardener. To her surprise, he offers Terlu a place to sleep, clean clothes, and freshly baked honey cakes—at least until she’s ready to sail home.
But Terlu can’t return home and doesn’t want to—the greenhouses are a dream come true, each more wondrous than the next. When she learns that the magic that sustains them is failing—causing the death of everything within them—Terlu knows she must help. Even if that means breaking the law again.
This time, though, she isn’t alone. Assisted by the gardener and a sentient rose, Terlu must unravel the secrets of a long-dead sorcerer if she wants to save the island—and have a fresh chance at happiness and love.
Funny, kind, and forgiving, The Enchanted Greenhouse is a story about giving second chances—to others and to yourself.
While readers of The Spellshop will instantly recognize the character of Terlu from a tale told in that first book, no prior knowledge of this series would be necessary to jump into this not-quite-a-sequel second book. When Terlu is reanimated in an unfamiliar forest, she knows as much about her surroundings as the reader does.
As Terlu explores her new environs and meets the denizens of an island filled with a series of enchanted greenhouses, she brings the reader along in that discovery. I found myself completely invested in the mystery of the failing magic. Like The Spellshop, this book is also a light romance, with some nice moments and captivating settings to be found within the magical gardens.
If you enjoyed the sentient spider plant, Caz, from the first book, there are more of his relations to be found in this novel. These non-human denizens were essential to fill out the cast of characters since both Terlu and the gardener, Yarrow, are essentially trapped on the island through their circumstances and choices. This limited setting leaves fewer potential plot complications, but the ongoing failures of the greenhouses provided enough twists and mystery to keep me interested in the book.
Cozy fantasy seems to always involve some level of cuteness in regard to the creatures, and I am all here for this. In this book we have a winged cat and some tiny dragons. The shrub who wants to be a sailor was a particular favorite of mine.
The Enchanted Greenhouse delves more into spells and the practical use of magic that we didn’t see in the first book, and I enjoyed seeing the characters think through their problems, spend time researching, and then learn how to work their own spells. The necessity of this was a nice counterpoint to the prohibition against lay people performing magic.
Overall I enjoyed this book a lot. I can’t decide if I liked it more than The Spellshop or not. Anyway – I’ve already read the next book in the series, Sea of Charms, and should have a review of that out in the next few weeks. It looks like a fourth book will be out in 2027 titled The Magical Cheese Emporium.
Have you read this series? What did you think? What other cozy fantasy books should I read? Let me know in the comments.
You can find more of my book reviews here.