Review: The Little Shop of Gentle Magics

The Little Shop of Gentle Magics by Jessica Rosenberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this one frustrating because it just didn't quite make sense or come across as plausible to me. Someone with a stronger ability to suspend disbelief may enjoy it considerably.

The editing is good (apart from one word choice by the author which I'll point out, when I give feedback to the publisher via Netgalley, is probably not the word she means). But I kept getting tripped up by little oddities in how things unfolded.

Firstly, Meg, the spoiled protagonist. This is a term I came up with for protagonists who get showered with unearned help by everyone they meet. The little Scottish town where this Scottish-descended American protagonist pitches up, a little while after a bad divorce, instantly and unanimously takes her to its heart and begins helping her set up her tea-and-decorated-cookies shop, which she has (unusually for her, we are told) impulsively spent all of her divorce-settlement money on. At least, we're told a couple of times that all her money has gone on buying the lease, but she still seems to have money to spend on fitting it up and getting inventory. It's not clear whether all the tradesmen who are relatives of her neighbours are working for free or just at a discount, but certainly the conveniently-available second-hand shop fittings and kitchen equipment and the tea and baking supplies aren't free. The unconditional help and support, by the way, comes from everyone including the owner of the coffee shop right across the street, who you would think would have at least some thoughts about direct competition for the tourist dollar, but no.

Of course, her new instasoulmate Art (who she met and had one amazing date with in the US, then cut off in a brief message with no explanation because she had to go to Scotland and find herself) moves in with her almost immediately, and is presumably paying something, since his company posted him (conveniently) to Scotland and has an accommodation budget for him, but the question of his contribution to the household finances never comes up. Money in general never comes up, despite the fact that this is probably the number one worry of a new small business owner apart from marketing.

The marketing almost takes care of itself, despite the fact that on the day the business opens, the shop still doesn't have a name. Art's daughter does some social media stuff Meg doesn't understand, despite being 40 years old in 2026, and they're packed to the doors all day, but Meg can still take time out for interpersonal drama, since the entire community is, as previously mentioned, supporting her.

Meg has grown up being dumped on by her awful mother and aunts because, unlike them, she has no (apparent) witchy powers, and this prepared her to marry an equally if not more awful man who made it all about him, so that she had to completely efface herself in order to manage his emotions for him. But when she starts to finally develop powers (because of the ancient magic of Scotland, which is apparently more magical than America; maybe white people can't access the inherent magic of the land in America?) it doesn't seem to be a big deal for her, as I would have expected. She is worried about telling Art, but of course when she finally does, he's OK with it, because no conflict lasts much more than a short chapter in this book. Even Art's surly teenage daughter is intermittently pro-Meg from quite early on, and his five-year-old son loves her just as instantly as his father does.

There's a good deal of sizzling-hot kissing on page, but no actual sex; it's strongly implied that Meg and instasoulmate just cuddle the first night, and after that it's never directly addressed.

A lot of things are way too easy, and because it's set in a version of the real world, that stands out more than if it's in a lightly-sketched sword-and-sorcery secondary world. At least there are interpersonal (and intrapersonal) dynamics; I wasn't fully convinced by all of them either, but there are some. For example, Art, who is usually a perfect foil for her awful ex-husband, does occasionally make decisions for Meg without consulting her, which she resents, despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that she'd subjugated her own preferences to her ex-husband for 20 years. It seems like these two near-perfect people can only have conflict by both of them acting a bit out of character.

The whole thing is in broadly the mould of all midlife women's paranormal cosies: divorce, small business, new love, discovery of powers, helpful community. It isn't quite what I call This Damn Thing Again, which also involves an inheritance from a relative, returning to one's hometown, discovering for the first time that the supernatural exists, and having a basic mystery to solve, but it's a close cousin. Sure, that's what a genre is, a set of expectations, but this particular genre seems to adhere more closely than most to the exact same setup each time.

Within that setup, for me it didn't come across as plausible. The fiction I admire most starts with a premise - preferably one that hasn't been done a thousand times before - and some well-realized characters and grows the events organically from the setting, the premise and the characters interacting in a natural and believable way. I didn't feel this book was doing that. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm sure plenty of people will enjoy it a lot, and I do commend the excellent standard of editing. It just didn't quite work for me.

