7 Cozy Fantasy Books to Start 2024 Off On a Gentle Note
Happy New Year! It’s finally time to officially start the 2024 Read Harder Challenge! Throughout the year, I’ll be sharing recommendations of books to read that complete each of the tasks. A couple titles will be available for everyone, while paid subscribers to the Read Harder newsletter will get more recommendations, plus you’ll be able to trade ideas in the comments with other subscribers.
What better place to start than from the top? Task number one is Read a cozy fantasy. This is one of the tasks I’m most excited about, because this is a subgenre I recently fell in love with. Why read cozy fantasy in 2024? Because this subgenre has exploded in popularity lately! If you haven’t tried it already, this is a good time to see what all the fuss is about. The Read Harder Challenge is an opportunity to sample kinds of books you might not otherwise have picked up. You might even find a new favorite!
Without further ado, here are seven cozy fantasy books you can use to complete task number one of the 2024 Read Harder Challenge.
Legends and Lattes and Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree
I couldn’t have a list of cozy fantasy recommendations without mentioning the book that helped propel the subgenre into its current popularity, Legends and Lattes. This is a very gentle, slow-paced fantasy novel about an orc hanging up her sword to start a coffee shop in a town where no one has even heard of coffee. It has low stakes, a found family element, and a slow-burn F/F romance. The prequel is out now, and it’s just as good, but set in a rundown bookstore. And it has an owl/pug gryphet named Potroast!
Hakumei & Mikochi: Tiny Little Life in the Woods by Takuto Kashiki
Comics are a great place to explore cozy fantasy! This cozy fantasy manga is about two little sprites living in the woods together, getting into adventures. It’s absolutely adorable, and each volume is a kind of short story collection, offering vignettes about them searching for their lost wallet in the market, or visiting a friend, or making food together. It’s a very gentle read, and there are eleven books in the series so far!
Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne
Cozy fantasy is a new term, which means there is a lot of discussion about how to define it. While it’s often associated with very low-stakes stories, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea is a popular cozy fantasy title with high stakes, battles, dragons, and more. But that action is interspersed with slice-of-life scenes of a sapphic couple running a tea shop together. You can use whatever cozy fantasy definition speaks to you to complete the task!
The Tea Dragon Society by Kay O’Neill
This is the graphic novel series that made me fall in love with cozy fantasy. I have the boxed set, a framed art print, and even the card game, though I did stop myself from supporting the plushies on Kickstarter, as painful as that was. In this first book, Greta is apprenticing as a blacksmith when she finds a tea dragon — a small dragon that produces magical tea leaves. She learns about how to take care of him from the local tea dragon experts. While there, she befriends their ward, a shy girl with missing memories.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
This romantic cozy fantasy book has more conflict than something like The Tea Dragon Society, but less than Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea. In this book, witches live in secret, but Mika has a social media account where she “pretends” to use magic. That’s where she’s contacted about taking care of three young witches at Nowhere House. When she arrives, she finds a librarian who is suspicious of her — but they can’t help being drawn to each other. When danger knocks at the door of Nowhere House, she’ll have to defend her new found family.
Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono
If you’re like me, you hear “cozy” and think “Studio Ghibli.” What you might not know, though, is that Kiki’s Delivery Service was a book first, published in Japanese in the 1980s. This is a gentle coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old witch trying to prove herself in a new city by starting a delivery service (by broom, of course). This is a middle grade book, so it’s a quick read — you can pair it with the movie to see how the adaptation differs.
The Baker and the Bard by Fern Haught (March 5, 2024)
I’m sorry that you’ll have to wait a few months for this one, but it looks worth it! It’s a graphic novel that follows a couple of friends as they apprentice at a bakery, performing as bards in their spare time. On a trip to forage mushrooms, they stumble into an adventure as they investigate what strange creature is eating the farmers’ crops at night.
I find it interesting how many cozy fantasy books are queer — Legends and Lattes, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea, The Tea Dragon Society, and The Baker and the Bard, for example. If you’re looking to get bonus points by reading all queer books/authors for the Read Harder Challenge, this task won’t be an issue!
Looking for more recommendations? Check out these 20 Must-Read Cozy Fantasy Books.
Oh, I almost forgot, let me introduce you to the mascot of this year’s Read Harder Challenge: my dog Scrappy. You’ll be seeing a lot of him. He’s a three-year-old little pitbull mix that I adopted from Mexico nine months ago, and he is a menace. I adore him. This is a picture of us watching the first sunrise of 2024 together.
Which cozy fantasy book are you planning to read to complete task number one? Let us know in the comments! I’d also love to hear which tasks you’re looking forward to, and which you think will be hardest to complete.
The comments section is moderated according to our community guidelines. Please check them out so we can maintain a safe and supportive community of readers!
The comments section is moderated according to our community guidelines. Please check them out so we can maintain a safe and supportive community of readers!
27 comments
Join All Access to add comments.