The Faraway Inn by Sarah Beth Durst Review

A teen girl decides to spend her summer helping her eccentric great aunt manage her quaint Vermont inn—only to discover that the fixer-upper is hiding a magical secret—in this cozy and irresistible new young adult fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spellshop.
 

When sixteen-year-old Calisa arrives at her great-aunt’s B&B in rural Vermont for the summer, she’s shocked to find a rundown inn rather than the cozy bed-and-breakfast she was expecting. Grumpy and eccentric, Auntie Zee is determined to keep anyone from messing with her beloved inn . . . even though she clearly needs the help.
 

To convince her great-aunt to keep her around, Calisa sets to work fixing up the inn, enlisting extra help from the groundskeeper’s (handsome) son. But the longer she stays, the surer she is that there’s something strange about the B&B—and its guests. Something almost . . . otherworldly.
 

The inn is keeping a magical secret—but to protect the place she’s come to love, Calisa must unravel the truth before it’s too late.

This review is based on a complimentary Advanced Reader Copy provided by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books.

Like the cake and other baked goods Calisa makes when she arrives at the isolated inn, Sarah Beth Durst’s YA book The Faraway Inn feels like it’s filled to the brim with all the right warm and cozy ingredients. Light magical whimsy, cottagecore aesthetic, dusty and neglected rooms, and an assortment of amusingly odd customers checked in for extended stays. While certainly cozy and devoid of anything remotely uncomfortable, the Faraway Inn is a book that some may find too safe and lacking a notable hook or spark compared to other similar reads.

Following the recent betrayal and breakup with her boyfriend Ethan after she finds him cheating with another girl, a heartbroken Calisa seeks a mental and social reset during the summer break before her senior year of high school. She arrives at the Faraway Inn, a reclusive bed and breakfast in the Vermont wilderness and is shocked to find the once charming inn to be in a state of disrepair. To make matters worse, her Aunt Zee doesn’t even want her to stay or help at the inn, with Calisa now having only three days to prove her worth before she’s forced to return home. With the help of the cute handyman and jack of all trades Jack (see what I did there), the two of them attempt to return the inn to its formal rustic glory. But the longer Calisa is at the inn, the more she notices peculiar things of magical origin. And when Aunt Zee goes missing, Calisa and Jack must discover secrets of the Faraway Inn while appeasing its current guests and their unorthodox requests.

On paper, the Faraway Inn sounds like a perfect blend of warm escapism, cottagecore, and light-hearted intrigue that’s perfectly suited for the cozy fantasy genre. Its story is simple, comforting, and low stakes, a book you can pick up and put down for short reading sessions without losing any details. Unfortunately, the cozy intent and relaxing tone is just that, cozy and relaxing but without any sort of strong narrative or direction. Cozy fantasy in general tends to be rather hit or miss genre for me as I generally prefer more intense, complex, or thought-provoking reads. However, the Faraway Inn felt especially slow, bland, and underwhelming due to a variety of contributing factors.

First and foremost, my most prominent note with this book is that it feels like it’s marketed to the wrong demographics and reading group. Its book blurb, author’s comments, and book listing all categorize the Faraway Inn as a YA cozy fantasy book given that Calisa is seventeen years old and Jack around the same age. However, when getting into the book, it’s quickly evident that this novel has an identity crisis of being pushed as a YA book when its characterizations, dialogue, simplicity, and narration are much more in line with that of a middle school aged children’s book. The story, its character depth, motivations, and level of nuance is very surface level and casual to the point that this book feels far too young to be a YA book typically targeting 13–18-year-old teenager readers as well as young adults. This book instead feels much more fitting for readers 11-13 years old instead, though the inclusion of occasional swearing and light language is at odds with the rest of the book’s contents.

While Calisa is an appealing character in her own right and quite spunky, her internal character logic, narrated thoughts, and concerns just feel so young. Her character narration and reactions often feel spastic, overwritten, and I’m not sure how else to say it, childish and dimwitted despite being a teenager. Jack’s character fares even worse, particularly the way the book handles his family/background and his challenges with almost everything introduced in the story. I believe his character was likely intended to have a lovable golden retriever energy, but to me he came off as being hopelessly useless, spineless and quite bland as a character. While the romance is a supporting element rather than the focus, their romantic chemistry feels almost non-existent to the point of chaste platonic friends. I definitely don’t want spice in a YA fantasy book, but their relationship essentially felt like it boiled down to “this person is nice and supportive, I like them” which sounds like a passing school crush.

