Chai and Charmcraft: A magical Middle Eastern cozy fantasy (The Charmcraft Chronicles Book 1) by Lynn Strong
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Cosy Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Middle Eastern-inspired setting and cast, fat gay MC, MLM MC, M/M, secondary asexual character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 1st May 2026
ISBN: B0GLHQH9LT
Goodreads

What's a prince to do when the man of his dreams doesn’t want a crown and his cat is banned from the palace?

His Imperial Highness Faraj al-Nadhir has never thought himself a charming sort of prince. He’s shy, round, middle-aged, and always dutiful. But he has also secretly spent years dreaming of a man tending jasmine in a sun-lit window — prophetic visions that led him at last to one blissful night with someone who sees his heart, not his crown.

He did not expect to wake up with a cat walking on his face.

Cat-familiars are forbidden in the Imperial fortress. They might be spies. They might be soul-charmers. They might even sharpen their claws on thousand-year-old tapestries. But Faraj cannot regret that sweet little Sahar chose him — just as he cannot regret Asharan bir Chameli, the enchanting owner of the House of Jasmines. Asharan wants nothing to do with Faraj’s title and power, only his kindness. And Faraj hadn’t expected either the delights or the dilemmas of Asharan’s magical, soft-pawed little gift.

The rules have always been different for the God-Emperor's brother. Faraj never before realized how much.

Now he's breakfasting from community cauldrons in back alleys full of children and kittens. His foresight shows him a thousand paths toward disaster, but not the way through. His devoted chamberlain fears that Faraj has been bewitched by a purring agent of chaos, and Faraj can’t exactly say he’s wrong.

When the choice comes down to betraying his lover's name, his cat-familiar’s life, or his own use of forbidden magic, Faraj does the only thing he can: He gets himself put on trial for heresy, trying to change the laws of the Empire itself.

If his visions always lead him into trouble, he might as well make useful trouble.

CHAI AND CHARMCRAFT is the first book in a cozy and queer Middle Eastern M/M fantasy trilogy brimming with charm, intrigue, later-in-life romance, body positivity, and so many kittens. Here, nobody needs a magical makeover to be loved exactly as they are — and their night of joy together isn't where the story ends. That's where it begins...

I received this book for free from the author, in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~a magic pouch of rose-sweets
~cats know best
~friends who’ll take on a god-emperor for each other
~when the man of your dreams comes from visions of chaos
~a book that cleans the tarnish from your heart

WHERE HAS THIS BOOK BEEN ALL MY LIFE?!

I do not usually get along with cosy fantasy: it tends to be light and shallow and toothless, with plain prose and minimal worldbuilding. There are some wonderful exceptions – Alexandra Rowland’s Yield Under Great Persuasion springs to mind, and if you want to argue that much of the Singing Hills Cycle is cosy, I will naturally give those books full marks as well. But on the whole, this is a genre that’s let me down.

Chai and Charmcraft is everything I’ve been begging cosy fantasy to be. It’s warm and intimate and renews my faith in humanity; the stakes are low but extremely important to the characters involved, creating plenty of tension; the worldbuilding is genuinely interesting; the prose is lovely. I read a huge chunk of this book overnight while pretty awful family drama was going in, and in between terrible phone calls and anxious text messages, Chai and Charmcraft was a rose-and-gold solace; less an escape from the world than a haven of a rest-stop, giving me sanctuary and comfort while I needed it, so I could go back to Real Life…strengthened by the reminder that most people are good, actually.

Like – sometimes we go through stuff that leaves our hearts tarnished. Chai and Charmcraft is one of those precious books that gently polishes the tarnish away, leaves you shining.