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Review: The Friendship Circle: A magical heartwarming story about second chances and friendship for fans of cozy small-town emotional reads in 2026!

The Friendship Circle: A magical heartwarming story about second chances and friendship for fans of cozy small-town emotional reads in 2026! by Amanda James
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

That subtitle is positioning the book pretty clearly, and if you like this sort of thing, this is definitely one.

I'd read an Amanda James before, The Secret Library , which set out to be inspirational and uplifting, but was let down a bit by the fact that the author's craft skill is not equal to her ambitions. It had an interesting enough premise and a worthy enough positive tone that I wanted to give her another chance, but the lack of skill was even more evident in this one, where cliches are presented as wisdom, and trite, vaguely New Agey self-help platitudes are presented as depth. The characters seemed stiff and generic to me, and overall it just didn't keep my interest, and I didn't finish it. For someone who is more centrally its target audience, it would probably work better.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy

The Slow Spell: A Cozy Fantasy by Briana Snow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author isn't kidding about the slow. It takes the first 4% of the (relatively short) book for the main character to come into a room and make a cup of tea. That's OK, though, because every sentence of that 4% is building character or the world or both.

But I have to say, by the time some conflict finally appeared almost halfway through, I had been ready for it for a while. I'd had to stop reading because I was falling asleep (on a sunny afternoon, on the couch with my cat). It's maybe just a tiny bit too cosy unless you're really, really into that slow life vibe. That conflict, by the way, is relatively easily resolved and has no long-term negative consequences.

I mentioned worldbuilding above. I often criticize the worldbuilding of cosy books for being thin - slapdash scenery flats placed behind 2020s people in cosplay. This one has more worldbuilding than that, but it's a bit incoherent.

Firstly, there's a reference (to Blackpool in 1987, in a context that signals this was many years ago) that places it probably in contemporary England, but nothing in the story really requires it to be, and no details back that up. The English is American, and with the exception of a single toaster, nothing seems to be powered by electricity or manufactured. It's very much the pre-industrial cosy setting I was expecting from the cover and blurb, and it could easily be secondary-world without affecting the story whatsoever.

Secondly, there are random bits (and one non-random bit) of the Harry Potter Wizarding World scattered throughout, with references to silver sickles (the currency, though there is also a literal sickle made of silver), the Minister of Magic, and, above all, house elves. A house elf is central to the story, and it's clear that house elves are effectively slaves or a close equivalent, as in HP - but he's wearing ordinary clothes, which goes against HP lore. The title "warlock" is used for his master, which isn't in HP as far as I remember. There's a point mentioned about house elves having wandless magic, but the witch who's the main character does various magical things without her wand as well as with it. There's no apparent magical/non-magical person divide or secrecy about magic in the village. It's all a bit of a muddle, and could easily have been de-HPed, whether or not it was originally fanfic, just by using, say, "brownie" instead of "house elf."

On the upside, it is about as cozy as it's possible for a book to get, the editing is far better than I usually see, and its faults are all minor ones. If you're a habitual cozy reader, by now you've probably trained yourself to ignore worldbuilding oddities anyway, and you're likely to enjoy this very much.

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Review: Lateral Cooking

Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This book has an interesting premise which attracted me immediately. Rather than thinking of world food as discrete points, it looks at it as a giant possibility space in which multiple recipes are connected by what they have in common, but distinguished by slight differences in ingredients or techniques. So, for example, there's a basic bread recipe that more or less applies everywhere, but you can vary the flour, vary the hydrating ingredient, add different kinds of rising agents, take different approaches to how it's proofed, and cook it different ways, and this gives you everything from flatbreads and crackers through soda bread to yeasted bread all the way to babas.

It's an ambitious approach, and unfortunately the execution, for me, didn't quite support its usefulness as well as I would have liked. It really needs to be an app, rather than a book. If it's going to be a book, it needs to not require quite so much flipping back and forth between the base recipe and the variations; for example, if you're telling me that you can "use a 50/50 mix of warmed plain yogurt and milk for the liquid," it would be nice not to have to find my way back to the base recipe (especially in a Kindle edition that isn't as easy as it might be to navigate) to remind myself how much liquid that is. I resorted in the end to writing everything out by hand in a notebook. (I then decided to stick with my simpler, tried-and-true no-knead bread recipe, but that's another matter.)

