Fiction Reviews
The Enchanted Greenhouse
(2025) Sarah Beth Durst, Tor, £14.99, trdpbk, 389pp, ISBN 978-1-035-04238-8
This is a direct sequel to Durst’s previous novel, The Spellshop (2024). The protagonist in both is Terlu Perna, a librarian in a library of magic, serving powerful wizards. The previous book ended on a dark cliff-hanger in which Terlu was caught and tried for using magic spells from the library resources to give life to a spider plant. Her punishment was to be turned to stone, becoming a living statue.
The sequel begins as the spell is broken (exactly how is never fully explained). She is now on an island, six years on from her stone-freezing. The island is dominated by a network of interconnected greenhouses containing all kinds of exotic plants. It is tended by a lonely gardener, Yarrow, who is not a magician, but needs one, as one by one the greenhouses are breaking down, and their plants are dying. The greenhouses had been created and maintained by a wizard, Laiken, who has died falling down the stairs in an accident (another avenue given little detailed explanation, and foul play is never considered as a cause).
Aided by a sentient plant, Lotti, once Laiken’s closest friend, who served the wizard, Terlu and Yarrow try to crack the man’s heavily encrypted coded instructions. The heroes are later aided by a gaggle of sentient plants they salvage and wake up, tiny dragons that pollinate the greenhouse plants like bees, and islanders returning after temporarily fleeing the island on the death of the wizard. (Quite a large ensemble cast and though named their characters lack any distinct personality.)
Much back story is never shared, threads and plot promises go nowhere. Terlu fears her mainland people discovering that she has been woken up without legal permission and once more, given sentience to fauna. This goes nowhere. The wizard’s ghost communicates in séance to explain some spell information but then has no other part to play. A flying cat turns up periodically just to be cute and adorable or mischievous but has no bearing on the plot at all. Similarly, with the dragons, the plants and Yarrow’s interchangeable family and friends. The story lacks any real threat or antagonist. Everyone and everything is nice.
Only the discovery of the collapsing ecosystem, and a chapter in which Yarrow and Terlu are trapped in a bubble-force field and in danger of suffocation when a spell goes wrong create any genuine tension.
A lot of nice world-building in the creation of the plant housing estate, and the gradually developing romance between Terlu and Yarrow is quite sweet but so much is otherwise anti-climatic. It lacks the sense of threat that Terlu faces in the preceding novel, and the problems her home culture was facing are described as all having been sorted out and no longer worth worrying about. So much happens off-stage here. We never find out exactly how or why Terlu’s statue was moved from the library to the island or why, among much more. While the first book has a clear-cut opening for the sequel, volume two wraps things up rather neatly, and how a third adventure for Terlu might arise is less clear.
Arthur Chappell
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