Chai and Charmcraft is set in the same fantasy-city as Chai and Cat-tales (you do not need to have read Cat-tales to enjoy Charmcraft, but it is a happy-tear-inducing, heart-warming collection of novellas following some of the minor characters of Charmcraft and I strongly recommend it): Tel-Bastet, ‘the city of cats’ in a Middle Eastern-inspired empire. Here, humans live alongside catfolk, bipedal felines who can shapeshift into housecats indistinguishable from not-catfolk cats; the priesthood of Upaja keep their cauldrons ever-full to feed anyone who needs feeding; and the God-Emperor’s brother and prophet, Faraj al-Nadhir, heads the Ministry of Finance and prophesises disasters in time for them to be averted or prepared for.

Because he only sees future trouble, is the thing. He’s a specific kind of prophet; it’s not that he never gets to see nice things, but he only sees them in the context of (negative!) chaos leading to them or coming from them.

So the fact that he’s been having visions of a particular man’s hands his entire life? Guarantees that trouble surrounds them. And yet…some things are worth plenty of trouble, aren’t they?

The rahat al-hulqum that Master Asharan had dreamed into being, that he had given to Rahat for a name he thought fitting – it tasted like bliss. Like sunlight on fragrant petals, rich and redolent, vivid, unmistakable. It tasted of the sweetness in Master Asharan’s smiles, and the delight in his kisses.

Charmcraft opens with Faraj finally finding his way to the man of his dreams, Ashar, who owns a bath-house, practices magic with his familiar Nehal, and does sex work. And from these opening pages, I knew this was going to be a book that wrecked me, because Ashar (whose POV this part is from) looks at 40yo+, fat Faraj…and genuinely thinks he’s beautiful. Inside and out. The sex is fade to black, but the…loving-worship of it still comes through, and hi, thanks, I’m fine, it’s just raining on my face. No big deal!!!

“Never be ashamed to be yourself,” he said. “You are Rahat; you are comfort and rest and the sweetness of ease. A soft warm pillow for a lazy hunting-cat in the sunbeam, a cushion against the world’s sharp edges. Let me savor you exactly as you are.”

(I lie, it’s a huge deal.)

Ashar knows who Faraj is, but calls him Rahat – after delicious rose-flavoured sweets – so that neither of them have to acknowledge the Real World outside. They accidentally summon Faraj a familiar – a spirit that takes the form of a cat, to live alongside a mage – and this is where most of the overt plot comes from. Because cats are totally forbidden from the imperial complex, but how can Faraj give up the wonderful Sahar, now that she’s bound to his heart?

Whether or not you get to keep your cat probably sounds very low-stakes indeed to anyone who doesn’t have a pet; those of us who have lived with not-human beasties know exactly how not low-stakes it is. But the issue for Faraj and Sahar is a much bigger deal even than that, because in many ways, for many people around Faraj, Sahar is a giant red flag that Faraj must be under someone’s mind-control magic. Cats are banned from the palace for a few different reasons, some of them even understandable, but familiars are forbidden for religious reasons – and Faraj is the brother of the God-Emperor! He can’t flout his brother’s religion like that! That he even wants to, after a lifetime of being the most wonderful, honourable, proper prince, is proof that he’s being mind-controlled. Right? Why else would he suddenly be flouting all these rules and expectations, pushing back against protocol, making extremely unreasonable demands???

It’s not, really, about a cat. It’s about Faraj’s right to exist as a person, an individual, rather than a polite, polished functionary. So it’s true that the fate of the world isn’t at stake here, but at the same time, I know I’m not the only reader to have an awful knot in my stomach and a lump in my throat, reading about this kind of scenario. The scene where Faraj helplessly asks how he’s supposed to convince anyone that he isn’t mind-controlled, when anything he says or does is being taken as proof that he is…

“You’re right, of course,” Faraj said, blinking hard at the blurring of his vision, trying not to allow himself tears. “Of course you’re right. Of course you would have to question it. But how can I ever prove that my new thoughts might simply be my own?

That scene’s going to be with me for a while.

