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.

Last week, I read another book that I got from that box of free books on the sidewalk, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I think maybe someone here recommended it a while ago. At least, the title jumped out at me when I was digging through the box, so it was one of my selections.

I love time travel stories, but not the usual “person from our time goes back in time and has adventures/falls in love” type stories. I like some twists to it, like multiple or parallel timelines, non-linear storytelling, worries about changing the timeline, etc. The book is an interesting twist in that it’s about people from the past who’ve traveled to the “present” (which is the near future). It’s sort of an inverse of the Connie Willis time travel books, in which historians travel in time to study the past. Here, they bring people from the past who were known to have died forward in time just before they died (so they won’t affect the timeline) and study how time travel affects them.

Our heroine/narrator (who remains nameless throughout the book) works as a “bridge” for the Ministry of Time, the organization doing this work. Her job is to help the time travelers transition to their new lives while keeping an eye on them and reporting on how they’re doing. She’s assigned to a polar explorer who went missing in 1847 on an expedition. She’s to live with him for a year to help him adjust. There are other bridges who have different people in their care, including a young woman from the 1600s and a man from World War I.

The author does a wonderful job of capturing the voices and worldviews of these people and what they would think of a modern world. The woman from the 1600s embraces modern life for the freedoms she didn’t have in her time, comes to love movies and becomes a Swiftie. The man from WWI has some trouble adjusting, as he finds it hard to deal with the fact that there were more wars after that devastation. The Victorian polar explorer pretty much refuses to adapt, aside from being keen on motorcycles, and maintains his stiff upper lip and his manners.

This is a slow burn of a book. The first half is mostly a comedy of manners as we deal with all these historical fish out of water, but then it takes a turn into spy thriller, as things start happening to the time travelers and a threat becomes increasingly apparent. Our heroine starts to worry that the threat is coming from within, but she doesn’t know who she can trust — and then the time travelers aren’t sure they can trust her. Meanwhile, she and her assigned time traveler have grown far closer than they were supposed to, though they have very different ideas of what constitutes “courting.” That relationship is also a slow burn, though when it does happen, it gets pretty graphic, so fair warning. I was a little uncomfortable with those bits, since this person is a real historical figure and it’s kind of weird to get that explicit about a real person that way.

Aside from the time travel hijinks and spy thriller escapades, there’s some musing on what it is to be a displaced person who can never fit in. The narrator is biracial, the daughter of a refugee, and she’s well aware that her Victorian comes from a British empire where she wouldn’t have been considered fully human. At the same time, that helps her empathize with his situation of not quite fitting in.

Aside from my discomfort with graphic scenes involving a real person, I really enjoyed the book. It’s quite funny in places and then gets really emotional and tense. I’d recommend it for fans of the Connie Willis time travel books or other time travelers exploring history stories, like the TV series Timeless.

I love “what if?” stories that explore how things might have gone if someone made a different decision at a turning point or if a twist of fate had gone another way. The movie Sliding Doors is one of my favorites, and I wrote something in that vein as a Christmas novella.

In that box of books set out on the sidewalk earlier this year, I found a review copy for a book that falls into that category, Begin Again by Helly Acton. Our heroine Frankie is turning 36 and unhappy with her life, feeling like she made some wrong decisions along the way. She’s still single, in a job that she’s come to hate, living in a tiny apartment, and having disastrous dates while her friends are married, buying property, having kids, and having dream jobs. On the night of her birthday, on the way home from another disaster date, she slips, falls, hits her head, and wakes up in a strange place that seems to be part train station, part office park.

There she’s informed that she died when she hit her head, but she’s being given a second chance. She can move on or go back, and she can choose which life she wants to go back to. She gets to live 24 hours in each of the lives she’d have now if she’d made a different decision at a pivotal moment in her past — if she’d taken that job abroad, if she’d accepted that marriage proposal, if she’d gone back to that ex, if she hadn’t chickened out on that job interview. Or she could go back to the life she had. It’s not an easy decision because each life has its pluses and minuses, and her old life has things she doesn’t want to give up even if she wasn’t happy with all of it.

I know the term is out of favor these days, but this book was pure chick lit, right out of 2002. We had our London singleton career girl, her job in the media, and her group of quirky friends. They tend to refer to books like this as “rom coms” now, but the romance content was pretty minimal. It was mostly about the heroine and her growth as a person. I really miss books like this, and I enjoyed this one, particularly with the twist of exploring a variety of possible lives. It would make a good movie since the lives are so different and Frankie’s just dumped into them without any kind of download for her to know what happened in the meantime since she made that pivotal choice. She doesn’t know how her relationships stand, where things are in the house where she lives, or what she does for a living, and she has to bluff her way through and figure things out on the fly. It would be a fun role for an actress. I guess it’s similar to the TV series Being Erica.

It’s funny, I generally find “light” reading like this more thought-provoking than literary fiction, maybe because it comes closer to relating to my life, so it makes me think. Woven in among the comedy hijinks is the idea of figuring out what you really want and what’s most important to you, as well as the idea that whatever life you end up in, you can’t change the past but you can change the future.

It looks like this one is a couple of years old (but this time I wasn’t the one sitting on a review copy until well after the book was published. I didn’t get it until a couple of years after it was published) and never heard about it, so I don’t know how it did. My smallish town library system has a couple of copies, which suggests it got some pickup, but it has no other books by this author.

I’ve been pondering what my pivotal decisions would be. Possibly admitting to myself that I actually hated my major in college and letting myself explore other options instead of forcing myself to stick with it. Then there was a job I hoped to get in another part of the country, gave up on and took another job (and got a new apartment), only to have the first job contact me about an opening. Maybe the decision to submit Enchanted, Inc. as chick lit rather than as fantasy (since it came out right as chick lit was dying off and urban fantasy was on the rise). I don’t really have any relationship ones since I never turned down a marriage proposal, I have no “man who got away,” and when I’ve run into men I used to have crushes on and see them now, I feel like I dodged a bullet.

Like I said, it’s a fun, fluffy book, but it really made me think.