Definitely an interesting idea, and I will dip into it again, I think, but not the perfect execution.

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Review: Radical Magic

Radical Magic by Kate Macdonald
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

For an otherwise mostly well-edited book, this has a surprising number of places where the "let's eat Grandma" issue occurs (lack of a comma before a term of address). Note that I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and this (and the places where the present tense drops into past or otherwise glitches, and the occasional missing punctuation, and the less occasional missing words in sentences) may be fixed by time of publication.

The story has several different viewpoints that slowly draw together, although none of the viewpoint characters have the full story of anything, and they don't know until nearly the end that they are connected. Viewpoint one is Conny, whose husband foolishly tried to excavate a fairy mound and was taken as a result. Viewpoint two is her husband Edward, enslaved and abused by the fae (known as elfin to themselves and fairies to humans, but I'll just say fae to make it less complicated). Viewpoint three is Auberon, the fae gentleman who owns the mound in question, who is moving around undetected in human society, learning ideas about liberty while seducing various humans, and decides that he will free his slaves. Unfortunately, his malevolent steward takes advantage of the unspecific nature of the command he's given, and releases Edward not back into 1807, where he came from, but into an unspecified year in the 20th century. Fortunately, one of Auberon's former (male) human lovers has been gifted with the ability to travel through time on being sent away, and has set up a cross-time guest house to help unfortunates like Edward.

The other key characters are Pertinacity, a researcher into the fae, who meets Conny by chance at the Royal Society and forms a friendship and alliance with her, and Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of George III (an actual historical character, though somewhat changed for purposes of the story), who is dying of TB. The author takes as established historical fact the rumours that her elder sister Sophia had a child out of wedlock, and Amelia in her turn starts an affair with Auberon.

All of this is very promising. I enjoy Regency fantasy (not that this is quite Regency, technically speaking; the Regency began in 1811), and the author does a decent job of using a few turns of phrase and some historical and cultural references to evoke a feel of the period. Most of the book, too, is satisfyingly stitched together, with these people who have multiple points of connection (unknown to them) striving for their various goals in ways that will bring them into conflict or alliance.

Unfortunately, I felt that some of the plot problems were solved rather too easily by helpful characters or coincidence, rather than the decisions and actions of the protagonists, and the ending, rather than tying up all the threads, left several dangling unresolved. This is the main reason I've dropped it to three stars (from my normal starting point of four).

A bit of softness in the plot and some mechanical issues that may be fixed by publication don't add up to a bad book, and I can see a lot of potential here and would consider reading another book by this author.

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Review: In Her Exquisite Clutches

In Her Exquisite Clutches by Auston Habershaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'll start this review with the disclaimer that I got a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review, and there's a long time to go until it's published. That means that hopefully most of the errors I spotted will be corrected, most notably spelling a dragon's treasure as "horde" rather than "hoard" and saying that she "horded" it (the latter of which spell check should have caught). That's not the only vocabulary error either, by a long way, and the author also apparently doesn't know, or at least consistently doesn't follow, the conventions for how dialog should be punctuated (with the tag as part of the same sentence as the dialog, not a separate sentence). Even if they do get fixed by publication, these are disappointingly basic errors to still be in place at the time the book is sent out for review. This is presumably why so may authors make the same few simple mistakes: their teachers (like this author, who teaches composition) don't know the rules either.

Setting all that aside, the actual story is well told, and is a clever unravelling of a heist, loosely based on an actual (still unsolved) art heist in real-world Boston. This one, however, takes place in a world where thought-to-be-mythical beings have reemerged into the world a few years before the main action, which takes place in the 2020s, and several years after the heist in the early 2000s. Among them is a dragon, who hoards (she does not horde) art.

