This feel-good audiobook is the sequel to THE SPELLSHOP. Narrator Caitlin Davies delivers a warm, emotionally rich performance, capturing Terlu's vulnerability and Yarrow's gruff charm with heart and nuance. Davies's character voices, especially that of the lively sentient rose, Lotti, bring the magical world to life. After being turned into a statue for practicing illegal magic, Terlu awakens on a snowy island of enchanted greenhouses. With the help of a reluctant gardener and magical plants, she must uncover lost spells to save the island's fading magic while learning to trust herself again. Davies infuses the story with tenderness and playfulness, matching its themes of second chances, found family, and quiet courage. This wonderfully narrated romantic fantasy has just the right touch of whimsy.
Pub Date: July 15, 2025
Duration: 13 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250402257
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
After her divorce, Roberta Jewett, with her three daughters, returns to Camden, Maine, to start a new life. Such an independent move in 1916 brings difficulties with her mother, her in-laws and the townspeople. Dukes's performance, while skillful, sometimes suffer in scenes of emotional content. His pace slows, and his reading acquires the peculiar emphasis of someone trying to get instructions across to a non-English-speaking person. The effect is disturbingly laughable. When he resumes his normal pace, the story revives and personalities emerge again, but the awkwardness remains as an odd interruption to Spencer's drama of pain and love, dispelling Dukes's carefully constructed characterizations.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 3 hrs
Publisher: Dove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
A young Southern woman marries into an aristocratic Boston family and spends her summers at a vacation community on the Maine coast. Heavy-handed abridgment reduces this novel to an outline which denies the listener any character development. Judith Ivey offers stereotypical dialects which are discordant to a New Englander's ear. In her interpretation the Down East Mainers speak like thugs in raspy voices. Her presentation of a Boston accent is phonetically erratic and also spoken in gruff tones. The color and flavor of Maine are missing from this tasteless rendition.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 3 hrs
Publisher: Harper Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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