Magic and Mischief at the Wayside Hotel by Elizabeth Everett
Contemporary Fantasy Romance
Published on March 10, 2026 by Ace

Reviewed by Kate

Magic and Mischief at the Wayside Hotel is a cute cozy fantasy romance that takes place in our modern day world. It has a fun, quirky sense of humor and a lovely found family aspect to it that really drew me in. 

The Wayside Hotel is a universe-hopping hotel that unexpectedly runs out of magical “gas” on Earth, one of the least magical worlds. Pax, the hotel manager, decides that the way to “fill the tank,” as it were, is to get some new hotel residents. However, he’s stuck because he needs to keep all the magical beings a secret. This leads to a lot of fun and a fairly low-stakes story. 

There is a lot going on in this book. First, there’s the magical guests having to acclimate to Earth and hide who they are from Josie and her son Amos, the new guests. Then, there’s the plotline of Pax wanting to protect Josie, especially from the other magical guests. Obviously, that leads to a romance between Pax and Josie, which I have to say was refreshing – as Pax is a 100+ year old warrior, and Josie is a single mom who has real responsibilities, a shift from your normal romantasy female protagonist who is 18 and just discovered her magical powers. Josie also has the misfortune of not really getting along with her deceased spouse’s (and Amos’s dad’s) parents, mostly because the mom is kind of a piece of work, so Josie is generally fending off their seemingly well-meaning but possibly nefarious overtures toward Amos. What I am saying is that there were a lot of areas for things to go horribly wrong and for some big conflict to emerge, but generally, things resolved fairly tidily and I never felt too stressed out (obviously, your mileage may vary, and maybe you want to feel a little more tension, but for me it was perfect). 

There were some inconsistencies in the world building that occasionally pulled me out of the book – most frequently, when one of the magical characters understood something about life on Earth that contextually didn’t make sense based on all the things they did not understand. But the characters themselves were great. The dynamics between the different characters and the type of beings they were made for a bit of chaos in the situations they found themselves in, from library story time to snowball fights. The hotel even felt like a character. If you have read the Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper series, you may find yourself catching similarities between the Wayside Hotel and the Inn of that series. Both are semi-sentient buildings, though I felt like the Wayside Hotel had maybe a little less personality. I did appreciate its influence throughout the story, starting with the way that it decorated Amos’s room for him. 

Overall, this was a lovely romance with a fun premise that has reasonable adult characters with fully developed frontal lobes. What more can you ask for? 

Grade: B+

CW: Josie’s husband passed away prior to the events of the book