What Makes Fantasy So Cozy – GUEST POST by Sarah Beth Durst (THE SPELLSHOP)
Today we’re thrilled to welcome back to the Hive Sarah Beth Durst!
Her latest novel, The Spellshop, has been described as ‘cosy fantasy’, the subgenre that’s lately been gaining a lot of popularity. Sarah joins us today to discuss this subgenre further, but before we read that, let’s find out more about The Spellshop:
Every home needs a little magic . . .
Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people, and as librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she hasn’t had to.
She and her assistant, Caz, a sentient spider plant, have spent most of the last eleven years sequestered among the empire’s precious spellbooks, protecting the magic for the city’s elite. But a revolution is brewing and when the library goes up in flames, Kiela and Caz steal whatever books they can and flee to the faraway island where she grew up. But to her dismay, in addition to a nosy – and very handsome – neighbour, she finds the town in disarray.
The empire has slowly been draining power from the island, and now Kiela is determined to make things right. But opening up her own spellshop comes with its own risks – the consequence of sharing magic with commoners is death. And as Kiela starts to make a place for herself among the townspeople, she realizes she must break down the walls she has kept so high . . .
From award-winning author Sarah Beth Durst, The Spellshop is a cottagecore cosy fantasy following a woman’s unexpected journey through the low-stakes market of illegal spell-selling and the high-risk business of starting over.
The Spellshop is available now. You can read Nils’ review here and you can order your copy on Bookshop.org
What Makes Cozy Fantasy So Cozy
by Sarah Beth Durst
When I sat down to write The Spellshop, I wanted to write a book that felt like a warm hug. Or like sitting on a couch with a blanket wrapped around you, a magical cat on your lap, and a mug of hot chocolate in your hands.
In other words, I wanted to write a cozy fantasy.
Cozy fantasy is a new subgenre — or, more accurately, it’s a new name for the type of optimistic fantasy / comfort read that’s descended from books like Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and Beauty by Robin McKinley. It’s often described as low stakes or slice-of-life fantasy.
It’s not about saving the world; it’s about saving a heart or a soul.
It often features found family, quaint shops, quirky villagers, and a lot of baked goods. The Spellshop is about a rogue librarian and her best friend, a sentient spider plant, who start an illegal spellshop in a rose-covered cottage — it’s full of stolen spellbooks, friendly neighbors, merhorses, and a lot of cinnamon buns and raspberry jam. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree has a retired orc who starts her own coffee shop (which also sells baked goods). In Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne, an ex-guard for a tyrannical queen and a sorceress flee to open a tea shop. The upcoming The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong has a found family in a traveling wagon — they sell fortunes and, yes, baked goods.
But those surface-level similarities aren’t what makes cozy fantasy so cozy. Emily Wilde’s Enclyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett is an excellent cozy fantasy that doesn’t involve any kind of mercantile undertaking whatsoever. Same with Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, though you will encounter found family there as well.
It’s not about the tropes; it’s about the vibe. It’s about how it makes a reader feel — as if they’ve entered a sanctuary and there’s a pleasant voice saying, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
So how is this achieved?
It’s actually surprisingly tricky from a sheer technical craft standpoint. We — writers, particularly genre writers — teach ourselves to always raise the stakes and ratchet up the tension. Keep the reader turning pages by making their heart beat faster — heighten the drama, increase the danger, add to the risk. It’s a familiar story pattern that everyone knows how to respond to, and it works great in thrillers, epic fantasies, and star-crossed romances.
But with cozy, you need to unwind the tension and deliberately lower everyone’s heartrate. You need to allow the story to just breathe, while simultaneously pushing the narrative (gently) forward.
Think of that scene in Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, where Chihiro is on the train with No-Face. Just riding the train through the ocean. Peaceful music plays. It’s a moment of stillness. The cozy fantasy writer strives to achieve that in prose.
There are a number of different way to do this. One is by grounding the character (and therefore the reader) in the moment by focusing in on sensory details:
She picked a raspberry, stared at it a moment, and then popped it into her mouth. For an instant, it felt smooth and tasteless, and then she squashed it. Sharp sweetness exploded gloriously over her tongue. It was so overwhelmingly raspberry that it felt as if it invaded her skull and displaced every thought — there was only flavor. Powerful, intoxicating flavor. She’d forgotten what a freshly picked berry tasted like. It tasted like a bit of sunshine.
Another technique is to add humor to diffuse a potentially tense moment (for context, Kiela is the protagonist, and Caz is her best friend, a sentient spider plant):
“You could have been struck by lightning, swept out to sea, crushed by a tree — I’d half written your eulogy,” Caz said. “I said very nice things.”
Kiela laughed. “Thank you, I think?”
“It was in iambic pentameter.”
“That’s amazing.”
“I had to create different versions, to match the different ways you died.”
Gently, she said, “I didn’t die.”
A third technique (and my favorite) is to embrace joy:
The merhorse picked up speed, jumping through the waves like a dolphin. Kiela clung to her mane, feeling as if she were holding on to seaweed, slippery but soft. She let out a shriek as Sian leaped over the top of a large cresting wave, and then she laughed as they sailed down the other side. She’d never felt anything like this. It was terrifying. And wonderful. She felt as if her blood had become the wind, and her breath had become the sea spray. She tasted salt, and she tasted freedom. Both were glorious.
It’s this last technique that I used the most while writing The Spellshop. Every chapter, every scene, I’d ask myself: What else can I add that brings joy, wonder, and delight?
I absolutely loved every second of writing this book, and in my opinion, that’s what makes a cozy fantasy so cozy: it’s written with love and hope. And, yes, often with baked goods.
The Spellshop is available now. You can read Nils’ review here and you can order your copy on Bookshop.org
Sarah Beth Durst is the author of over twenty-five fantasy books for adults, teens, and kids, including The Queens of Renthia series, Drink Slay Love, and Spark. She has won an American Library Association Alex Award and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has been a finalist for the Andre Norton Nebula Award three times. She lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband, her children, and her ill-mannered cat. Visit her at www.sarahbethdurst.com.