The character development also felt quite lacking across the board. Calisa’s attempts to help fix the inn and convince her aunt to stay don’t address their characters’ distant relationship and family dynamics until the very end of the book in a rushed and flippant manner that feels like a major missed opportunity. The book also spends so much time repeatedly highlighting how Ethan betrayed Calisa by cheating on her, which is meant to exemplify how much better Jack treats and respects Calisa. However, her heartbroken feelings of betrayal feel very one-dimensional, young (again middle school age feeling), and Ethan’s memories are repetitive, repeating the same thing repeatedly only slightly rephrased. Later, her conflict with Ethan is resolved so casually and rushed that it feels underwhelming compared to how much the book kept bringing him up as a major plot element. And then there’s the storyline of Calisa being kept in the dark about the existence of magic, her family’s history with the inn, and her mothers’ connections to it. The other guests at the inn are given even less time and development, where their backstories and personal issues are covered and resolved in only one chapter each. Mulligan’s conflict felt so underdeveloped, I could barely remember what his concern and attachment to another guest during what was supposed to be one of the most dramatic moments in the book and felt like Durst was checking boxes off a list cheaply for diversity and representation. While the ideas were good on paper, it felt like it lacked the foreshadowing and attention required earlier in the book to work and had a compound effect on top of Clisa and Aunty Zee’s poorly developed dynamic, resulting in a dull and unsatisfying narrative climax.

The book’s pacing and unfocused narrative unfortunately also doesn’t help the situation. Although cozy fantasy books in general tend to be slower paced than other fantasy sub genres, the Faraway Inn feels especially slow which is odd considering YA books are typically snappier and fast-paced to hold younger readers’ shorter attention spans. While the book features a compelling premise suggesting a magical mystery and light fantasy story, the fantasy part is so light to the point that it’s barely there up to the half-way point. Additionally, the entire first half of the book is spent with Calisa bumbling around the inn cleaning, baking, but not really doing anything of importance or building the story. If not for my persistence against dropping books and looking to follow through on reviewing advanced reader copies, I certainly would have and should have DNF-ed this book. The early chapters have some nice rural cottage visuals and the book is full of food descriptions and baked sweets, but most of these details often felt unnecessary. I’m all for atmospheric descriptions, but there’s a difference between details for immersion vs those that are irrelevant bloat, many scenes feeling like a descriptive audio track of a movie or TV show. The story does pick up in the second half when Aunt Zee goes missing while Calisa and Jack explore the fantasy secret hiding in the inn, but frustratingly the story skims over the “faraway” part of the premise and its implications and instead focuses on the book’s trite storylines.

Seemingly mismarketed, narratively unfocused and slow, and featuring immature and lackluster character development, unfortunately the Faraway Inn was an all-around disappointment for me. Between its storytelling that feels overwritten with redundant details and its off-balanced fantasy elements, this book really felt like a drag the entire time I was reading it. While definitely cozy and warm, it almost feels like Durst went out her way to avoid anything remotely tense or upsetting, scrubbing the book clean and just leaving a lot of cottagecore fluff behind. And that’s honestly a bummer since this book has a lot of great ideas that are undeveloped or skimmed over in favor of soft vibes. The book is nicely polished, presentable, and decently written, earning its 2-star rating on the merits of its objective strengths, though it really felt like a waste of time for me personally. The Faraway Inn is an unfortunate case where it’s not particularly funny (see A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping), nuanced and character-driven (see Violet Thistlewaite is Not A Villain Anymore), wholesome and sweet (see The House in the Cerulean Sea), or fairytale-like (see Emily Wilde). I can see readers that particularly love simple low-stakes cozy fantasy books having a relaxing time, but for others that only dapple in the sub genre or read a variety of genres like myself, there are unfortunately far better options out there than the Faraway Inn.