Review of The Spellshop, by Sarah Beth Durst

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

The Spellshop

by Sarah Beth Durst
read by Caitlin Davies

Macmillan Audio, 2024. 12 hours, 12 minutes.
Review written September 27, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

The Spellshop is a novel for adults that reads like a sweet middle grade story (and I mean that in all the best ways). Yes, our main character is an adult, who’s been working for many years at the Great Library of Alyssium, but years of staying away from other people, happy with her books and with the sentient plant who serves as her assistant, has left Kiela good-hearted and somewhat naive.

As the book opens, the great capital city has been through a revolution – and a mob has started burning the library. Fortunately, Kiela had prepared by packing up some of the most important spell books in crates on a library boat, so she is able to escape with the books and with her plant assistant Kaz. She heads to one of the outer islands, to the cottage where she was born, but which her parents left when she was a child.

In the Empire, it was illegal for someone not a sorcerer to cast spells, but Kiela’s not entirely sure who’s in charge now, and there’s a need for magic on the island, as the imperial sorcerers have been neglecting it for years. And she has those spell books….

It begins as she tries to figure out how to make a living and casts a spell that makes raspberry bushes grow. She has her family recipe book for jam, and she decides to open a jam shop – and sell some “remedies” on the side. Maybe she can help the islanders with the plants that are failing and the springs that have dried up. Maybe she can help her handsome and helpful neighbor Loren with his mer-horses.

It all seems to be going well until a terrible magical storm hits the island and Loren rescues a woman whose ship is destroyed in the storm. She says she’s an imperial inspector. How will Kiela hide her magic?

This is a feel-good magic story. Yes, there’s romance, but the only physical affection is kissing. Yes, there’s real danger, but everyone is revealed to have a good heart. (Well, except one guy, and he’s dealt with in a gentle way.) It’s a story about Kiela finding a place and a home and making friends and helping those friends, and I just know they’re all going to live happily ever after, and I so enjoyed spending time with them.

This is a perfect dose of charm if you have had enough of sex, darkness, and death with your fantasy. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy that, too! But this was a sweet change and a well-written story that leaves you feeling happy.

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of The Lost Dreamer, by Lizz Huerta, read by Elisa Melendez and Inés del Castillo

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Lost Dreamer

by Lizz Huerta
read by Elisa Melendez and Inés del Castillo

Macmillan Audio, 2022. 10 hours, 52 minutes.
Review written November 5, 2022, from a library eaudiobook

The Lost Dreamer says on Amazon that it’s book one of a duology, so fair warning that there’s not much resolution at the end of this book — it feels like half of a story.

But what we do have is full of rich world-building. Chapters alternate between two different teenage girls. Both of them are dreamers — at night, they experience “The Dream,” a world inhabited by spirits, where they learn truths about the waking world. When someone dies, they say they “returned to the Dream.”

Indir, the first featured character, is part of a family of Dreamers, and she serves at the Temple of Night in the capital city. But after she dreams to answer a question for the king on his deathbed, her ability to enter the Dream disappears. Is she still a Dreamer? And then when the new king brings fire warriors to the city and seems hostile to Dreamers, they all fear that he’s ushering in chaos.

Our alternating featured character is Saya. Nobody knows she’s a dreamer, because her mother won’t allow her to tell anyone. In fact, her mother uses Saya’s gift to act as a seer in the villages where they travel. But Saya begins to want to come into her own.

Both of the girls’ stories increase in danger. The way they come together toward the end of the book surprised me.

The Dream is fantastical, and both characters spend plenty of time there. The author does a good job conveying how the Dream and the world about it works. As well as making us worry about what’s coming to that world.

lizzhuerta.com

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Review of The Lost Wonderland Diaries, by J. Scott Savage

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy 0

The Lost Wonderland Diaries

by J. Scott Savage

Shadow Mountain, 2020. 344 pages.
Review written September 6, 2022, from a library book

The Lost Wonderland Diaries is a wonderful tribute to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a great-great-niece of Lewis Carroll discovers his lost diaries and gets pulled into Wonderland with her friend.

And it turns out that Wonderland is in trouble! They’ve been expecting an “Alice” to come and put it to rights. Celia is very sure she’s not the one. Her friend Tyrus, though, is an avid reader, and would love to be the hero of a story.

