Be prepared to crave raspberry jam when reading this YA cozy fantasy by Sarah Beth Durst. It’s even dedicated “To Adam, with love and raspberry jam.” And if that’s not enough there are raspberry chapter heads. I had to go buy a jar of jam and a loaf of sourdough. True.
The story hits all the tropes of cozy fantasy:
Personal Problem: Kiela’s an introverted, orphaned librarian who fled the city of Alyssium, after working in the Great Library for many years, because a fire ravaged her library during an uprising. She escaped with her sidekick, Caz, a wise and sentient spider plant (and only friend) and several spell books which will bring about her demise if she gets caught with them. Now, she’s on the island of Caltrey where she was born and once lived in a charming cottage with her parents. After working in the library so long, she doesn’t know how to talk to people or make friends. The garden is wildly overgrown and the cottage needs a good cleaning. Plus where or where will I hide these contraband spell books?
Community Problem: “the magic is unbalanced, too concentrated in some areas and absent in others” (110). Weather manipulation by sorcerers? Climate change? Aha. The Emperor of Alyssium has been hoarding all the magic for years so the outer islands are in decline. Kiela wants to fix this problem using her salvaged spell books. To do that, she’ll need the help and support of the everyone on the island, especially when an Imperial Investigator arrives.
Idyllic Lifestyle: Kiela needs to make a living. When she notices a tangle of ancient raspberry bushes out behind the cottage, she uses a spell to “accelerate plant growth.” Soon she has so many big juicy raspberries she realizes the only thing to do is make jam. Of course, why not open a jam shop?
Romantic Subplot: a kind, handsome, young man lives nearby. Larran is a “wears a tool belt” builder type of guy who often strips off his shirt to dive in the sea and tend to his merhorses. His creatures help the community by driving the fish into the fishers’ nets. Due to the magical problems, his merhorses have stopped reproducing. Larran makes it known that he’s interested in Kiela, but Kiela doesn’t seem to trust or understand him. So a slow burn romance throbs beneath the surface. Thank god, he’s persistent and can keep a secret. It doesn’t hurt that he looks great swimming shirtless in the sea.
Quirky Characters: Bryn is a furry deer/goat-like creature who runs the yummy bakery and becomes Kiela’s friend and champion in record time. Eadie is her friendly centaur friend. There are winged cats and merhorses. And not long after they arrive, Kiela and Caz, the spider plant, create a sentient cactus by accident who communicates many thoughts with one syllable: “Meep!”
This is a “feel good” story, In fact the author says, I wanted to write a book that felt like a warm hug. As I wrote each chapter, I’d ask myself, Does this make me smile? —Sarah Beth Durst
The story won’t just make you smile, it will teach you about magic and spell casting. “Spells have to be cast with very specific words and ingredients” (95). It will appeal to your inner witch.
Durst is a masterful writer, lyrical and original. The cover is gorgeous and the book has violet-painted-edges, though I might have gone with raspberry myself. All in all, this book will entrance you, possibly even heal you.
But when she stepped out from the canopy of green, the blue smacked into her, and she stopped and just stared. It was the vastness of the blue that was so breathtaking, as well as the variation: the bleached blue-white of the sky near the sun, the deeper blue of the sky near the horizon, the slate blue of the clouds, the black-blue and green-blue and fathomless blue of the sea, all contrasted against the pale sand of the shore, the bright colors of the houses, and the dark green of the trees (90).
How beautiful is this cover? Art by Lulu Chen. Cover design by Angela Carlino. The book also comes with beautifully painted fore-edges.
This was my first foray into Young Adult Cozy Fantasy and it transported me right back to my childhood days of reading in the orchard beneath the apricot tree on hot summer afternoons. A Baltimore oriole made her nest there and it swayed in the breeze like a lady’s fuzzy silk stocking.
Cozy Fantasy is one of the newest trends and it comes with specific tropes, the most defining being: zero violence, an idyllic lifestyle, low tension, and a personal/community problem for the protagonist to solve. These stories are may-your-wishes-all-come-true kind of books that keep the reader in their grip without relying on murder and mayhem.
