I recently finished the last book in Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series, and it pretty much made me into an emotional wreck for at least a few days. I needed a bit of a palette cleanser book, so I picked up The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst, mostly because out of all the books on my TBR, it looked like one of the least likely to make me want to ugly cry.
Kiela is a librarian, taking care of the spellbooks at the empire’s great library. But when revolutionaries burn down the capital city, and the library along with it, she and her assistant (Caz, a sentient spider plant) save the books they can and flee to the island where Kiela was born. There, she deals with a nosy-but-handsome neighbor and attempts to help the struggling inhabitants of the island with the knowledge she can glean from the spellbooks, while trying to keep the source of the knowledge secret as the use of magic is heavily restricted.
This was a fun, cute book. The interactions between Caz and Kiela were especially entertaining. It’s got “cozy” vibes (occasionally it gets *too* cutesy for me), but there’s enough danger, from both weather-related emergencies and the threat that Kiela’s illegal spellcrafting will be discovered, to keep the plot moving along. There’s not a ton of emotional depth, but that’s kind of the reason I picked it up—it’s a fun book, gives happy vibes, and was a good way to spend a few hours!