I probably should have remembered that I’m not really a fan of Alice in Wonderland before I picked up this book. The chaotic way the magic works, and Alice’s seemingly random progression through the story never made much sense to me, and this book is similar in that.

Now, there are some fun mathematical puzzles sprinkled through the books. I really liked Celia and Tyrus — even though they represent one of my pet peeves — the idea that “numbers people” and “books people” are wholly separate things.

Though in Celia’s case, she’s dyslexic, so it seemed fair that she’d have trouble with words and reading. (I wonder if she has trouble telling apart 9s and 6s.) I appreciated that she was shown to be intelligent despite her dyslexia. And Tyrus’s love for books and references to great children’s books was a lot of fun. I appreciated that both of them solved some of the puzzles with their own strengths.

But a little more problematic for me was the idea that the Queen of Hearts is all about logic and the King of Hearts all about imagination — as if those two things are opposites. I don’t buy it. Yes, the story showed that you need both, but I just don’t think they’re as fundamentally opposed as this book implies.

I suppose it’s all because two of my biggest passions are math and reading. And I actually think those things go together.

All that said, this was a well-written book and a good story. And yes, we need both imagination and logic! Fans of Lewis Carroll will especially enjoy it.

shadowmountain.com

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Review of Gwen & Art Are Not in Love, by Lex Croucher, read by Sarah Ovens and Alex Singh

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Gwen and Art Are Not in Love

by Lex Croucher
read by Sarah Ovens and Alex Singh

Macmillan Young Listeners, 2023. 10 hours, 48 minutes.
Review written October 26, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Okay, this one is just lots of fun. It’s set in England a few hundred years after Arthur Pendragon. Gwen’s father, a descendant of Arthur Pendragon, has moved the capital to Camelot to try to hold onto the kingdom. He’s also made an alliance when Gwen was a baby to win over the cultists, and betrothed her to Arthur, now 19 years old and also a descendant of Arthur Pendragon.

Gwen and Art have despised each other since they were children and Gwen broke Art’s arm and Art put a toad in her bed. Now? Well, as it happens, Gwen spots Art kissing a boy, but then Art discovers Gwen’s diary and learns she’s in love with Lady Bridget, the only female knight in the kingdom, who is currently competing in the big tournament in Camelot.

And then Art starts falling for Gabriel, Gwen’s brother and the heir to the throne. But both Gwen and Gabriel thought that someone in their position wasn’t allowed to be happy. But maybe Gwen and Art should go through with their engagement, because who could understand them better?

I’m calling this Fantasy because it’s a fantasy England where Arthur was real, and many in the story believe in magic, but no actual magic happens in the book (that we can be sure is magic, anyway).

The story has lots of hijinks and laughs and scrapes, but there’s a serious side because there is unrest in the kingdom. The narrators are lovely (I always like British accents!) and this is one I’m sure I enjoyed all the more from listening to it. Just plain fun.

lexcroucher.co.uk

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Review of A Drop of Venom, by Sajni Patel

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

A Drop of Venom

by Sajni Patel

Rick Riordan Presents (Disney/Hyperion), 2024. 393 pages.
Review written October 26, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

Here’s the idea behind this book: What if Medusa’s wrath was justified? The story is told by the victors, after all. A Drop of Venom combines the idea of Medusa with Indian mythology to give us one of the Nagin people with an affinity for snakes.

We’ve got two protagonists throughout the book. One is Manisha, a girl who when she was small was sent away from her family for her own protection when her family’s home was attacked. Manisha was sent to the temple, to hide her origins and become a temple priestess. There she meets our other protagonist, the king’s slayer, Pratyush.

Pratyush is the last in a line of supernatural monster slayers. His father and mother lived in hiding from the king, but when the king’s soldiers found them, a monster killed him. They took Pratyush to the king, and he had to slay monsters in order for his sister to be cared for. But after his sister got married off to a noble who abused her, and she eventually died, Pratyush has lost enthusiasm for killing for the king. He wants to settle down and marry that beautiful priestess he’s been flirting with at the temple. The king agrees, if he brings back the head of one last monster, the Serpent Queen who’s been turning men into stone.

