#BookReview: Magic and Mischief at the Wayside Hotel by Elizabeth Everett

Magic and Mischief at the Wayside Hotel by Elizabeth Everett
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, romantasy
Pages: 352
Published by Ace on March 10, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

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.

My Review:

The premise of this was just a teensy bit familiar, which is what made me pick it up. If you’ve read Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper Chronicles, well, let’s just say that the Wayside Hotel and Gertrude Hunt, Innkeeper Dina DeMille’s Texas B&B, have more than a bit in common.

The Wayside Hotel finds itself very much by the wayside as this story opens. The quantumly entangled, multiverse-traveling, magically voyaging hotel comes to a stop on Earth because it’s run out of gas. Or whatever resource fills its tank. It’s literally dropped itself by the side of the intergalactic road because its ‘get up and go got up and went’.

The hotel’s manager, a retired paladin calling himself Pax Nomen, which more or less translates to “the name is peace”, doesn’t actually know what powers the Waysides, of which his is Number 5. What he knows is that magic is dying, that there used to be six Waysides but one is gone and that Number 5 has been on the blink for a while.

Earth has no magic, so if it’s magic that Number 5 needs, then there’s no help or hope in sight. But Pax just can’t let it go. And he can’t let the Wayside’s current crop of intergalactic travelers loose on magicless Earth. There must be something he can do.

The vampire lord Raphe, just one of the not-exactly-human travelers, is late for his own coronation and dead certain (all puns intended) that a blood sacrifice will top the Wayside’s tanks back up. But Pax has retired from the business of killing and wants to try something considerably less violent.

Which is where widowed single mother Josie LaChusia and her little boy Amos come in. Literally, through the front door with more than a bit of wish fulfillment – hers, Pax’s AND the Wayside’s. Josie and her boy need a safe place they can afford so that she can keep a roof over their heads, keep her underpaid job at the local college AND keep her grasping mother-in-law at bay regarding Amos’s custody.

Josie is sure that it’s all a bit too good to be true. The Wayside Hotel has transformed itself into an apartment building, so close to her job that she won’t need a car. The apartment is built out of her dreams for herself and Amos, and the rent is less than the last dump they lived in.

There has to be a catch – and there is. Very few of the Wayside’s residents can pass for human; all of them have magic and some of them still think it would be quicker and easier to just sacrifice the humans and be on their way.

But the Wayside makes it very clear that it wants Josie and Amos to stay. They might be just what is needed to get the tank topped up – not by dying – but by living and turning the place they live in into a community – with at least one happy ever after shining sunshine through all the windows.

Escape Rating B-: I have very mixed feelings about this book. At first, it was just delightful and charming and sweet. It’s very cozy and I felt cozy within it. But it just wasn’t grabbing me. I mean, I enjoyed it as it was reading it but it seemed like not much was happening. When I put it down I didn’t feel compelled to pick it back up – not even to see how the romance was going to work itself out. But when I did pick it up, it was like being wrapped in a cozy blanket.

Part of that is probably down to the concept being very familiar. The Wayside Hotel will remind readers a LOT of the Gertrude Hunt in Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper Chronicles. But the Innkeeper Chronicles, which are also set in a magically powered inn with non-human travelers, AND also includes a romance between the innkeeper and a local resident, always seems considerably more compelling.

There’s stuff happening at Gertrude Hunt, there’s usually a crisis or three, the guests nearly break out into outright warfare on a regular basis, and the local police can’t keep their noses out of the outlandish or outright otherworldly things that happen in the inn’s proximity. Wayside Number 5 needed more of that spark.

The events at the Wayside Inn move slowly, almost as if the Wayside itself was being as careful as Pax is in his courtship of Josie – because the Wayside is courting Josie and Amos every bit as much in its own hospitable way. The big tensions get underplayed or carpet-swept; Pax’s powerful but distrusting and micromanaging assistant, Josie’s insecure and micromanaging boss, and especially Josie’s negging, grasping, overbearing and overreaching mother-in-law.

Someone needed to blow up somewhere about something, but instead all the issues fizzled out – even though Fairy Princess Naliti unintentionally blew up the planetarium.

This was a really terrific premise and I had high hopes for it. It sounded like what you’d get if the Innkeeper Chronicles, If Wishes Were Retail, and Hotel Transylvania had a book baby. There was a LOT of potential between the various not-quite-human species and stereotypes – I adored the cheerleading squad of fairies and the gargoyles dressed as sporting mascots – but not even that accidental explosion gave the story as much of a life as it needed.

This story had a lot of potential, but the sizzle turned out to be more like a fizzle. Color me disappointed, even though the fairy cheer uniforms were in some truly eye-popping color combinations. Your reading mileage may vary.

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