TL;DR: A cozy little read in a bookshop with a truly playful story.
Source: NetGalley, so many thanks to the publisher!
Plot: Princess Tandy gets trapped in a bookstore and seven princes attempt to free her from the curse.
Characters: A delight. I truly enjoyed everyone. Tandy is pretty standard fair for a cozy heroine but the side cast were a delight.
Setting: A magical bookshop. I adored it and it did a great job for the setting.
Fantasy: Very low fantasy with just enough hints of fantasy to truly make it fantastical.
Summary:
Princess Tanadelle of the Widdenmar is disillusioned with life as a princess. She longs for real conversation, the chance to build a life of her own making, and uninterrupted reading time.
During a routine royal visit to the town of Little Pepperidge, Tandy’s dream comes true when she finds herself cursed to remain in a run-down bookshop until she unlocks her heart’s desire. Certain that someone will figure out how to break the curse eventually, and delighted by the prospect of an entire bookstore of her own, Tandy settles into life among the stacks. She finds it easy to exchange balls and endless state dinners for teetering piles of books and an irritatingly handsome pirate who seems bent on stealing her stock.
She even starts to believe she’s stumbled into her very own happily ever after.
There’s just one, minor problem: as Tandy’s royal duties go unfulfilled, her frantic parents start sending princes to woo her, each one of them certain their kiss will break the curse. After all, what more could a princess want but a prince?
Thoughts:
Stay for a Spell was a sleeper hit for me. I’ll admit I had the book on my shelf for months, the eArc for even longer, but I put it off. That was a damn shame on my part because this was a delight to read. This is the cozy bookshop book I needed to follow up one of my favorite cozy series, and I enjoyed it immensely.
Princess Tandy does the traveling work her family doesn’t want to do. She’s mostly okay with this as it gives her time to read, but on a stop in a small town she discovers she’s out of reading material. What to do but stop by the local shop? Obviously this leads to a curse and she is trapped in the shop. From here we see her make the best of it, meet a very fun cast of characters, and find her heart’s desire.
This one does cozy right. We have low stakes, but a slight real threat. We get little bits of keeping the bookshop up, changing things, and her interpersonal relationship with the folks in and around. There is also a ton of humor. The author herself says in the acknowledgments she ended up making this one more and more ridiculous to help her deal with real life and it worked so well. I enjoyed so much of this, and I really am excited to see the next book.
So if you’re looking for a great new cozy read, I can’t recommend this one enough. The romance is light, the cozy is high, and the good feelings abound. Stay For a Spell is a lovely read.
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