Where Charmcraft differs from most other cosy fantasy I’ve tried is that the antagonists are not cartoonishly simple villains; Irfan, the chamberlain, is honestly and genuinely worried for Faraj. He’s getting in the way of our happy ending not because he’s a terrible person, but because with the information and context he has, he has every right to be afraid that something terrible has happened, or is happening, to his prince. His entire lived experience is telling him that something is Very Wrong, and he’s desperately trying to save Faraj from whatever it is. He’s not acting from hate, like the kind of evil scum who send their queer kids to conversion camps to ‘save’ them; he’s acting very much from love.

That is the heart of this book: love, and caring, all the different ways we love our fellow people, and all the ways we can take care of each other (and of ourselves, too; Charmcraft is very big on self-love and self-care!) It suffuses every page, is maybe the biggest reason this book made my heart glow; seeing and exploring all these connections between the characters, how all of them care so much, are doing their best, are there for each other any way they can be. What’s between Ashar and Faraj is romantic, but that’s actually a fairly small part of the story because the two of them don’t spend a lot of time on-page together; Faraj spends a lot more time with his catfolk bodyguard and friend Kamil, and with Najra, the head archivist and Faraj’s best human friend; Ashar has Hira, his catfolk business partner and bestie, as well as Kalyani, another sex worker who works at his bath-house. Given that Ashar is not in any way nobleborn, we get to see the web of connections he has in his community, from gossipy aunties to local teachers to street children who love his chai. None of them are perfect people, but the care they have for one another is so genuine it repeatedly brought tears to my eyes. The friendships especially – Faraj and Kamil+Najra, Ashar and Hira – were both incredibly heartwarming and endlessly delightful; these are friends who will go to bat for each other, who are ride-or-die-or-take-on-the-God-Emperor.

So let me ask again: How can we, of the community you seek to support, also support you?”

“I… I don’t know…? But I couldn’t possibly ask…”

“Let me introduce you to one of the foundations of being in community with aunties and cats and bath-house gossip,” Ashar said. “Whether or not you are asking, we are insisting.”

Plot-wise, Charmcraft is relatively slow, though to me the pacing felt luxurious and decadent, wonderfully unhurried rather than dragging. The story takes its time specifically so the reader can luxuriate in all that love and caring, and also in the giggles, in the beauty, in the ridiculously delectable-sounding treats. As someone deathly Tired of fantasy worlds that are Medieval Europe knock-offs or so bland as to be placeless, I adored the amount of detail that went into this setting, how much of it is pulled from real Middle Eastern cultures and history. Food, fashion, architecture – I loved the attention to detail in everything from carpets to window frames, and the gentle pacing allowed for it, allowed us to pause and savour or delight in a beautiful thing, a delicious thing, something unfamiliar. It made reading feel like I was walking through Tel-Bastet’s streets for real, able to pause to look at anything that caught my attention, with Strong right there to tell me all about it; if not there on the page, then at the back of the book where there are handy lists of vocab and explanations of not-English terms. I never felt info-dumped on, just gleefully spoiled with all the sensual and worldbuilding detail I could want!

I mean – did we need to know that there’s a fashion for catfolk to get hennaed leopard spots, because

“You have to sit entirely still for hours with mud-blobs soaking into your fur. It makes quite the statement about your endurance, your stealth-prowess in the hunt, your fashion sense…”

No, we didn’t need that. But it delights me! And worldbuilding tidbits like this abound. Charmcraft is a cornucopia of delights like that, details and moments that make the setting come to life and get the reader grinning. Literally everything about the catfolk will light up your entire day – and I say that as someone who usually can’t stand stories with anthropomorphised animals (I know, I know, it’s a personal failing, I’m working on it). I defy you not to laugh at how Hira gets her friends and family to investigate for her, or at Kamil’s tail floofing, or at how impossible it is for anyone in Tel-Bastet to tell apart a normal cat from a catfolk from a goddess (especially with the catfolk priestesses insisting they’re all goddesses, thank you very much!) Every page feels like a gift; there’s always something to delight in, so no, I never felt like things were going too slowly. If I could have, I’d have made the story go even slower; I didn’t want it to be over!

