Bookshops and Bonedust
The Legends and Lattes series, Book 2
Travis Baldree
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Young orc Viv joined up with Rackam's Ravens with high hopes of adventure and heroism and glorious battles... until her own foolish enthusiasm dropped her, an ill-advised solo charge into the thick of a necromancer's wight army leaving her leg (and her pride) badly wounded. While the rest of the mercenaries continue their pursuit of Varine the Pale, Viv is trundled off to the nearby seaside town of Murk, there to recuperate until Rackam passes back through in several weeks.
Viv chafes at the enforced rest. She's an orc warrior in her prime, gods curse it! She should be swinging steel with her mercenary comrades, not limping down decrepit boardwalks! "Sleepy" doesn't begin to describe Murk, a place as dull and gray as a foggy seascape... or so it seems at first. A mishap with her crutch leads her into the little town's dilapidated bookshop, and into the lives of stubborn bookseller Fern, flirtatious baker Maylee, and eager would-be mercenary Gallina, among others. While discovering the transformative power of a good book (and a little light romance of her own), Viv decides that maybe this detour in her own mercenary career won't be so bad - but there just might be a greater danger awaiting sleepy little Murk, as the necromancer Varine may not be as done with the local countryside as Rackam and the other Ravens believed...
REVIEW: This is technically a prequel to Travis Baldree's wildly popular "cozy" fantasy romance Legends and Lattes, but I haven't managed to get around to that book yet. Instead, I found this one on Libby when I was looking for an audiobook to fill a workday. I have mixed luck with works described as "cozy", so I admittedly went into this one with middling expectations... expectations that were quickly and surprisingly exceeded.
Set in a slightly soft-edged fantasy world reminiscent of a role-playing adventure, with a mix of humanoid races and magic not uncommon (if not necessarily an everyday thing), it starts with Viv in her element - perhaps a bit too much in her element, caught up in her own excitement, bloodlust, and youthful assurance of her own immortality. It only takes one rusty pike to the thigh to remind her that she is, indeed, mere mortal flesh after all. Left behind in a seaside inn while Rackam and the others continue their pursuit of the necromancer, Viv's hurt ego and the undeniable knowledge that this is her own fault are just more salt rubbed in the wound. She isn't a cruel or bad person, and she (usually) knows better than to take out her frustration on strangers, but she just plain does not want to be stuck here, particularly when she's left wondering if Rackam will even bother coming back for her after she disobeyed his orders to stay with the group. She never even meant to stumble into Fern's sad little bookstore until she literally stumbles into it, thrown by a broken boardwalk plank - and, from the start, Fern proves more than a match for the young orc's surly stubbornness, giving her what will turn out to be the first of many books that will awaken a new love of reading. But Fern is also in need of a friend; her store, inherited from her father, has seen far better days, and she's mere months (if that) away from giving up. It takes an outside eye to help her figure out how to turn her business around. As Viv is unexpectedly drawn into the struggle to save Murk's one and only bookstore, she also becomes entangled in other lives, notably Maylee, a baker with a diminutive stature and outsized personality, who provides a distraction of a different sort while Murk is in town. There's also an eager young gnome Gallina, who sees Viv as her ticket into a mercenary life (for all that Viv only had a few months with the Ravens before being sidelined), as well as a handful of other colorful locals. As one might expect, Viv's arrival triggers some needed changes and shaking-up, but Viv herself is also notably changed, both by her new friendships and by the books that Fern keeps pressing on her (even the "moist" ones, which prove a popular genre across the board and tie into a minor subplot about a reclusive romance writer living nearby).
If it seems like this is all low stakes frittering and a bit of a waste of a fantasy setting, things get more intense when a stranger turns up bearing the stench of Varine's necromancy about him. The enemy whose minions nearly ended Viv's mercenary career (and life) may be turning her eye back to Murk - and Viv is the only fighter who has any experience with her brand of evil. Even as Viv helps Fern spruce up the old bookshop and draw in new customers, she doesn't forget her true calling with the blade. That storyline takes some interesting twists and turns even as Viv grows more and more conflicted over how much she's come to care about parts of life that don't involve crushed skulls. Most of the storylines come to a satisfactory, if occassionally a bit bittersweet, conclusion that leaves many lives and outlooks changed. The epilogue ties it back into the first installment neatly, though in some ways I'm just as glad I read this volume first, as it made it a bit less obvious how the whole story would wrap up. I wound up adding an extra half-star for characters who became more interesting and insightful than anticipated, and a story that didn't always go to the most obvious places. (I also have to give Baldree credit for a very good audiobook narration, always easy to understand even in a moderately noisy warehouse environment.)
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