Book Review – Sea of Charms

13 Oct 2026 Leave a comment

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

After spending time immersed in cozy fantasy at New York Comic-Con, I’m back to writing book reviews. Next up on my backlog for review is Sea of Charms by Sarah Beth Durst. This is the third book in The Spellshop series and I just reviewed the second book, The Enchanted Greenhouse, last week.

You can find my reviews of the previous books and purchase links below:

  • The Spellshop – review here / purchase here
  • The Enchanted Greenhouse – review here / purchase here

And for a disclaimer – I received Sea of Charms courtesy of Net Galley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Book cover for 'Sea of Charms' by Sarah Beth Durst featuring a serene seaside scene with a sailboat, lush greenery, and vibrant flowers framing a wooden gate.
I read the e-book edition.

Here is the blurb:

Marin had always belonged on the great blue sea. When the man she thought was the love of her life schemed to ruin her parents’ business, she did what her heart knew best: she fled to the sea.

Now working as a supply runner on her own boat, Marin sails from island to island, delivering a varied array of goods: letters, flour, stories, and even the occasional enchanted statue. It’s a lonely life, but it’s hers. Besides, she’s got the company of Perri the sea serpent and Ree the sailor shrub. They’re the best crew she could ask for.

On one of her routine trips to the capital of the Crescent Islands Empire, Alyssium, Marin finds the city on fire and a revolution underway—so she offers transportation to Dax, a composer friend who refuses to leave behind his instruments. What starts as a rescue evolves into a deal: Marin will keep Dax on as a (temporary) member of her crew if he becomes her pretend boyfriend at the End-of-Harvest Festival back home.

Against her better judgment, Marin finds herself intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, his charming smile—and realizes that perhaps she isn’t saving him. Maybe it’s the other way around.

Sea of Charms is a cozy fantasy romance about finding your crew, your family, and moreover, finding yourself.

This book felt different that the earlier ones in this series because it took our characters to multiple islands across the Crescent Islands Empire. While the other books in the series work well as stand-alone novels, this one ties in to the events of those earlier books and would be best read after the other two. Marin is a side character in The Enchanted Greenhouse, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we see where her adventures overlap with the events of that book.

The timeline in Sea of Charms takes us back to roughly the start of the revolution in the capital city, Alyssium. This book also takes place over a longer time frame than the earlier ones, but with a broader world to explore, that made sense to me. For part of the book Marin sails without any human companions, so the romance aspect of this story takes time to develop as it requires Dax to be around Marin enough for their relationship to develop.

I loved how Marin tried to be a loner and refused to take on a crew or passengers, only to bend her rules as circumstances changed. She was unable to refuse people in a desperate situation and I think she empathized with their desire to flee their homes as she herself had done when she went to sea, even if the reasons were different. Dax was also a wonderful character who starts out naive and sheltered, but he yearns to see the world. His role as a talented composer and musician put him in a different social class than most of the other characters we see in this book, but opposites attract and made him the perfect partner for Marin. Dax is obviously enamored with her throughout the book, but it takes time for Marin to heal from her past experience and to learn that she can fall in love again. Like the earlier books, the romance is sweet and stays simple.

Once again, a talking plant was probably the most endearing character in this book. We first met Ree the wax myrtle in The Enchanted Greenhouse, but in this book we see him learn how to sail. Like Dax, Ree is also naive but eager, and his joy in becoming a sailor helps to soften Marin’s heart.

The places that Marin and crew visit in this book were one of my favorite parts of the book. We get to see Alyssium during the revolution, as well as Marin’s family home with an abundance of winged cats. Together the crew braves a dragon and a magical storm, and even encounters unicorns. Overall this was a delightful and inventive story that tied together some of the pieces of earlier books, while remaining focused on its own central plot.

The next book in the series will be The Magical Cheese Emporium and is expected to be published January 19, 2027.

Have you read any of Sarah Beth Durst’s books other than this series? Which would you recommend? Let me know in the comments.

You can find more of my book reviews here.

Book Review – The Enchanted Greenhouse

08 Oct 2026 Leave a comment

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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:

  • The Spellshop – review here / purchase here
  • The Faraway Inn – review here / purchase here
Book cover for 'The Enchanted Greenhouse' by Sarah Beth Durst featuring a magical greenhouse in a snowy landscape, with an intricately designed structure and a cat with wings in the foreground.
I read the e-book edition.

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.

Book Review – The Faraway Inn

13 Apr 2026 3 Comments

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I reviewed The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst in my previous post and I wanted to follow that up with a review of the new YA cozy fantasy novel by the same author, The Faraway Inn (paid links). Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. The Faraway Inn was just published on March 31, 2026.

Book cover for 'The Faraway Inn' by Sarah Beth Durst, featuring a whimsical, illuminated inn surrounded by flowers and greenery, with elegant text at the top.
I read the e-book edition.

Here is the blurb:

After a devastating heartbreak, a teen girl decides to spend her summer helping her eccentric great aunt manage her quaint Vermont inn–but this fixer-upper is hiding a magical secret–in this cozy and irresistable new fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spellshop.

