I’m on a reading roll this summer, as I’ve found a number of good books. The latest wasn’t a big surprise, as I’ve read the rest of the series, but I think this one is my favorite so far. I read the latest book in Sarah Beth Durst’s Spellshop universe, Sea of Charms, and it was absolutely delightful.

This one overlaps a lot with the previous book, The Enchanted Greenhouse, showing some of the same events, but from a different perspective, which gives them a different context. The heroine of this book is the sailboat captain who brought supplies, people, and messages to and from the island in that book. In this one, we see what went into getting those things to the island and what else was happening along the way. But I don’t think you need to have read the other book first. I think you could read either one in any order, and each will give you context to the other. It’s an interesting way of handling a series (that I now kind of want to play with).

Marin’s happy being mostly alone with her boat on the sea, along with her friend the sea monster, but in the chaotic aftermath of a revolution, she finds herself taking on a composer/musician she’s met in the capital city. She didn’t really want a crew, but he wants to see more of the world and the city isn’t safe for him. She agrees to take him if he’ll come with her to her family’s local festival as insulation against her ex, who’s now out to ruin her family. Meanwhile, her family owes a huge debt from getting her boat built, and she doesn’t have a lot of time to pay it off, so she has to take as many jobs as possible, which means taking some risks.

This book proves that a fantasy can have adventure in it and still have that cozy vibe. It seems like a lot of cozy fantasies, including mine, are focused on communities in one place—a neighborhood, a shop, a village—but this gets into a broader sense of community in the people one person might know in various places she visits. You still get that warmth and comfort even as we’re sailing the high seas and dealing with things like magical storms and dragons. The other thing that’s interesting about this book is that it shows that you can have a “found family” and still have a family of birth. Marin finds herself part of a new “family” in the crew that grows around her as she gradually lets others in, but she still has her parents at a home she returns to regularly. A lot of found family tends to involve people who’ve lost or been cast out of their birth families, so it’s nice to see this spin on that, adding to the family instead of replacing them.

Even though the book actually takes place during the fall and winter, it feels like a summer book to me, probably because of the sea and swimming, so it’s a good cozy fantasy for sitting on the porch or deck with a glass of iced tea or lemonade. I guess it would also work with hot tea on a cool, rainy day, but I was reading it in August.

I’m also encouraged by the fact that you can mix cozy and adventure because the book I’ve been working on is sort of an adventure story but the cozy vibes keep sneaking in and I wasn’t sure they mixed well.

One genre I really miss is the Regency romance. Not the Regency-set historical romance, like the Bridgerton books, but the old “category” Regencies that were modeled on Georgette Heyer’s books, which were modeled on Jane Austen. They were short books in a similar kind of tone and content to Austen and Heyer, so very chaste, witty dialogue, clever heroines, and maybe something to say about society and the plight of women in it. They were category-like lines, so a certain number of books fitting certain guidelines were published every month, and you could even subscribe to a line to get all the books every month. The subscription model died off with the growth of Amazon — why subscribe to get all the books delivered to you, some of which you might not like, when you can pick and choose exactly the books you want to get delivered to you? And this kind of book became less popular as the steamier historicals moved into the Regency period. I think they also sort of killed themselves because they started changing the books to be steamier, but still not truly steamy, as the Regency-set steamy historicals became popular, which meant that the people who liked them for what they were no longer liked them but they weren’t steamy enough to appeal to the people who’d never been interested in them because they were too mild.

I started reading these in junior high, and I particularly loved that a lot of them had unconventional heroines, the kind who were still unmarried at a later age (like actually in their 20s) because they were intellectual “bluestockings” or wild tomboys who didn’t fit into society. I guess maybe there was a hint of “not like other girls” there, but I suspect it was more a way of having less icky age gaps than you really might have had in that period and finding reasons for that. Of course she’s not yet married at 21, she’s terribly bookish and tends to bore anyone who dances with her with her opinions. Or she’s a better rider than the men, which intimidates them.

I recently found a book at the library that gave me all the old Regency romance vibes, but with some modern twists, Fast and Fastidious by R.M. Caldwell. Our heroine is very much coded as neurospicy, though not labeled as such in the book because they wouldn’t have known about autism. She doesn’t understand the unwritten social rules, so she writes them down and codifies them for herself, then rigidly follows them so she won’t risk getting it wrong. The one area where she breaks from society’s norms is in her interest in carriages. She knows all the specs and how they’re put together, and when she learns of the midnight races, in which competitors meet at midnight during the full moon to race carriages, she can’t resist. But when a new person moves into a neighboring estate and shows up as a competitor at the race just when there’s a string of carriage robberies, she can’t help but be suspicious and decides to get to the bottom of it.

We have drawing room and ballroom intrigue and lots of witty Regency banter, and all the things that make this kind of book so much fun, along with secret identities and espionage. Throwing a heroine who struggles to understand rules that don’t make sense into the rules-driven Regency period is an interesting twist to the genre. These are such fun characters and a fun story, with a romance that works for me (I can see why they’d like each other and can imagine their relationship working) and it reminded me of some of my favorite books when I was reading a lot of Regencies. I hope this author writes more books (nothing else is listed on Amazon) because this was just what I was in the mood for.