skygiants

If anyone's written a nice quiet knitting or gardening-themed fantasy romance, I haven't come across it yet.

Dammit, I really feel it should exist! The gardening one was almost written several times by Robin McKinley, but didn't quite happen.

Huh. Would you accept Sunshine (2003)? Its protagonist works at a bakery.

-- and it's very vague in my head, like all McKillips, which somehow tend to turn into pleasant-memory mist at a much speedier rate than any other author's work --

You are the second or third person I've heard that from! I find it true of lesser McKillip, like The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995) or In the Forests of Serre (2003) or Alphabet of Thorn (2004) or The Bell at Sealey Head (2008), but it's not at all the case for me with many of her other novels, which are distinct and vivid and I can talk about for pages if offered the chance: the Riddle-Master trilogy (1976–79), Stepping from the Shadows (1982), Fool's Run (1987), The Changeling Sea (1988), The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991), Something Rich and Strange (1994), Ombria in Shadow (2002), The Bards of Bone Plain (2010). She was a huge imprint on me as a young reader and still one of my deep favorites. Every now and then I write a sentence and I can see exactly what I learned from her. (And the 2000's were a very frustrating decade for me. She was so hit or miss. I can barely remember anything about The Tower at Stony Wood (2000) or Od Magic (2005) because I bounced off them so badly.)

Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, maybe, sort of, but I think there's a bit too much there there to comfortably call it 'charming' and leave it at that.

Too much at stake, no matter your feelings on whether she pulls it off or not. Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (1998) is mostly just YA.