A few weeks ago, I mentioned playing with the idea of a cozy fantasy rom-com series involving an old Victorian mansion split up into apartments, with each book focusing on a tenant in the building. It seems there is a viable market for this sort of thing because I just found a couple of books at the library along those lines.

The first one I read was Books & Bewitchment by Isla Jewell (a pen name for science fiction/fantasy author Delilah S. Dawson). This one involves a young woman who receives word of the death of the grandmother she never met (due to a conflict between her mother and her mother’s mother) and an inheritance in the town her mother swore never to return to. Our heroine has no reason to stay where she is, since she just lost her job when her boss wanted to hire a relative, so she goes to check it out. It turns out that she’s inherited several buildings in the downtown, but only one is viable and has a currently operating business, a video store. She also discovers that her grandmother was magical, and distributing her ashes somehow gets her spirit into the heroine’s pet bird. As she sets out to turn the video store into a bookstore, she learns more about her magical heritage and what happened with her family, as well as about the conflicts her grandmother had with other magical people in town, including the family of the handsome contractor who’s helping her renovate the video store into a bookstore.

This one is very cozy. There’s no real antagonist. It’s more about mediating conflict than overcoming it, which makes for relaxing reading. It looks like it’s the setup for a series, since the heroine has two sisters and there are two more buildings with non-functioning businesses in them.

The other book was The Only Purple House in Town by Ann Aguirre. In this one, a young woman inherits a huge old house from the great aunt she barely knew (I’m sensing a theme here). She’s utterly broke, so she decides to live in the house and take in renters, and she ends up with a quirky found family as she starts to learn more about her own origins. The fantasy twist is that this happens in what I guess you could call an alternate present in which magical beings have come out into the open. Witches, vampires, and shapeshifters are just ordinary people, and in the “island of misfit toys” group of outsiders who find themselves in her house, there are some of those. But not everyone’s happy about this, including the next-door neighbor.

This is a big found family kind of story, and I think it might actually have worked better without the fantasy elements, which sometimes went over the top to be a distraction. You could almost remove all the fantasy elements without drastically changing the core of the story. Still, it was a fun read, very cozy and comforting. The romance is relatively subtle and very sweet.

I don’t know if there being so many of this sort of thing means it’s been done or that there’s a clear market for it. I still need to come up with some specific plots before I have enough to even discuss it with my agent.