Scan barcode
A review by ergative
The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst
3.0
This was very nice and fluffy. Nothing terrible happens, all the potential antagonists turn out to be pretty decent people, and the rapid acceptance of our main character into a new life is comforting to read about, but you need to be willing to look past the unbelievable bits. Not the talking non-binary plants, centaurs, antlered winged men, goat boys, and ghost bears, I hasten to add--those were lovely bits of world-building--but the societal behaviours that depend on certain recognized patterns working in all the ways that make them good, and none of the ways that make them bad. In particular, I refer to the tendency for small-town insular societies to close ranks and look after their own. The reason for this (as I believe) is that they know exactly who their own are. They keep strict distinctions between insiders and outsiders. So it rings a bit false that a stranger to this small island would be able to benefit so quickly from the closing of ranks that such a society would give to one of its own. (But then, as I like to say about sexism, if you can imagine dragons, why can't you imagine a society without sexism?)
The effortlessly magical and chymerical properties of the beings in is this world are a lovely touch, but that led a bit to its own awkwardness. At one point the intelligence of merhorses to be described to a character in terms of dolphins, as if the character needed the 'unfamiliar magical' creature aligned with mundane animals. The reader does, of course, but I don't see why a character who has grown up on an island whose economy rather depends on using domesticated merhorses to herd fish would need to have their features explained by comparison to fully wild animals who do not even show up in the book outside this comparison. That exposition was clumsy.
Still: small quibbles, in an otherwise fluffy blanket of a book. This is a very solid installment in the cosy SF genre, and if you need something cosy and undemanding, this book will provide it.
The effortlessly magical and chymerical properties of the beings in is this world are a lovely touch, but that led a bit to its own awkwardness. At one point the intelligence of merhorses to be described to a character in terms of dolphins, as if the character needed the 'unfamiliar magical' creature aligned with mundane animals. The reader does, of course, but I don't see why a character who has grown up on an island whose economy rather depends on using domesticated merhorses to herd fish would need to have their features explained by comparison to fully wild animals who do not even show up in the book outside this comparison. That exposition was clumsy.
Still: small quibbles, in an otherwise fluffy blanket of a book. This is a very solid installment in the cosy SF genre, and if you need something cosy and undemanding, this book will provide it.