Published By: Tor
Pages: 384
Released On: 06/08/2026
Marin has always belonged on the great blue sea. Betrayed by love, she lives and works as a supply runner, sailing from island to island, delivering an array of goods with Perri the sea serpent and Ree the sailor shrub as her crew.
On one of her routine trips to the capital, Alyssium, Marin finds a revolution underway — and a friend in the line of fire.
What starts as a rescue evolves into a deal: Marin will keep Dax on as a member of her crew if he pretends to be her boyfriend at the End-of-Harvest Festival back home.
But against her better judgment, Marin finds herself intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, his charming smile — and realizes that perhaps she isn’t saving him. Maybe it’s the other way around.
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Tor for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This is book three in the Spellshop series – The Spellshop was book number one, followed by The Enchanted Greenhouse (which I read just before this one), and I’ve pre-ordered number four which is The Magical Cheese Emporium. I love her books. They’re so much fun, full of love and hope and joy, they’re funny, romantic, magical, and just so uplifting and enjoyable.
It is a sequel, but I don’t think you need the read the ones beforehand. I mean, you’ll get more from it because you’ll meet familiar characters and you’ll know certain storylines, but the books work completely standalone.
I loved meeting Marin again. She was a small character in The Enchanted Greenhouse, and if I’m honest, she wasn’t really someone I was thinking of having her own book, but it made sense.
This one still had all the whimsical, magical elements, but it had a much deeper, darker, more serious side to it that I wasn’t expensing. I found it harder to get into. I needed that fantast world to wrap me up and comfort me, but this didn’t quite have that same touch.
I think it might have suffered from the fact that read The Enchanted Greenhouse just a day before and I loved that so much and with familiar characters and storylines, it was impossible not to compare the two. But this did get better as it went along.
If I’m being completely honest, it’s probably my least favourite of the three. But don’t think I didn’t like it, because I think it’s impossible not to like her books. It had so much charm, a gripping story, fabulous characters, heartfelt emotion, there were thrills and dangers – it had everything, except for that little spark that the other two had.
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