“If you never cross a line, you never get to sit inside the perfect box,” Mreret said.

“I confess I also do not see the appeal of sitting in boxes,” Sami said.

Ears laid back, Mreret said in a tone of grudging almost-respect, “You are a heretic, aren’t you.”

The slower pacing also feels correct because the central plot is about self-growth, and growing into a community, and those things aren’t done overnight (even if you happen upon a community very willing to adopt you!) There is some Big Picture plot – Faraj is hosting the Great Convocation, wherein representatives of all the empire’s religious factions will be wined and dined by Faraj himself – and that provides a good amount of low-stakes intrigue and politicking…though there, too, what shines is Faraj’s friendships with some of the representatives (if anybody writes Anuket/Faraj/Nefer fanfic, tell me immediately I am so there) and the exquisite courses presented at the feast. We’re never really worried that the snakefolk cobra priestess is going to bite someone for real.

But Charmcraft does have teeth. In many ways this can be read as a critique of quite a lot of cosy fantasy – there’s a quiet but strong theme of anti-gentrification that puts it in direct opposition to books like Legends and Lattes, for example (if you don’t call inventing fantasy!Starbucks gentrification then I don’t know what to tell you). One of the (many) moments that will stay with me is when Faraj gets to taste the food a local teacher makes to feed street-kids (and encourage them to stay for class), and how that is contrasted against the kind of food he’s familiar with, but not in a disparaging way.

There was nothing subtle or exquisite about it. Smoke and iron and a fistful of long pepper tasted like a battlefield, like a determination to get up and fight one more day, like the stubbornness not to lie down and yield when people needed your strength, blunt and unrefined and unshakeable as stone.

Like – yep, it’s not what a palace would serve a royal! But it’s still good and necessary and doesn’t need changing, just like the people who made it and eat it. There is value in food and places and people who are not swimming in wealth; gentrification is not required to improve them or their lives, and it’s not what would help their community. I can’t articulate all the ways in which this is important, but it’s important!

One of my other favourite snarly-messages is the pushback against fat-shaming, woven throughout the entire book, appropriately tangled with issues of power and privilege and double-standards. Faraj has always been mocked for his weight, for his love of sweets, which is absolutely bonkers when you think about it because

No one spoke against the tastes of the great ones who made sport of their servants, or those who made war for power’s sake, or those who took whatever they wished from those without the power to deny them. No, nothing was to be said against the tastes for power. Just the taste for sweetness, in someone who would feel the sting of shame.

I really thought I had worked through my own body-shame issues, but this was a galaxy-brain moment for me so I guess I still have work to do!

What I’m trying to say is – yes, Charmcraft is very sweet and warm and loving. But it’s not shallow in the least; this isn’t a book you enjoy for a day or two and then completely forget about. It has a lot to say, and it says it powerfully and convincingly, without preaching at the reader. It got under my skin; it’s curled up around my heart and purring just like one of the many, many cats in the story. It is delightful and hilarious and made me light up inside; it got me through real awfulness and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It reminded me of what I love about people; it’s a promise-in-pages that most people are good, actually. I’ve reread multiple passages of it in the week-and-change since I finished it, just for comfort, or because they’re beautiful and poignant and I wanted to revisit them. I want to try all the recipes at the back of the book (THERE ARE RECIPES AT THE BACK OF THE BOOK). I love everything about it.

Making less trouble was positively uncatlike.

Even if you usually don’t like cosy fantasy – like me! – I must insist that you try this one. Chai and Charmcraft will be on my best of 2026 list come December, I am officially declaring it a Crescent Classic, and Lynn Strong has catapulted (pun fully intended!) to the top of my auto-buy author list. I cannot express how happy I am that this book found me, and how happy I am to help other people find it too.

Because this is EXACTLY what cosy fantasy is meant to be.

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