Book Review: ‘The Faraway Inn’ by Sarah Beth Durst (cosy YA romantasy)

One of my favourite books as a teenager was Sarah Beth Durst’s ‘Ice’, a re-telling of ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’, and it has one of the most unforgettable opening lines in a novel:

“Once upon a time, the North Wind said to the Polar Bear King, ‘Steal me a daughter, and when she grows, she will be your bride.’”

I read ‘Ice’ back in 2016 and I hadn’t read Durst since until I picked up ‘The Spellshop’ on a whim earlier in the year and fell in love. I quickly devoured ‘The Enchanted Greenhouse’ and jumped at the chance to read and review ‘The Faraway Inn’ on NetGalley even though I’ve moved away from reading YA in recent years. It was so sweet and a whole lot of fun, especially as it also counted for an r/Fantasy Bingo prompt!

When Calisa gets her heart broken, she’s quick to accept her moms’ suggestion to go and stay with her great aunt for the summer and help out at her inn in rural Vermont, even when it turns out that Auntie Zee wasn’t expecting her and is struggling to maintain the overgrown and rundown inn.

After convincing Auntie Zee to let her stay a few days, she begins to notice that there’s something not quite right about the inn, something possibly otherworldly. Auntie Zee is keeping a secret and Calisa is determined to uncover it and save the inn.

While it took me a little longer to settle into ‘The Faraway Inn’ than ‘The Spell Shop’ and ‘The Enchanted Greenhouse’, it still didn’t take long to be enchanted by the side characters and long for a visit to the inn.

The romance is very much a sub-plot in ‘The Faraway Inn’ and that was absolutely fine with me. Calisa and Jack, the groundkeeper’s son, build from strangers to friends to something more, and it lovely watching them get to know each other and unravel what’s happening at the inn. I was really pleased to see the novel go more into a mystery than the romance with substantial stakes while still retaining the cosiness that I was expecting. That’s a common thread in Durst’s cosy romantasy novels and possibly why they work so well for me: everything and everyone has a purpose.

I’m a big setting girl and Durst is a master at setting. An isolated inn in rural Vermont surrounded by dense, wild woodland sounds so gloriously peaceful, and yet also very alive. It was lovely to watch Calisa and Jack help bring it all back to its best and work so hard and so earnestly for it.

This is the perfect introduction to cosy romantasy for tweens and young teens with a sweet romance and a magical world full of vibrant and loveable characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan for the review copy.