When a magical hotel appears smack-dab in the middle of the most unmagical of worlds, the last thing the residents expect is to fall in love.
Manager of the Number Five Wayside Inn and World Travel Hub, Pax Nomen has one of the easiest jobs in all the known universes, unless you count the occasional plumbing disaster. When Number Five Wayside gets stranded on a non-magical world, even Pax's trusty Wayside Handbook can’t help him. How is he going to “reboot” the hotel and keep it on its magical journey?
Josie LaChusia is a single mom experiencing debt, having parenting doubts, and tipping dangerously toward depression when an ad pops up on her phone that an apartment is available in a building she’s never seen before.
Pax needs a new guest to restart his hotel, and Josie needs a nudge to restart her life. In a building occupied by faeries, gargoyles, and a gnome with a bad attitude, two souls from very different places come together to create a home like no other.
Magic & Mischief at the Wayside Hotel is a charming cozy fantasy with a strong romance thread. It’s set in an intriguing world that left me with some questions that didn’t stop me from enjoying the story. Pax and Josie are very well drawn and engaging, and the secondary characters have enough layers and detail to seem real without taking over the story.
The Wayside Inns travel between realms. Travelers seeking to reach one of these realms go to a place that’s a stop for one of the inns and register as guests. The inns have strict rules to make different, sometimes mutually hostile species, coexist peacefully. The problem this Wayside Inn faces is that it has run out of magical fuel. That’s how it comes to land, and be stranded, on our Earth. Some of the inns have disappeared, but no one knows why.
We don’t learn much about these other worlds, but Pax shows Josie records of one that’s drawn in vivid and appealing detail. The brief explanation of the inns’ traveling implies that any inn can go to any and every destination. I couldn’t help wondering how this worked and whether there actually were routes for the individual inns.
Pax and his assistant manager, Maddy, don’t know what to do to fix the Wayside so it can resume its travels. The inhabitants, who’ve paid for transportation, understandably want to reach their intended destinations. Pax has an idea, bringing in an ordinary person, making a change in an effort to “reboot” the inn, which the instruction manual directs them to do but does not define. Some of the guests favor this approach, some do not, and a couple want to try using an ordinary person as a blood sacrifice. In the end, they advertise an apartment for rent, knowing a nonmagical human will move in because this world has nothing else.
Contemporary popular culture plays a big role in this book.
There are many pop culture references. For the most part, they were a lot of
fun. I loved seeing the stranded fairies become enamored of TikTok and
cheerleading, for example. By the end of the book, though, I felt that there
were too many pop culture callbacks.
One of the threads that runs through the book is Pax learning contemporary
American culture. His internal questions about various topics, which he then
consults Google for information about, are humorous and endearing. Josie’s son,
Amos, plays a big role in this part of Pax’s education.
Pax grew up in an orphanage on his world, where all orphans are slated for the Army of the Light, which defends the existence of magic. Pax was a paladin, a leader, and very good at his skills that come in handy for dealing with the assortment of non-human beings—faeries, a vampire, a gnome, gargoyles, and a zombie, just to name a few—who’re marooned in the inn. Because of his upbringing, Pax has no experience of love and doesn’t understand it.
Josie lands at the Wayside because she sees the apartment ad. She can’t afford her current rent, so, despite some odd experiences when she views the apartment, the Wayside is a godsend. Her life has been difficult though she and Amos’s father, Dan, had a good relationship until he died. Now Dan’s mother undercuts Josie’s parenting at every opportunity.
Josie lacks confidence in her ability to make decisions. She doesn’t trust her own judgment. Pax doesn’t understand love, and neither of them knows what will happen to the romance building between them when the Wayside recovers and goes on its way. As she and Pax find their way to each other, they also become stronger, more confident people, in the best tradition of romance.
The inn itself is both sentient and magical, and it takes an indirect hand in the various developments. Everett uses scent effectively as a tool to interpret the inn’s actions. There are also visual cues. The changes the inn makes at time almost drive Josie away, but she does need a place to stay.
There were a few downsides to the book for me. There were also a couple of passing references to contemporary American politics. Whether I agree with such a references or not, I don’t want them in my escapist reading. Amos’s grandfather is described as letting his wife do the talking but steps aside from that at an important point. I didn’t feel it had been seeded well enough. I need a little more foreshadowing for his move.
Overall, I enjoyed this book tremendously. Highly recommended.
4.5 stars
~ Nancy
This sounds good, thank you for the review
ReplyDeleteThank you for the "warning" about pop culture references. They ae nice to find in books, but for some of us of a certain age, they might be problem. I have found myself unable to get references to more recent pop culture items.
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