Calisa, our sixteen-year-old hero, leaves bustling New York and her cheating boyfriend, at the request of her two moms and arrives at her great aunt Zee’s inn in paradisical Vermont. Only The Faraway Inn is no paradise. It’s dirty and dilapidated. In fact, Calisa falls through the porch on her approach and gets stuck, much like Alice in Wonderland. Problem-solving is a key trait of the main character. Moreover, her ancient, crotchety aunt doesn’t know she’s coming and demands she leave. So much for a spending her summer holiday in the country. Calisa negotiates a three-day probation and decides to earn her worth by cleaning like mad and baking cakes for afternoon tea.
She also meets handsome Jack, who is the only employee at this huge inn, and is a little sad as his father’s gone missing. Their romance, of course, is flirtatious, never going beyond soft, warm kisses which are absolutely necessary in the moment, and remains secondary to the main problem. Keep the inn in business. With just the two of them, it’s something of a chore.
The story is scrumptious with just the right dose of calamity.
It reminded me very much of The Spiderwick Chronicles (ancient house, whispering voices, eccentric creatures) and Alice in Wonderland (a portal fantasy with its many doors that absolutely must not be opened.) Auntie Zee insists upon two rules: don’t ask questions and don’t open doors. Of course, we know what that means.
The inn is populated by eccentric characters from other realms: a moving statue, a magic teakettle, fireplaces that seem to light themselves, and exotic creatures—a dryad, a small dragon who takes to Calisa, and a lovely gent who’s a night owl and whips up decadent hot chocolate with vanilla.
“Standing at the counter amid the stacks of pots and bowls was a fifty-to-sixty-year-old man, as thin as a skeleton, with wild white hair that poked out at all angles and skin so pale he looked nearly translucent. He was wearing all black—a black turtleneck, black slacks, and a single black gem earring—and humming “Ain’t No Sunshine” as he poured milk into a bowl” (46).
With brings me to food porn. What’s more cozy than tea and cakes? Maybe mac and cheese? Details. It’s all in the details. Calisa begins with pancakes; after all, it is a bed and breakfast, there are guests to feed, and Jack shows her umpteen varieties of locally-made maple syrup (blueberry, salted caramel, elderberry among them.) Without technology (another trope) she must rely on an old cookbook to learn to bake. No cell phones, no internet, no computers, not even an old television. This in itself intrigues me.
My only complaint is that the story seemed to have a long, drawn-out ending as every question posed and every thread pulled was thoroughly tied. I drifted off to sleep feeling, well, cozy, and yet excited to try another of Durst’s books, The Spellshop. Hah. I may have to give this genre a try myself.
“Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,” began John Keats in his famous sonnet,“ On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 1816.
Not only was it a metaphor for the exquisite literature he’d read, but a reference to the gilded fore-edges of a book. The process of coating a book’s edges in gold became popular in England during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The edge could be painted in a solid color or contain a small work of art like this book from the Virginia Museum of Art & Culture.
This flourish has become new again and I love it. In fact, I’m drawn to buying and collecting such books. I first saw this on Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, published by ECCO, an imprint of HarperCollins. Then last week, I picked up The Faraway Inn, a YA cozy fantasy by Sarah Beth Durst, that I LOVE (published by Delacorte Press, a division of Random House and manufactured in India.)
So, the Big Five are pushing this trend. I wonder how promising you or your book must be to become one of the chosen ones. More importantly, as traditionally published books raise the “pretty” bar, where does that leave us Indie authors?
Many of us have our books printed on demand by either KDP/Amazon (who is still the cheapest source in Canada) or Ingram Spark Lightning Source (who have a global network but no printers in Canada.) Book Vault offers “sprayed edges” in either a solid color, chosen from a palette, or a custom design. If you live in or around Britain you have the “edge” here as that’s where they’re printed. I got a quote just out of interest.
To make my latest novel “bespoke” (with solid-painted edges) the cost came back at £8.87 or roughly $16.85 per book (for up to 99 copies.) For a 272-page paperback, this includes shipping from England to Winnipeg and then on to me on the West Coast. But not taxes.
If, like me, you sell your books at markets for around $20 or you write bigger books or books with smaller dimensions than 6×9 which equals more pages, the cost is prohibitive. This doesn’t consider your time and expertise, your expenses (such as market fees), advertising, editors, and marketing. Writing is, after all, a business for most of us, even if we haven’t given up our day job.
Having said that, I’m tempted to order a case of my latest standalone because I’m so enamored by the look.