What Pratyush doesn’t know was that while he was gone, Manisha was raped by a powerful man and kicked off the temple mountain in the clouds. But she didn’t die. In fact, a pit of vipers cushioned her fall, and the snakes gave her magical powers. She has a golden snake familiar that keeps growing bigger and bigger, and she’s traveling south to find her family. But she encounters people along the way, and some of them are very bad, and Manisha now has power to fight back.

There is violence in this book, and some horrible deaths. But for the most part, it’s a book about the powerless fighting back against injustice.

The book is atmospheric and pulls you along with each character. Unfortunately or fortunately (there will be more!), the story is not finished with this book, though we do have a face-off between the supposed monster and the slayer.

This is a fantasy story with many overtones about justice and power. It felt good to watch Manisha coming into her power.

sajnipatel.com
RickRiordan.com
HyperionTeens.com

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Review of Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands, by Heather Fawcett

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

by Heather Fawcett
read by Ell Potter and Michael Dodds

Books on Tape, 2024. 12 hours, 5 minutes.
Review written October 10, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Oh, I love these Emily Wilde books so much! And Ell Potter gets her voice exactly right – a scholarly British accent with multiple diversions into the historical background of things she encounters or similar tales of encounters with the Fae.

For Emily is a distinguished dryadologist in this alternate version of Cambridge, England, where faeries are real and interact with our world – and people study them.

After her adventures in the Otherlands in the first volume, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, where she was rescued by her colleague, Wendell Bambleby, a faerie king in exile, Emily is now working on a new book – a Map of the Otherlands. And she also vows that as her next adventure, she’ll save Wendell’s life for a change.

And she gets an opportunity to do that all too soon. His stepmother, the same one who usurped his throne, poisons him on his birthday and then sends assassins into Cambridge to finish him off. After fighting them off, Emily convinces him to go on an expedition to the Alps. She thinks she has a lead on finding a doorway to his kingdom.

But it’s not a romantic trip for two. The department head insists on going along because of the research and in exchange for not reporting Bambleby’s falsifying research in the past. And Emily’s niece Ariadne also plans to come along. She’s been working as Emily’s overeager and overly talkative assistant for some time, and can’t be dissuaded, but she does show signs of having what it takes to be a good dryadologist.

Most of their research involves trying to track down a dryadologist who went missing some fifty years before and may have found a door between multiple faerie realms. But there’s plenty of research and exploration to do in order to find her, and plenty of adventures that show that something about that poison is still affecting Wendell. So when things all come together, it’s up to Emily to take a quest into Faerie to get what’s needed to save his life. But can she stay safe from the current queen?

Again, I can’t even express how much I love listening to these books – the scholarly tone of one who has read everything ever written on the topic of the Faerie realm and remembers it all is just perfect. I love Emily’s extreme capability and her nerve when in a tight place, plus her care and attention for the smaller creatures of Faerie, who tend to get scorn from many.

Altogether just an absolutely brilliant series, and I’m thrilled to discover that there’s one more book coming out in February. Even though I’m listening to it first, this set is one I’d like to own to be able to come back to.

heatherfawcettbooks.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Blue Floats Away, by Travis Jonker, pictures by Grant Snider

Fantasy, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

Blue Floats Away

words by Travis Jonker
pictures by Grant Snider

Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2021. 40 pages.
Review written July 26, 2022, from my own copy, signed by the author
Starred Review

Full disclosure: Travis Jonker is a librarian friend. I served on a committee with him at one point and say hello at conferences, all after I followed his blog, 100 Scope Notes. It made me happy when ALA Annual Conference was finally in person again to get a welcoming smile along with the signed book.

The book is a simple story of an iceberg calf named Blue who suddenly breaks off from the iceberg where he lived with his parents. All the characters are expressed by iceberg shapes with three dots for their faces.

The words are simple, and the pictures really make it special. They are also simple, done with what looks like collage and torn paper, but it’s colorful and beautiful. Blue floats away and sees new things. Beautiful things.

Just after he’s made friends who helped him figure out how to get back, he melts away —

But Blue wasn’t gone.
He was changing.

