Everything is political.

Cozy fiction doesn't get a pass because it wants to give you a warm, fuzzy feeling.

The Spellshop, surprisingly, opens with a context that will shape the entirety of the narration, for the wrong reasons. A revolution, the fall of an empire, the revendication of the common folks. All of this, the main character couldn't care less. Sometime her tiny brain does caress the topic, never deeply, never acknowledging more than "the emperor was greedy".

She mentions starvation and torture as something she was vaguely aware of. Never acknowledging that she was one of the keeper of the ressource, a guardian that had her albeit small part in keeping others away from safety. But, more infuriatingly, she mentions them as something not important, not worth taking an instant to fully comprehend. People died Kiela.

From this opening, the warm and fuzzy feeling expected from cozy fiction will be cold, sharp, and unfortunately never to be heard of again.

Kiela is not an intelligent nor caring woman, and that includes her best-friend Caz. She will irrationally fixates on her terror of being discovered by people who a) have their own problems (islanders) and b) have no more power over her (Empire). As a reader, it felt like either she was the dumbest person walking or the author failed at explaining the situation. And honestly I'll say it's both.

Because the pacing is all over the place. The first half is slow, nothing big really happens -which makes her fixation on being arrested the more insufferable. Which is why it was unexpected to suddenly have a physical obstacle (as in the typical narrative outline's obstacles) that was in every way too late, but also it gave so little place for the danger to grow, for the reader to feel any kind of dread for the main character. All there is is urgency from the narration. And it would already have been hard to follow had it been one obstacle, but they kept on coming on after the other, to the point they were happening and resolved in a page or two.

I felt like I had run a marathon and my brain was about to explode with too much information.

But that isn't what made me hate this. As I said, everything is political. Including the distasteful choice to have several monologues (I refused to consider that part a conversation) declaring blank statements about equality and what not at a moment that made no sense, to a character who isn't even against those points. It felt hollow, dull, and a cope-out. Do not come talking big words you don't seem to understand and make yourself a hero in shiny armour when there was no growth, no acceptation of your own flaws. The captain wasn't the problem here.

Also, let's stop marriage proposal as a happy ending cause it falls flat and unconvincing. Wedding isn't the shiny goal at the end of the road.