I’d love to see this paperback with gold edging.
But wait— Another option is to learn the craft and do it yourself. This really intrigues me. A quick search tells me there are authors out there painting their own edges and making them remarkably “pretty.” With some wooden planks larger than your book, four heavy-duty clamps, extra paper, a couple of good brushes and some good quality water-based paint, you’re on your way.
You could even invite your writer friends over for a painting session (maybe not wine and painting.) I just created wands and have some brilliant gold I’d love to play with. Beware of the Reader offers a step-by-step tutorial. I’d suggest starting with some of those books that you just can’t sell for whatever reason. You want to be able to paint “without bleed” before you start in on your good copies.
I do think that painted edges might become a “thing” in my library. Of course, I’ll have to stand them all spine-in, or lay them flat, so we can admire the lovely art.
This book is one of the readings at North Island Distance Education School in British Columbia, Canada, for English First Peoples 12. It reads like a young adult novel, which is not surprising since David A. Robertson won his accolades for children’s writing and graphic novels—twice he won the Governor General’s Literary Award, also the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award, and the Writer’s Union of Canada Freedom to Read award. Published in 2022, this is his first adult novel.
I found his writing detailed, repetitive, and slow-paced (he did this, she did that). He tells more than he shows, and it lacks the edgy, lyrical style I’ve come to appreciate in books by other Indigenous authors like Cherie Dimaline, Eden Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Drew Hayden Taylor, though it is honest and does reveal his feelings and experiences.
Forty-year-old Matthew feels empty and estranged from his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter. He suffers with anxiety and is weaning himself off a longtime Xanax addiction. To fill the void, he sends some flirty texts to a co-worker—that’s it, no sex, just flirty texts. His daughter Holly (birth name Hallelujah) who suffers with anxiety and teenage angst, discovers his texts and calls him on it.
“And if you want me to stop drinking this much, then I’ll make you a deal: how abut you stop texting some bitch that isn’t my mother!”
The story is divided into two parts. Part One details the problems plaguing this Winnipeg inner city family of Cree-Scottish heritage and goes on a little too long for this reader. It takes a family tragedy to shock them into action. Matthew realizes he must go back to the land where his father grew up on the old family trapline, and Holly realizes she must come along.
Robertson is a member of Norway House Cree Nation, and he drew inspiration from his own life for this novel. It reads like a fictionalized account of his memoir, Black Water, where he writes about a trip to Norway House to deal with his own mental health issues, specifically anxiety. Robertson went accompanied by his Cree father, who like Charlie McIvor in the story, is a minister. In The Theory of Crows, Robertson changes the focus to reflect estranged relationships within his own family, especially his eldest daughter.
Part Two (Chapter 17) ramps up into a survival story and that’s where the action begins. The writing style becomes more poetic too.
“They flew through the clearing (the crows) like shards of night fallen to earth, then landed on trees.”
I’d personally liked to have seen the first half condensed and the second half expanded. Most of us understand the estrangement between fathers and teenaged daughters but wilderness camping is more elusive. Norway House lies five hundred miles north of Winnipeg and was a Hudson’s Bay Company depot in the 19th Century. Matthew and Holly, both who’ve been raised in Winnipeg and have few outdoor skills, aren’t prepared or equipped to deal, which ups the stakes. Fortunately, Holly is a water-polo champion, something that saves these inexperienced city folks, when Matthew takes a canoe out on the river and makes a wrong turn. Mosquitoes and black flies are mentioned but I had to imagine what it was really like from my own experiences in Northern Ontario.
The story is split between their points-of-view. Unable to speak to his daughter, but desperate to let her know how much he cares, Matthew writes a series of letters to Holly which reveal his backstory and are woven throughout the text.
Several themes reverberate through the story: identity and belonging; the legacy of residential schools; the impact of Christianity; self harm; intergenerational trauma; Indigenous girls at risk; blood memory; and especially connection to the land.
The book has a wonderful cover and title: The Theory of Crows, but it’s not until the very end that we’re given a glimpse into that theory.
“Your moshom, he told me about this. He told me that you remembered the land, even if you’d never been on the land before. Your grandfather used to say that the land could remember you. It works the same way with crows, Hallelujah. They remembered him, they would remember me, and they remember you. They pass these things down through the generations.”