Blue mixed with the ocean water,
evaporated,
condensed,
and was transformed.

Now Blue sees more new things. And learning about air currents, he finds away to get back to his parents in the North.

“Were they ever surprised.”

This is a simple and happy story that would work great in storytime, but there’s also a note in the back about how Blue’s story illustrates the water cycle. So you’ve got some very simple science to go with it.

A really lovely picture book with a happy ending.

travisjonkerbooks.com

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Review of The Grace of Wild Things, by Heather Fawcett, read by Aven Shore

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Starred Review 0

The Grace of Wild Things

by Heather Fawcett
read by Aven Shore

Balzer + Bray, 2023. 8 hours, 29 minutes.
Review written June 1, 2024, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Here’s another one I loved oh, so much! This is Anne of Green Gables, if Anne were a witch child! It’s even set on Prince Edward Island.

The world is somewhat different from ours, though. Our orphaned heroine, Grace, has a natural gift for magic and the strange heartbeat that marks out witches — so she leaves the orphanage and finds a witch to apprentice herself to.

The witch lives in a beautiful cozy house by a brook, but she doesn’t want an apprentice and tries to bake Grace in her oven. Once Grace gets out of that she convinces the witch to make a pact with her. If Grace can perform all one hundred and a half spells in the witch’s grimoire before the cherry trees bloom, she can stay and become the witch’s apprentice. Otherwise, Grace must give up her magic.

So the stakes are high. But Grace is gifted and Grace is imaginative — and she chatters on about her imaginings just like Anne of Green Gables. Fortunately, Grace has a knack of making friends, and once she finds a best friend at the neighboring farm, she gets some help at figuring out the grimoire.

This is not a retelling but a reimagining, so the parallels are quite loose — though I did enjoy the way magic got Grace’s best friend tipsy and the witch told her mother she’d mistaken currant wine for raspberry cordial. The magic in that world is playful and fun, and I enjoyed the boy who offends Grace early – rather like Gilbert – but is actually a fairy who makes all the humans forget about him.

Anne loves poetry, and she loves to read poetry to Wind Weaver, her familiar (who is a crow). So each chapter begins with poetry from that time period, and I was surprised how many appropriately flowery poems the author found.

Completely delightful! I highly recommend this book to any fan of Anne of Green Gables. Revisit Prince Edward Island — with a little magic.

heatherfawcettbooks.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Our Divine Mischief, by Hanna C. Howard

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Our Divine Mischief

by Hanna C. Howard

Blink, 2023. 371 pages.
Reviewed October 16, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review

Here’s a sweet young adult fantasy with a touch of romance set on an island where every young person makes a trip to Yslet’s Island to meet the goddess and learn what apprenticeship they will get. Áila is almost eighteen, and it’s time for her to make her pilgrimage. But when she goes, the goddess is not there – instead she finds a dog, a dog named Orail.

The village elders don’t know how to respond when Áila has nothing to show for her trip to the island but a dog. So they have her live in isolation and prepare for five Ordeals. If she passes the Ordeals, she will be allowed to try again to voyage to Yslet’s isle. The only human she’s allowed to talk to is Hew, a young man who is considered Unblessed because Yslet gave him a blank pendant. His work cutting peat is so unimportant, he can be spared to run errands for Áila.

But while Áila is preparing for the Ordeals, it becomes obvious that Orail is no ordinary dog. She can grant wishes, especially Áila’s wishes. And Hew is observant enough to find out something is going on. Best of all, Orail’s thoughts are given to the reader in poetry form.

But there’s another man who’s interested in helping Áila, and he has the approval of the priests – a handsome visiting scribe and his sister. Is there a reason Orail doesn’t trust him? It’s probably just that he doesn’t like dogs.

As events start taking place that affect far more than their island, Áila and Hew face huge obstacles to try to make it right.

