I might have to revise my position on doing chores. Cleaning rooms, scrubbing toilets, weeding a garden, and fixing up a creaky old house all sound absolutely delightful — provided that the house is actually a bed-and-breakfast that has a sentient mirror, a self-brewing tea set, and a maybe-kinda-sorta dragon named Steve. Oh, and that it occasionally welcomes guests who aren’t exactly from this world.
After catching her boyfriend cheating, 16-year-old Calisa escapes Brooklyn for the summer and lands at her great-aunt Zee’s crumbling Vermont B&B, where she plans to keep busy by helping out. And that’s…. easier said than done. Because instead, Calisa finds an aunt who, for some reason, doesn’t seem to actually want her there, a handsome boy named Jack who’s been helping hold the place together, and a growing list of things that don’t make sense. (People come and go under strange circumstances. One guest might be a vampire, while another talks to plants and beavers. A statue in the garden seems to move when no one’s looking. Doors lead places they shouldn’t.)
The inn has… secrets!
At this point, Sarah Beth Durst is an auto-buy author for me; I gave both “The Spellshop” and “The Enchanted Greenhouse” five stars, and she’s someone I trust to drop me somewhere cozy, hand me something warm to drink, tuck me under a blanket, introduce me to a few delightfully strange creatures, and make the all-too-draining real world disappear for a while. “The Faraway Inn” does just that — and is full of the kind of magic that makes everyday life look a bit better. This book is cozy and sweet and whimsical and adventurous, and the inn itself quickly becomes as much of a character as anyone staying inside it. There are strange guests and stranger objects, homemade food and magical surprises, rooms to fix and mysteries to solve.
“The Faraway Inn” could easily feel enormous; the inn contains portals to other realms, and Durst can theoretically send Calisa — and the reader — almost anywhere. Instead, she keeps much of the story pretty darn close to home. Calisa spends a lot of time cleaning and gardening and helping keep the place afloat. That could feel rote, but Durst does a wonderful job of slipping her now-signature magic into the everyday work, turning chores into part of the adventure.
That doesn’t mean I never wanted the book to giddy-up and pick up the pace. The plot occasionally drifts into a collection of sweet, scattered adventures (as much as I loved those little moments), rather than a story that’s actually heading toward something big and exciting. I spent a decent chunk of the book waiting for the story to pick up and for the premise to open up into something compelling, rather than just cozy. A magical inn with doors to other worlds promises the reader a whole heck of a lot, and I wished Durst would push further through those doors instead of keeping the story so firmly rooted in the inn itself. There are places to go and people to see! (Vermont is great; magical realms are better.) But once the plot really got moving, the book did, too. The mystery deepened, the magic stretched, the stakes rose, and suddenly all that very lovely setup finally had somewhere to go.
Yes, the whole YA of the book is noticeable, especially compared with Durst’s earlier works — but that’s exactly the point: This is a YA book. The conflicts (both emotional and plot-driven) stay pretty simple, the romance remains nothing much more than sweet, and Durst rarely lets anything in here get too dark or too messy. The characters, as expected, have that YA tinge too. Calisa is kind, capable, and remarkably willing for a teenager to spend her summer doing all the hard work required to keep an inn running, and Jack is sweet and hard-working. Some readers might find the characters a little thin or the romance too easy, but I didn’t need much more from either. Sometimes a nice boy can just be a nice boy and a cozy book can just be a cozy book. I wanted a little more from the story, sure. But I got exactly enough from the place itself.
And if the inn ever starts taking reservations, I’ll even help with the toilets.
Thanks to NetGalley and Delacorte Press for providing me with an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
