REVIEW: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Image provided by the author

I drank so much coffee while reading this book and writing this review - which, if anything, speaks to its supreme ability to make me yearn not just to return to the joys of cafes, but specifically to one run by an orc and her motely crew of companions. It is genuinely one of the most comforting, easygoing books I've read in a long time. This is a  Goldilocks book - I was not stressed over turning the pages, nor laboriously chugging along through chapters to finish it, but just in the right place: enjoying and savouring each minute spent in this world.

Legends & Lattes busies itself with eternal questions but doesn't seek to answer them through a sweeping quest or high-flung political drama. It asks how you make a break with your past and forge a future, and how you learn to find contentment and security within that future, and it does so by putting our protagonist, Viv, in the role of a coffee shop entrepreneur.

The big thing that jumped out to me about this book was its sense of place, both in terms of actual setting and in terms of inhabitants - all of which, if we're doing a coffee shop yarn, are pretty essential. A key chunk of the book's first third is just getting the café off the ground. As it went on, I came to love the whole cast of characters and how Viv was gathering more and more friends and allies who were both her friends and had their own stakes as individuals in her enterprise. I was particularly fond of quiet, industrious Thimble, as well as the Madrigal, who - for those who have seen the TV series Black Sails - reminded me, both in appearance and disposition (and frankly also in terms of hobbies!), of matriarch Marion Guthrie. 

I love how coffee captured a dream of peace that Viv had so clearly been seeking, and how she found joy in recreating her own joy for others - it was a feedback loop of her sense of things coming together as she, herself, was surrounded by people who became part of that togetherness. I also liked that the setting of the café became a perfect measuring chart for the story's progression, too - interactions with customers and problems were diverting, added something to Viv's journey, and were in many occasions ultimately encapsulated in some way on the slate menu's items. The menu tracked the story. It's a really clever use of setting that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The highlight of the setting isn't limited just to the primary location, either. Baldree definitely has skill with words and I found this skill was deployed strongest when it came to description. Thune as we hear about it is a city that feels populated, and that feels lived in, and it feels like a real city. It was so comforting and not something I've really experienced as a reader before. Not every alleyway is one that you, as the new kid in town, are going to get knifed in! There are tidy restaurants with nice barkeeps! There are market days and a post office and libraries and spice shops and dock workers! As someone who's moved to places in several different countries in the past few years (most of them also river towns like Thune!) I related powerfully to Viv's experience of displacement but wanting to belong, and worrying about faux pas that might follow you in your new life. 

Viv's character was an interesting one, as it's the first time I think that I've really felt a character squarely sits half-and-half on the line between being a character of her own and being a reader stand-in. The latter point is largely due to the fact that the writing doesn't give Viv a particularly strong or distinct voice, and because I felt the prologue was a little abrupt when it came to setting up Viv's status quo before entering her new world, which made it harder to connect to Viv and her circumstances for the first ~15% of the novel. However, as the novel grew into itself, I also felt Viv grow in to herself, and so the actual coffeeshop Legends & Lattes ended up feeling as much an enterprise of hers as of the reader's.  

It's also a huge credit to Baldree's skill as a writer that despite this early difficulty in connecting to the protagonist - something pretty important to me as a reader! - I still was invested and read on. I'm glad that the story eventually developed greater tug and pull about Viv's relationship to her old life and how it taught her to solve problems versus how she ought to solve them now, and showed genuine conflicts and contradictions that also were embodied in the characters that populated both the before and after portions of Viv's life. I have to concede that, when it came to eventual conflict resolution, doing so through the provision of cinnamon rolls was an absolute masterstroke.

While a lot of Viv's resourcefulness sometimes felt too easy, I do like that this was actually something explicitly addressed by the existence of the Scalvert's Stone, an artefact recovered in the prologue, and then interrogated, culminating in a great climax that - in hindsight - had been cleverly foreshadowed in a misdirection about the true antagonist of the story, and that really brought together the key ideas of this tale in a resonant full circle movement. The Stone itself is a tantalising bit of soft magic that suits this particular cosy fantasy very well. I like that its obscurity is mirrored by characters like the old gnome and Amity the direcat, too - it gives an old world fantasy bent to a story playing with aspects of modernity like coffee machines.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants a cosy slice-of-life escape into an interesting and easygoing world. It's also a true pleasure for anyone whose Dungeons & Dragons adventures were ever more in the provinces of city building or messing with the locals. I personally shared this with my party at the 25% mark because it was giving me such strong vibes about some of our previous adventures on our current campaign! I also highly recommend this to anyone who may be in a reading slump. This novel is not my usual pace, and that, for me, was refreshing. It's slow going and focuses a lot on building up place and community. It's not much fussed about rushing in to set up an overarching story conflict, however low stakes. I was genuinely taken aback by how much I enjoyed it and I think it has reignited a spark for reading that has been dimmed in recent months.

Legends & Lattes is ultimately a swift, easy, light, and evocative read that lets you live in its world for a while with a promise to be there to welcome you back again soon, lattes and Thimblets at the ready.

★★★★½ (rounded up to 5 on Goodreads)

Thank you to the author for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!