Sixteen-year-old Calisa is desperate for a change of scenery after her lying ex ruins her perfect Brooklyn summer. When her parents suggest she head to rural Vermont to help her great-aunt run her cozy bed and breakfast for a few months, she jumps at the chance.

But when Calisa arrives at the B&B, she’s shocked to find a rundown inn with only a handful of guests. And to make matters worse, upon meeting with her great-aunt it quickly becomes clear that Calisa was not invited. Auntie Zee is determined to keep anyone from messing with her beloved inn…even if it is clear she needs the help.

To earn her keep, Calisa sets to work fixing up the inn, enlisting extra help from the groundskeeper’s (handsome) son. But the longer she stays, the more it becomes evident that there is something strange about the B&B—and its residents. Something almost…otherworldly.

The inn is keeping a magical secret—but to protect the place she’s come to love, Calisa must unravel the truth of it, and her aunt, before it’s too late.

I believe that this book is being presented as a YA novel, and I think it does fit that description. Calisa, the protagonist, is a sixteen-year-old who is having some common problems for a teenager. Following the author’s recent trend in her writing, this is also a cozy fantasy story, or one in which the stakes are generally low. That doesn’t mean that nothing important happens to the characters in such a story, but rather that the world isn’t going to end (or similar catastrophe) if the protagonist fails to meet their goal.

This book was easy to read as long as I didn’t stop to think about the details of the story very much. Calisa finds herself at a magical inn that is run by her reclusive aunt, with the help of a teenage handyman, Jack. Jack’s dad is missing, only a few guests are booking rooms, and the inn is in a state of serious disrepair. In an attempt to ingratiate herself with her aunt and because she genuinely wants to help, Calisa starts to clean and cook for the guests.

As Calisa takes a more active role at the inn, I had to wonder how the place functioned at all before her arrival. Auntie Zee was too much of an enigma and was not present enough for me to believe that she had even managed to provide for the minimal guests who were present. She was the one character that I didn’t find believable in this book. However I did enjoy the secondary characters, particularly one guest who had an odd affinity for trees and shrubs.

This book is also a light romance, and while it follows a predictable pattern for that genre, it wasn’t the main plot of the book. The level of spiciness was low, for those who rank that kind of thing (fitting with this being a YA book). I found the small magical items around the inn to be creative and engaging. My favorites were the firebird who lit the fireplaces and helped with communication, and the tea set that always seemed to know when it was needed.

The Faraway Inn is a stand-alone novel and can be read quickly. I’m planning to read a couple more of this author’s books throughout this year.

Have you read other cozy fantasy novels? Which were your favorites? Let me know in the comments.

You can find more of my reviews here.

Book Review – The Spellshop

26 Mar 2026 4 Comments

by Clare in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , ,

I listened to the audiobook edition of The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst last summer without knowing much about it going in (paid link). This book that is considered part of the new trend of “cozy fantasy” novels. I’ve enjoyed a few books like this already so read on below to see what I thought of this one.

A whimsical and colorful illustration of a magical cottage surrounded by lush greenery and flowers, with sunlight filtering through the trees, featuring the title 'the Spellshop' by Sarah Beth Durst.
I listened to the audiobook edition.

Here is the blurb:

Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.

When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home.

In need of income, Kiela identifies something that even the bakery in town doesn’t have: jam. With the help of an old recipe book her parents left her and a bit of illegal magic, her cottage garden is soon covered in ripe berries.

But magic can do more than make life a little sweeter, so Kiela risks the consequences of using unsanctioned spells and opens the island’s first-ever and much needed secret spellshop.

Like a Hallmark rom-com full of mythical creatures and fueled by cinnamon rolls and magic, The Spellshop will heal your heart and feed your soul.

I enjoyed this book a lot and finished it quickly. The protagonist instantly inspires sympathy as she flees from an empire under attack and steals saves several spellbooks to keep them safe. Who wouldn’t try to save the library books they’ve been caring for under such dire circumstances?

It is clear early on that this book is also a light romance, with a single and handsome merhorse wrangler appearing frequently to offer help to the new inhabitant of the island. Besides the romance aspect, this story also features found family, and a small community that stands up for its own people. The writing style was easy to read, although I did listen to the audiobook, and that format often makes for an easier experience for many books for me.

I also loved the sidekicks and humor in this story. Caz the sentient spider plant provides a way for Kiela to have someone else to speak with as she fights to stay isolated in her new home. This allows the author to minimize inner monologues but many still slip through and Kiela’s voice is a bit annoying at times.

Kiela’s baking and spellcraft overlapped and made for a fun combination that made me wish that I had some of her creations to snack on. Of course magic never quite works the way the user anticipates and this provides some intriguing effects that moved the plot forward.

This is the type of fantasy story that perhaps would not stand up to close inspection. The way that magic works is more arbitrary than in other genre series, and the politics that are crucial in driving Kiela to flee with her books initially don’t have a huge impact on her new home. Yet this novel fills a niche for someone looking for an escapist tale that is easy to follow and finds a happy ending. I also loved the cover — yes, there are winged cats.

The Spellshop is a stand-alone novel, although there are more books set in the same world that I have yet to read.

Have you read any cozy fantasy books? Which would you recommend? Let me know in the comments.

You can find more of my book reviews here.

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