Book of the Day

From the review

Marin's boat crews itself with a sea serpent who reads the currents better than any compass and a sailor shrub who splices rope faster than any human hand, and that detail tells you everything about how magic works in the Crescent Islands. It's practical. It gets worked into daily labor instead of locked away with wizards in towers. Sarah Beth Durst's Sea of Charms, the third novel in her Spellshop series, follows Marin as she ferries cargo between islands, nursing a heartbreak sharp enough that she picked a boat over a bed and calls it a career choice. She's good at her job. She's good at being alone. Then a routine run to the capital city of Alyssium drops her straight into a revolution and a rescue, and neither her boat nor her rules for staying uninvolved survive the trip. The rescue is Dax, a man with more stubbornness than sense and a habit of telling stories like he's daring you to stop listening. Marin pulls him out of the fighting and, half out of guilt and half out of a need for another set of hands, offers him a spot on her crew. He counters with a deal: he'll work the ropes if she'll pose as his girlfriend at her hometown's End-of-Harvest Festival, no questions asked. It's an arrangement that only survives inside a novel, and Durst knows it, which is why she doesn't let it stay simple for long. Dax's stories carry real weight from what he lived through in Alyssium. Marin's distance turns out to be less a boundary than a wound she's been sailing circles around for years. Watching two people who are lying about being a couple accidentally tell each other more truth than they meant to is most of the pleasure here, and it lands because both of them are stubborn enough to keep resisting it right up until they can't.