The Spellshop

The Spellshop
by Sarah Beth Durst
Recommended Ages: 13+

Kiela has spent most of her adult life holed up in the stacks at the great library in the capital city of Alyssium, minding spellbooks whose use is strictly regulated by imperial law. She isn't very sociable; her best friend is a sentient spider plant named Caz. But then the revolutionaries defenstrate the emperor and start burning things, and Kiela and Caz take what books they can save and flee to the island where she was born, far from the center of civilization. There she hopes to be left alone, but almost immediately she gets swept into social connections with islanders who, in some cases, remember her up to about age 9, and who in one case starts to stir un-sought-after desires.

Life on the island of Caltrey rapidly grows more complicated for Kiela. She discovers that there is a need for the magic that the empire has stopped providing. There is an imbalance in the magic throughout the Crescent Isles, resulting in blighted orchards, fountains run dry, infertile merhorses (technically hippocampi) and a decline in the local fishing industry. People are hungry. The winged cats that live on the rooftops have become scrawny. And the once vibrant island is slipping into ruin as magic storms rage, unchecked by the imperial wizards who used to protect the outer reaches of the empire. Despite her misgivings – revolution or not, she doesn't know whether homespun magic has become legal again – Kiela tries to help, learning a few small spells, such as one to restore the health of trees, for starters. And she opens a jam shop as a cover for her real business.

But of course, the charade can't last for long. Bad luck, the next person whose sailboat wrecks off the coast of Caltrey turns out to be an imperial inspector, devoted to sniffing out unlawful magic. And even bigger dangers follow in procession, threatening Kiela's new feeling of belonging, her first few non-vegetable friendships and her blooming romance with a studly merhorse farmer whose kindness started opening her heart from Day 1.

I'd give this book full marks, except that late in the narrative, it starts dropping in artifacts of the sexual/gender politics of this precise moment in the decline and fall of western civilization. I'm not saying I won't read a book with gay subplots (I've read plenty of them) but the one(s) in this book comes across as surplus to requirements. Clearly, this novel takes place in a magical world outside the historical continuity of ours, so it would be silly to speak of anachronisms, but the impression that this book is set in a pre-industrial, technologically pre-modern era – with ships powered by sail, for instance – occasionally clashes with references to advanced scientific theories and a character (albeit a cactus) who declares their preferred pronouns. It's just a bit too much water carrying for the bleeding-edge politics of the moment to suit my taste, and I fear it will leave this book looking horribly dated a few years from now.

Apart from that quibble, I'll say this for The Spellshop: It creates a vivid, vibrant world with characters and issues your heart will ache for. It has a heartwarming community, a sweet love story, snappy dialogue, and magical creatures to marvel at. A mild Adult Content Advisory and a similarly mild Occult Content Advisory may be in order, for choosy readers and their parents, but the risk is worth it.

I've only read two books by Sarah Beth Durst before this – Ice and Into the Wild – but I've had a very positive impression of her as a fantasy writer up to this point. Her other works include a companion to the latter, Out of the Wild; a pair of books, The Lost and The Missing; the "Queens of Renthia" quartet; a sendup of teen vampire romances called Drink, Slay, Love; and some 20 other novels with such titles as Enchanted Ivy, The Girl Who Could Not Dream, Journey Across the Hidden Islands, The Stone Girl's Story, Fire and Heist, Race the Sands, The Bone Maker, The Shelterlings, Spy Ring and, coming in 2025, The Enchanted Greenhouse.