Bingo Square: Purple (maybe I am colorblind but it feels like there is purple filter overlaying this or something)
This was fine. Sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s my mood specifically when it comes to cozy fantasy or if it is the book but it’s a bit of a hit or miss genre for me. It’s hard to find that right balance between creating a world that feels cozy but also has just enough of a hook or plot to keep the reader engaged. This one wasn’t as successful at that as The Spellshop (and honestly, I have noticed that the second cozy fantasy in a shared universe never works as well for me as the first, whether we are talking about this one, Bookshops and Bonedust or Beyond the Cerulean Sea).
Now that I am thinking about it a bit more, I think at least one part of the problem is that the reader knows more about what is going in the universe than either character because this takes place around the same time as The Spellshop. As readers, we already know that many of Terlu’s fears are unfounded. But she’s out of the loop because she has been a statue for the last six years for breaking magical rules, and the other character is a super introverted recluse that doesn’t keep in touch with the outside world and has no idea about the fall of the empire.
Obviously Terlu has been through some major trauma – an outgoing and social woman who ended up in a lonely career field due to circumstances, she was severely punished when she tried to change that by illegally using magic and giving sentience to a plant (a prominent character in The Spellshop). Now returned to the living, she spends quite a lot of it dealing with her own insecurities and self doubt. While it’s all understandable, it also doesn’t make for that engaging of a novel.
Yarrow, the other main character, is introverted and quiet, with his own history that makes it difficult for him to trust in others – their relationship is sweet and develops slowly but it just needed more characters earlier on than we got them – it seems like a lot of other cozy fantasy heavily uses the community to help create the coziness factor. While this novel also has sentient and enchanted plants, here they felt more like props and less like characters in their own right.
The greenhouse as a setting really did sound magical, though, and while I don’t quite understand how Yarrow was maintaining all the greenhouses and their harvest, and finding time to make all the recipes he did, I definitely wanted to try the dishes he made.