Published in 2026, The Faraway Inn is a young-adult novel by Sarah Beth Durst, a New York Times best-selling author known for her work in the fantasy genre, including titles such as The Spellshop. The novel is an example of cozy fantasy, a subgenre that emphasizes comfort, community, and low-stakes conflict. After a painful breakup, 16-year-old Calisa travels to rural Vermont to spend the summer helping her great-aunt Zee at her bed-and-breakfast. She arrives to find the inn in a state of severe disrepair and soon discovers that its eccentric, otherworldly guests are arriving through magical portals hidden in the closet doors, revealing the inn to be a magical nexus connecting different realms.

The novel explores themes of The Healing Power of Found Family and Community, Accepting Change as a Catalyst for Growth, and The Restorative Nature of Retreat Spaces. Situating itself within the long tradition of portal fantasy, the narrative uses the nexus trope—where a single location serves as a crossroads to multiple worlds—to create a sanctuary for characters from diverse backgrounds. The story aligns with the conventions of the cozy-fantasy subgenre, which gained popularity in the early 2020s by offering readers an escape from real-world anxieties. By focusing on Calisa’s emotional healing and the restoration of the inn rather than a world-ending threat, Durst creates a comforting narrative in which personal growth and kindness are the central values.

This guide refers to the 2026 Delacorte Press edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death.

Plot Summary

Calisa, a 16-year-old Brooklyn teenager about to enter her senior year, arrives at the Faraway Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in rural Vermont run by her great-aunt Zee. Her two mothers, Kate (Zee’s biological niece) and Elise, arranged the summer stay after Calisa caught her boyfriend Ethan cheating on her. The plan is for Calisa to help the aging innkeeper while recovering from heartbreak. However, what Calisa finds isn’t the storybook inn she remembers from a childhood visit. The building is dilapidated: The paint is peeling, the roof is lopsided, the windows are boarded up, and the gardens are so overgrown that the forest seems to be swallowing it whole. After she falls through the rotting porch boards and becomes stuck up to her chest, she meets Jack Jones, the groundskeeper’s son, who’s carrying a stone gargoyle to a guest room. Beneath the porch, she hears strange, unintelligible whispers. When Calisa finally meets Auntie Zee, the innkeeper flatly tells her that she’s neither needed nor wanted. Only after Calisa blurts out the truth about Ethan does Zee relent, granting a three-day trial and establishing two rules: Never open doors without permission, and never ask questions, especially of guests.

Determined to prove herself useful, Calisa throws herself into restoring the inn. She makes pancakes each morning, scrubs the neglected common rooms, and helps Jack repair the porch. Beneath dust-covered sheets in the sitting room, she uncovers beautifully carved furniture and a silver tea set that begins brewing tea on its own. Fires ignite spontaneously in empty fireplaces. Jack offers mundane explanations, but Calisa remains uneasy. She meets the inn’s handful of guests: Mulligan, a gaunt, theatrical man in black who makes elaborate hot chocolate and fills a small vial with it for mysterious purposes; Kendra, an intimidating woman who appears to have stepped out of a supply closet rather than arrived by car; and Melidor, a young woman with green-dyed hair and green-tinged skin who screams at Calisa for cutting garden vines, insisting that the plants are in pain. Calisa also discovers a large, winged reptile in a linen closet. Kendra claims that the creature was an unwanted companion and offers a cryptic remark about the creature’s still-developing “fire.” Calisa and Jack name it Steve and relocate it to the abandoned greenhouse.

Using a family recipe cookbook belonging to Jack’s absent father, Calisa bakes cakes for afternoon tea, and this gesture begins to shift Auntie Zee’s attitude, extending Calisa’s stay day by day. Her suspicions about the inn crystallize when she hears whispers behind the door of room 12, Melidor’s room. After taking a master skeleton key, Calisa lets herself in and finds not a closet but a swirling, iridescent portal. She steps through into a field of whispering flowers beneath a purple-tinted sun, where a green-skinned woman identifies herself as Melidor’s mother. Back at the inn, Calisa checks another room and finds a different portal opening into a Night Market under a sky of many stars. The red “X” on her own room’s door, she realizes, marks a room with no working portal. The guests arrive through doorways to other worlds.