A big part of the charm of this book is the wonderful dog character, and the love between Orail and Áila. I won’t give anything away, but I also love what we learn at the end about those who are thought to be “Unblessed.” A feel-good story with a whole lot of charm.

hannachoward.com
BlinkYABooks.com

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Review of Impossible Creatures, by Katherine Rundell

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Starred Review 0

Impossible Creatures

by Katherine Rundell
read by Samuel West

Listening Library, 2024. (Print edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2023.) 8 hours, 55 minutes.
Review written October 7, 2024, from a library eaudiobook (referencing an advance reader copy).
Starred Review

I’m not sure how this book got all the buzz, but it turns out I didn’t order nearly enough print copies or ebook copies or eaudiobook copies for the library. Perhaps because it was first published in the UK, people knew how good it is? I even had an Advance Reader Copy I’d been meaning to read, but didn’t get to it before I needed to start reading Young Adult Speculative Fiction for the Cybils Awards, so I got in the queue to listen to the Audiobook version.

This book completely deserves all the hype! It’s one I plan to read again some day in the finished print form – probably buy myself a copy – because it’s illustrated, including a map and an illustrated bestiary at the back. The advance reader copy has some finished illustrations, but mostly sketches that show what will go there. (The book has Art by Ashley Mackenzie.) However, the audiobook is delightful, and Samuel West has the wonderful voice of someone reading you a fairy tale – which completely fits this epic quest.

I pulled out the Advance Reader Copy to write this review so that I could quote you the incredible beginning. (Wasn’t sure I’d get it exactly right without referring to it.) Then as I reread, the whole first chapter, called “The Beginning,” is perfect:

It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him.

It was a black doglike creature, but it was not like any dog he had ever seen. It had teeth as long as his arm and claws that could tear apart an oak tree.

It says, therefore, a great deal in Christopher Forrester’s favor that he refused — with speed and cunning and courage — to be eaten.

The second chapter, called “The Beginning, Elsewhere,” begins like this:

It was a very fine day, until somebody tried to kill her.

Mal had returned home from her journey, flying back from the forest with arms outstretched and coat flapping, buffeted by the wind.

After the opening chapters, the book backtracks from that very fine day to give us some background on Christopher and Mal. Christopher lives an ordinary life – except that animals flock to him and want to get close to him.

Mal does not live an ordinary life, having learned to fly by using a coat given to her by the seer who named her. And she lives somewhere where that doesn’t surprise her neighbors, with her great-aunt who has so many rules, Mal can’t possibly keep them all.

Then on the fateful day referred to at the beginning, their worlds come together. Christopher has learned from his grandfather that he is inheriting the guardianship of a magical place, called the Archipelago, hidden from our world and full of magical creatures. But the magical tree at the heart of the Archipelago is failing and animals are dying. Griffins are believed to be extinct.

And then a baby griffin comes through the lake on the mountain by his grandfather’s house, followed by a giant black dog with flaming ears. But a girl comes through the lake after the dog and shows him how to extinguish the ears and kill the beast. The griffin is hers (It’s Mal!) and she tells Christopher that someone tried to kill her and she needs help. So she leads Christopher back through the door that has opened in the lake to the Archipelago.

And so begins an epic quest, a quest to heal the tree, the source of magic. And both Christopher and Mal have crucial parts to play.

I usually don’t like stories that lead the characters from one thing to another, taking detours all along the way. But I think since this one was all in service of the goal to help heal the magic, it didn’t bother me. First they want to get to the sphinxes to find out what to do. No, I take that back – first, they try to tell the authorities in the Azurial Senate about the problem and get them to fix it. There’s a comical scene when they are spurned for being children. But a scholar who has detailed information about the problem is also spurned. Both they and this woman are going to be arrested and imprisoned for disrupting the court – when someone comes to their rescue, and they end up joining forces with the scholar and their rescuer. Then they go to the sphinxes, because if the human leaders don’t know, the sphinxes are the wisest ones who may be able to help.

Getting to the sphinxes is an adventure in itself, and that leads them to the next adventure, which leads them to the next adventure, and so on until it’s finally Christopher and Mal trying to heal the magical tree.

And the whole story is epic and wonderful and magical and full of wonderful people and danger and beauty and peril.

My only sadness is that this book was first published in the UK, so it’s not eligible for the Newbery Medal.

And I was delighted just now when I pulled out the Advance Reader Copy to notice “Book One” on the spine! That settles it – by the time Book Two comes out, I’m buying myself finished copies of both books and rereading this one in print for the joy of it. It’s that good.

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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