cozy – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I’ve done not much but sleep this weekend, and at least one person in the house has Covid and at least two are sick, and I didn’t have a lot of grading to do today but what I had to do was immensely annoying.

So, please, forgive me, when I write a very short review, less than it deserves: that The Enchanted Greenhouse is delightful, and it’s a sort-of sequel (same world, different characters) to The Spellshop, which I didn’t review when it came out last year but was also delightful, and it was absolutely the antidote to having read a bunch of books lately that I didn’t like all that much. It is short (I finished it in less than three hours, easy), low stakes (sure, “cottage core” or “cozy,” either works) and has a romance angle without ever descending into smut, and there are talking plants and a cat with wings.

I loved it, but I’m too tired to say much more, so just go read it, and enjoy peeling the pages apart, because something about the way they stained the edges kinda locks them together a little bit, and I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that the physical feeling of splitting the pages as I was reading didn’t add to my enjoyment of the book, because it totally did.

Back to bed.

It’s possible that by the time I go to sleep tonight I will have finished five books this weekend, and two of them I did not like very much. One of them may have been my fault, as it demanded a more careful reader than I’ve had the energy to be lately, and one, to my dismay, turned out to be something called extreme horror, which is code for “mentions things being crusted in pubic hair four times in the first fifty pages,” at which point I noped out.

We had an afternoon wedding in Indianapolis today, and I read S.A. MacLean’s The Phoenix Keeper cover-to-cover on the drive, closing the book with perhaps a minute of driving to go until we got home, and it was wonderful. Pay no attention to the tagline on the cover, which is referring to the phoenixes, not the people; dating is one of the many things on the main character’s mind, and she goes out with two people over the course of the book, but this is very much not a romantasy, a genre that I’m growing a trifle tired of at the moment. It’s a subplot and while it works out delightfully (there’s that word again) it’s very much not what the book is about. Also, the blurb appears on the back of my lovely Illumicrate edition of the book, and not on the front, which is nice.

One subgenre I’m not tired of yet, though, is the cozy fantasy, and … oh, man, this book is a hoodie and a warm blanket and maybe a sleeping cat in your lap to go with it. The titular character, Aila, is a 28-year old zookeeper with an anxiety disorder and maybe a touch of the ’tism to go with it,(*) and the entire book takes place at the zoo, with only a couple of brief interludes to her apartment and one (1) date at a restaurant. The problem driving the narrative is getting a second phoenix for her zoo so that she can have a breeding pair (the author explicitly references how zoos brought the California condor back to viability in a foreword, and the parallels are not subtle) and then how she manages to convince these complicated animals to accept each other and mate.

There are complications. There’s another zookeeper she doesn’t get along with. It’ll all be fine.

Turns out I like books set in zoos, and while I’m normally a stickler for worldbuilding, “this isn’t set on Earth, there are magical animals, fuckin’ roll with it” is more or less all the worldbuilding you’re gonna get, and it’s really all the book needs. I mean, there’s drama; there are poachers to worry about, and there’s the relationship stuff, but a big part of being cozy fantasy is relatively low stakes, and again, you know it’s all gonna work out fine and it does. I really enjoyed reading this, and I’ll definitely check out whatever S.A. MacLean comes up with next.

(Also: this book does queernormative societies quite well; Aila goes out with a guy, and then goes out with a girl, and it’s all good, and there’s a trans character and her transness is revealed in the most natural and easy and clean way I think I’ve ever seen in a book before. I’ve talked about this before, but trans side characters can be tricky, and there’s no Sekrit Penis moment in this book and the reveal, such as it is, comes in what felt like perfectly natural dialogue. Extra points for all of that.)

(*) I can imagine a reader who feels like Aila is kind of A Lot. I am not that reader.)