When Calisa confronts Jack, he confirms everything. The Faraway Inn is a nexus connecting pocket dimensions accessible through its doors. Auntie Zee controls which doors function as portals, and the inn serves as a refuge for travelers from these realms. Jack then reveals a painful truth: His father, Thomas Jones, went through a portal three years ago searching for something to help the failing inn, and the door closed behind him. Zee couldn’t reopen it, and Jack has been running the inn virtually alone ever since.

Calisa explores the inn’s magic more deeply, communicating with the stone garden statue, discovering a sentient mirror in the lobby, and retrieving a logbook hidden behind a small portal that contains 150 years of guest records. Mulligan reveals that his partner, Zef, is the stone gargoyle, accidentally turned to stone by Mulligan’s own failed magic; the vials of hot chocolate are attempts to break the spell through emotional potions. When Auntie Zee announces that she plans to close the inn permanently, Calisa argues passionately for its preservation and proposes a grand reopening.

Before the plan can take shape, Auntie Zee disappears. Calisa and Jack scramble to run the inn alone while searching for the innkeeper through portals, visiting otherworldly realms. At the Night Market, a vast otherworldly bazaar, the centaur baker Rin promises to ask around. Calisa buys a vial of distilled regret from a potion vendor, thinking it might help Mulligan. She gives it to him, and he uses it to create a potion recreating the drink that he and Zef first shared. Zef thaws from stone, and the two are tearfully reunited. Meanwhile, Melidor plants her 16 seedlings, baby dryads, beside the stream and asks Calisa to help look after them. Ethan also calls with a rehearsed apology, but Calisa realizes that she no longer cares and hangs up.

Another crisis arises when Kendra’s portal stops working. She begins gushing seawater uncontrollably, revealing herself to be a sea witch who regulates storms along the Eastern Seaboard. She says that she must return within 24 hours to avert disaster. Calisa calls Mom-Kate, who reveals that she has always known about the inn’s magical nature. Kate was supposed to succeed Auntie Zee but lacked the innate ability to open portals, the source of the long rift between them. She instructs Calisa to quiet her mind at the doorframe and experience a genuine positive epiphany to unlock her latent power.

While standing in Kendra’s closet doorway, Calisa asks Jack to kiss her. The kiss becomes transformative: She recognizes that she has fallen out of love with Ethan and into love with Jack, the inn, and its magic. She closes the closet door, whispers “Open,” and reopens it to reveal a swirling blue portal. Kendra rushes through, ending the crisis.

The stone statue, Evela, communicates that she knows where Auntie Zee is and points them to a linen closet. Calisa opens a new portal to a seaside realm where Thomas has been stranded for three years among silvery-scaled villagers, waiting for the portal to reopen. Father and son reunite tearfully, but Thomas insists that they leave quickly, warning that distant portals drain enormous energy. Back at the inn, Calisa collapses. Thomas administers felitris juice, a rare remedy he spent three years searching for that restores magical energy depleted by portal use. He explains that Zee’s power has been decaying with age and that she had been exhausting herself trying to reopen his portal. Thomas leads them to the library, where the elderly white cat Portia sits on the window seat. Portia is Zee. Thomas administers the juice, and the cat transforms back into the innkeeper. Zee explains that she’s a “traveler cat,” a rare type of witch who transforms into a cat to replenish her portal-opening magic, but she was too exhausted to change back. She acknowledges that Calisa has inherited the ability and apologizes for pushing her away.

The grand reopening proceeds. Rin and other Night Market vendors donate lavish supplies, and guests fill every room. When the bronze queen of Irisday disparages the inn’s shabbiness, Auntie Zee calmly tells her that she’s unwelcome, teaching Calisa a lesson: The inn is what you allow it to be, and not every customer is the right fit. Zee then opens a portal from Calisa’s room to her family’s Brooklyn kitchen. A tense but necessary conversation with her mothers produces a practical arrangement: Calisa will return home for senior year, commute through the portal each afternoon to train, and eventually study hotel management in college. When Ethan approaches one last time, Calisa thanks him, recognizing that his betrayal set her on this path, and says goodbye with finality. She transforms briefly into a gray cat, steps through the portal to Vermont, and walks into the kitchen where Jack is waiting. Hand in hand, with Steve circling overhead, they step through the portal to the Night Market together.