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After the success of listening to Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies, I was genuinely hopeful that Sarah Beth Durst's The Spellshop (for door) would also serve. The premise is silly--a city librarian returns to her childhood home on an island with a bunch of spellbooks, starts a shop, falls in love. That's okay! That's fine! I'm ready to put a silly premise aside! I'm ready to accept the givens, in return for a well-told story! 

Ah. A problem arises... 

Well, first. The book opens on Kiela, literally sorting books as fantasy!Rome burns. She's dismayed when her assistant, Caz, a sentient, talking spider plant, sprints through the stacks to tell her the library is on fire. All the other librarians left days--or weeks--ago. Kiela has been filling crates of books and putting them on a boat, in case of disaster, but the disaster won't really come. The revolutionaries--she read this in the paper--wanted to bring the knowledge in the library--which contains all the spellbooks in the Empire--to the people! She'd vaguely thought that seemed nice and stopped worrying. How could they be burning the library? She throws as many books as she can into her open crate; she and Caz take the elevator through the burning building to the docks; Caz tries to convince her to leave the crate behind; Kiela refuses; they load it onto the boat; they sail away. (The empire is a collection of islands.)

Imagine me fist-pumping. Here we have a book-person whose obsession with books has not only made them self-obsessed and blind in a way that's decent Romantic Comedy Fodder for a new relationship, but whose blindness to others has gotten her entangled in a messy political situation! How fun. I wasn't overly hopeful that the political undercurrent of the book would be very subtle, but I hoped that it would do something with the thorny knot of intention versus execution. 

I didn't expect it to basically disappear. More fool me. Fine! Fine. I gritted my teeth through Kiela finding her way to her parents' home; finding it basically habitable after 18 years or so, including furniture; finding her mom's clothes--also wearable--after same; Why didn't they sell or take these things?? shhh, shhh, you're the one who picked up a "cozy" novel, shhhh now; through Kiela meeting a baker who says something like anyone who likes butter is a friend of mine; through Kiela noticing the baker has no jam-based pastries; none???? no one makes jam on the WHOLE ISLAND? you've mentioned fruits a couple of ti--through Kiela deciding to open a jam shop/secret spell shop--ah; through Kiela making pounds and pounds of jam and not sealing them. Fine. The book doesn't make economic or culinary sense. Fine. From skimming reviews of other cozy novels, The Spellshop's chosen boutique shop niche was less ridiculous than others, and in either case, I was sincerely ready to let it slide. 

I was also disappointed but not surprised by that I still don't know what Larran, Kiela's love interest, sees in her, even though they do have a shared background. They were children on the island at the same time, and Kiela helped save a seahorse he was tending when they were children... But 1) she didn't know he was tending the seahorse; 2) she wasn't particularly trying to save it; 3) she doesn't remember him at all, and she tells him all these things. Despite this, and despite Kiela being very rude to him for most of the book, he resolutely brings her cinnamon rolls, fixes her house, builds her bookshelves, and takes her out riding seahorses. How hot is this woman. 

The straw that broke the camel's back, for me, was the sheer number of unforced errors. Kiela, in the library, sensibly articulates that if the revolutionaries have gotten to and started burning the library, 1) the empire has other problems; 2) no one will know; 3) she's saving treasures. Once she gets to the island, she's obsessed with that she's stolen the books and is going to be turned into a statue in punishment. Now, this is how anxious people think! This would be so easy to sell! All Durst would have to do is have Kiela reflect for a moment that well, maybe, she could convince people she'd been saving the books! If she then was like no one would ever believe me, the empire is sososo cruel, at least we would have acknowledged that at any point Kiela thought something else. But no. It's like that framing of taking the books disappears. To write a less-accurate version of anxiety? 

THEN IT COMES BACK BUT IN THE SAME WAY. KIELA CONVINCES HERSELF SHE CAN DO MAGIC BECAUSE NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW. DOES SHE WORRY ABOUT HAVING STOLEN THE SPELLBOOKS AND BEING TURNED INTO A STATUE? SHE DOES NOT. what? what? what? what? simply do not worry about it. What Kiela thinks about her own life and situation is driven by what is plot-convenient.

To make matters more excruciating, Kiela is constantly rehashing her own thoughts. She does it with the above, multiple times a problem-arc, but also with anything she thinks about. To the extent. Sorry this one makes me insane. To the extent that after spending a minute or two, so at least a page or more of the book, ruminating on how she now feels at home on, and connected to the island, Kiela turns from one grove of trees to see a vista, or her house, or something, and is like "home! wait, when did she start thinking of the island as her home?" TWO PAGES AGO? TWO PAGES AGO. YOU WERE. LITERALLY. JUST TALKING ABOUT IT------------------ 

I called these unforced errors, but I am afraid that they were added on purpose. Without any direct proof, I suspect that this book is suffering from the same malady as many contemporary TV scripts, where the writers are being asked to repeat themselves so that people who are cooking, or calling their friends, or listening at 2x speed, or whatever, can follow the story without paying attention. Fine. The unfortunate side effect, of course, is that if you do it the courtesy of paying attention you end up wanting to scrape out somebody's eyes with a spoon. 

The book's plot is. Fine. A person shows up, says she's a magic inquisitor from the empire. Will she catch Kiela? Is she an inquisitor? Will Larran like her better? Who could say! 

I enjoyed more of the book than this makes clear; it's about a 3.5 stars, if I had to rate it. Some parts of it are cute. I just can't recommend it for more than a skim read, whatever a skim read might look like for you.