Shelf Life — Sweet Silius Island Honey is a Tasty Dollop of Adventure
GDB I’m still stuck in my cozy media era, apparently. Given the state of, well, everything as I write this, it’s not hard to imagine why. Still, I didn’t really plan to read three comfy, cozy books in a row, it just sort of happened.
And to be clear and fair, Sweet Silius Island Honey by Alex Scott does actually have an adventure at the center of its plot in addition to the charming vibes. It just happens to be a charming adventure with some warm vibes, some interesting worldbuilding, and a story that genuinely took me by pleasant surprise more than once.
The story follows Owen, a teenage street urchin who gets by working at the docks and signing aboard the occasional ship. This lifetime of varied nautical expertise catches the eye of Wanda, a young witch with familial ties to the city where Owen lives who’s just moved back into town and could use someone to repair, maintain, and sail the family’s old yacht.
So far, so cozy, but the adventure part kicks in when Wanda and Owen put their heads together to realize that a mysterious, hard to sail to island just off the coast — one that Wanda can see is practically glowing with magic — is probably the secret source of the titular honey being sold in town, which is literally magically delicious and currently being monopolized by a single merchant who won’t disclose where he finds it. Said island also happens to be the site of a traditional magical ritual which, if Wanda can find and complete on her own, might grant her access back into the witch society that ostracized her and her family.
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Mandy 
Seafire is a swashbuckling dystopia following Caledonia Styx, a young woman on the run from a powerful warlord Aric Athair. After her family is ambushed and murdered by a crew of the warlord’s Bullets — loyal soldiers groomed from childhood for violence and controlled by mandatory drug addiction — Caledonia is forced to turn from refugee to pirate captain, sailing the high seas with her all-female crew of rebels and renegades aboard the Mors Navis, taking the fight to Aric’s forces by targeting his fleet of floating garden barges where the flowers that fuel his drug production are grown.
Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).
But beyond the technicalities of publishing, pulp fiction also developed a sort of overarching genre definition based on some recurring themes that tended to crop up in the stories again and again, regardless of categories like fantasy, noir, horror, etc. — namely, big, bombastic heroes squaring off against sinister, mysterious villains in dangerous, exotic locales, featuring beautiful women of both the damsel and the deadly variety.
And the warhog-riding half-orc bikers of The Grey Bastards are the bad boys (and girl) of the orc world.
During the tail end of writing this novel, though, I pulled down The Book of Kings from our shelves, a collection of “20 all-original stories of kings and kingdoms, both traditional and fantastical, recounted by such noble tale-tellers as (a bunch of names that probably look at least somewhat familiar).” Our own story is largely centered around the activities of a royal family and the assassin who’s living in their midst, so I thought it would be a good source of inspiration and motivation while I already had kings and their doings on the brain.
So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis that promised “a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and – most problematic of all – a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist.” I expected another lighthearted riff on the familiar archetypes. Murderous unicorns? Unicorns are not typically described as such! Oh teehee, how unexpectedly humorous!