Breakaway Books

Authored by Oliver Darkshire; Published May 2025; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

I can’t even remember the last time I read a novel that I considered to be truly and enjoyably silly, but Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil most definitely is. I wouldn’t have thought a Keats poem could inspire such a delightful story.

In Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, Isabella, trapped in a mediocre marriage, discovers a spell book and embarks on the adventure she was always meant to have. As her husband is tempted and eventually succumbs to the deadly fruit of the goblins, Isabella and her brand new familiar accidentally grant her pot of basil and her donkey the power of speech. Little does Isabella’s familiar know that her pot of basil contains the head of Isabella’s former lover, and once enchanted, the pot becomes a source of mischief and perhaps even evil.

This novel is full of joy. I listened to it, and the narration had the sense of a fanciful myth, featuring ridiculous voices for the pot of basil and the other characters. The two primary villains, Lorenzo and Gwendolyn Gooch, are near parodies of themselves, removing any real fright and replacing it with humor. Quite simply, the book doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I loved it for that. It doesn’t skimp on the fantasy lore either—the concepts of goblins as a type of fungi and the tempting but deadly goblin fruit are fascinating. Even if the full nature of the magic in the world isn’t revealed, the little details that are, like the way spells change each time they are used, more than make up for the lack of comprehensiveness. 

As for Isabella herself, for most of the novel, she is defined in relation to her marriage: Her life consists of cleaning up after her husband, who simply can’t survive without her. For someone as plucky as Isabella, it is somewhat difficult to buy that she would marry a person as difficult as Mr. Nagg, but in some ways, the dynamics of the marriage feel realistic, if a little exaggerated. Her final evolution felt like liberation, and, in the same quirky vein as the rest of the novel, she gets exactly the happy ending that she deserves. I wanted to know what other adventures she would plunge herself into going forward!

Isabella Nagg is a short and delightful read—when you’re looking for a shot of silly in your life, this is a good one to pick up.