It's explicitly inspired by Nero Wolfe, whose detective was split into two distinct people: the one who stayed inside and admired his collection and did the brain work, and the one who went out and did the leg work (and got beaten up while doing it). The latter, in this version, is a human, and our narrator, employed by the dragon as an investigator and her eyes on the street. The dragon is infuriatingly high-handed, which completely works, and the investigator is reasonably smart - but not dragon-level smart - and streetwise enough to get the upper hand over the criminals, at least sometimes.

There's a decent amount of character backstory for the investigator, too; he has history with several of the people who are suspected of having been somehow involved in the heist, and I did suspect that this was one reason the dragon employed him specifically, perhaps even the main reason. Yes, he's been working for her for a while at this point, but she's a long-term thinker, being more than a thousand years old.

The journey to the conclusion and the conclusion itself were both satisfying and both full of surprises, and despite the basic mechanical issues, I enjoyed the book and would look for another (but would hope that it had had more editorial attention before I read it).

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Review: Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder!

Mercy Allcutt Mysteries Box Set (Books 1 to 3): Historical Cozy Mystery | Meet Mercy Allcutt in Her First Three Adventures—Where Manners Meet Murder! by Alice Duncan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An often enjoyable light read set in 1920s Los Angeles, with a 21-year-old heroine who's a stuffy Boston Brahmin trying to get life experience so she can write. She does this by taking a secretarial job with a private investigator, and quickly becomes involved in his cases, showing a quick wit, determination and bravery, though she's also too naive to live at times, which became annoying to me. Also, she doesn't so much solve the mysteries as persist in poking around until the murderer becomes fed up with her and tries to kill her, which honestly is understandable.

It's told in her voice, which is amusing; she knows she's lived a sheltered and privileged life, but doesn't always know in exactly what way she's naive, and sometimes her naivety becomes a touch overdone (as when she consistently fails to see an obvious source of danger, or can't figure out that if she's talking to an adult man on the phone, the 30-year-old woman who's just died must be his stepmother, not his mother). It's also amusing to see the clash between her upper-class East Coast upbringing and low life in California.

To someone who reads a lot of fiction from the era, it had the clear feel of a modern reproduction rather than a genuine antique. It was given away by little tricks of phrasing, the way the world felt only lightly sketched as a background rather than truly lived-in, and of course the fact that homosexuality was acknowledged to exist (even if Mercy is too naive to understand the slurs applied by her boss to her beautifully dressed male friend who's a costumier for the movies), and the main character wasn't even a little bit racist. I didn't spot any actual glaring anachronisms, though.

There's a little Easter egg for fans of the era in the mention of Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without a Key in Book 1. This is the first novel in which Charlie Chan appeared, and the main character is a Boston Brahmin like Mercy. Also, she visits Chinatown in the course of the investigation. She hasn't read the book, though - someone else is reading it. She reads Agatha Christie.

The editing issues are relatively few and widely scattered, and consist mostly of excess commas (such as after "of course" when it's only agreeing with the previous statement - something word processing programs are not sophisticated enough to get correct), and words missing or inserted in sentences. At least once, though, the dialog alternation is messed up, and there's a continuity error where Mercy presents something as her speculation from limited information given by a witness when it's almost a direct quote from that witness, giving the detail Mercy says the witness didn't go into. Also, spell check should have caught "indiscretely," since there's no such word in English, and corrected it to "indiscreetly." It could do with another quick polish.

I enjoyed each book slightly less than the one before, because Mercy keeps insisting on putting herself in danger when she doesn't have the common sense of a gerbil, and (so that the author can have her rescue herself) her boss doesn't do anything so sensible as going with her to protect her, just turns up after she has already been attacked. Her voice is consistently amusing, and the historical aspects are OK, but it's pretty light fare, and Mercy, while she is a decent investigator in the sense that she has good instincts where to look for clues and is capable at unearthing them, often can't come to a correct conclusion to save her life. The "save her life" part is sometimes literal. One of the less plausible aspects was how (view spoiler)[despite having no self-defence training of any kind, she not once, but twice manages to push a crazed, murderous attacker off a high place. (hide spoiler)]

The mix of enjoyable aspects and weaknesses is such that it falls naturally into the three-star category for me, and I'm not going to be looking for more in the series or from the author. But if you can have more patience with Mercy than I do and don't notice the occasional editing glitch, it may be just the cozy mystery you're looking for.

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