This book should have been right up my alley. A cozy fantasy with an introverted librarian and a sentient spider plant assistant? Sign me up! But it failed to live up to my expectations and ended up being kind of “meh.”
For me, the problems started almost right at the beginning. Main character Kiela and the spider plant Caz flee the Great Library of Alyssium when rebels set fire to it, and they head to Caltrey, the island where Kiela was born and lived for the first 9 years of her life. So we’re starting off this cozy fantasy with a traumatic event that continues to feel traumatic for Kiela throughout the book. It’s upsetting enough for her that she doesn’t even tell the island residents that the emperor was overthrown. We do circle back to this periodically and during the climax of the novel, but it felt jarring.
The writing was also not what I was expecting. It had a YA feel, and while I like reading some YA books, the book is marketed for adults. The prose is occasionally repetitive and lacking in texture to really add life to the world that Durst has created. In fact, although we know that Kiela is blue with dark blue hair and magenta freckles, we get almost no description of the male love interest other than that he is basically Mr. Muscles with “nice” eyes. He’s a merhorse herder, so I just kind of envisioned him as Eric from The Little Mermaid. We do finally—halfway into the book—at least find out what color his eyes are: “warm brown, flecked with green and amber and a hint of blue and even purple. The more she stared, the more colors she saw . . .,” and that was just excessive.
There were things I liked. I loved the found family aspect, and I also really loved Caz, with his anxiety, love of books, and love for Kiela, and later we meet a sentient cactus. Why don’t more people talk about the cactus?!
This was my first book by this author. It was a bit of a letdown (3.5 stars rounded down), but since I didn’t hate it, I will eventually try another book by her. It just probably won’t be in this series.