Sixteen-year-old Calisa’s perfect NYC summer plans are derailed when she catches her boyfriend cheating. To escape the city, her moms send her off to help Mom Kate’s Auntie Zee, who owns a bed and breakfast in the deep woods of Vermont. They haven’t visited Auntie Zee in years but Calisa has fuzzy childhood memories, and pictures her destination as the perfect place to recover from heartache.

However, when she arrives, she finds not the cozy B&B she was expecting, but a run-down inn in the middle of the forest. Her aunt is cantankerous and eccentric, and makes it clear that Calisa is not welcome. The single employee is a (very cute) teenager named Jack, and the few guests are…different. Despite the lack of warm welcome, Calisa is determined to stay. The last thing she wants to do is return to the city and watch her ex flirting with his new girlfriend.

In a bid to prove her worth to Auntie Zee, Calisa throws herself into long-overdue cleaning projects, bakes cakes to reinstate a defunct teatime tradition, and generally makes herself indispensable. Auntie Zee grudgingly gives her three days, but lays down the rules: No opening doors, and no asking questions.

Calisa agrees, but then opens the bathroom closet looking for cleaning supplies (oops!) and a very large winged “lizard” tumbles out. Jack is evasive about answering her questions. Guests act in inexplicable ways and arrive in the most unexpected manner. Then Auntie Zee disappears, and the truth of the magical nature of the inn finally becomes clear to Calisa. It’s equally apparent that only she has the power to find her aunt and save the inn.

A super fun story with one foot in the real world and one foot in the enchanted. Calisa is a relatable heroine with a character arc that brings her from standard-issue Brooklyn-dwelling teenager to one that discovers she is the youngest in a line of witches, and readers will enjoy both the magical world-building and the slow burn romance developing between her and Jack. Diversity is present in secondary but important characters; Calisa has two moms, and the various inn guests are magical creatures, generally human-adjacent in appearance, who visit via portals to different worlds; one couple is coded as gay. All stay at the inn as it is understood to be a safe, protected space from the larger world.

Aesthetically, the book cover is an eye-catcher with gorgeous sprayed edges. This is a great purchase for a YA collection, especially for anyone curating shelves aimed at younger YA, where readers enjoy fantasy and magical adventure with a romantic sub-plot.

5 stars

– Jenny Martinez, Maine State Library