Audiobook length: 8 hrs, 1 min
Rating: 3.5 stars
Buzzwords 2025 Title Challenge: Contains punctuation
Twenty years before the events in Legends & Lattes, Viv is a young and relatively inexperienced mercenary, who gets badly injured fighting undead monsters while hunting for a powerful necromancer. Her mercenary band leave her in the quiet and mostly empty seaside town of Murk to heal up and recuperate. She worries that the group are going to leave her there, but thankfully, to take her mind off her fears, she encounters the local bookshop owner, who manages to persuade her (Viv has never exactly been a big reader) to buy a book, which she is surprised that she can barely put down.
Soon a beautiful friendship is born. Viv spends most of her days hanging out in Fern the Ratkin's rather run-down store, trying to help her come up with ways to make the place a bit less dilapidated and more inviting to customers. Fern keeps giving Viv new books, and after having eagerly completed a few, Viv stops trying to pretend that reading isn't for her. There are some added complications involving a fierce gnome fishing for an invitation to Rackham, Viv's employer; a suspicious city guard captain, and the discovery of the corpse of the sinister fellow who Viv got into a very public fight with after he was rude to Fern's pet.
Viv also befriends the local bakery owner, a cheerful dwarf who keeps bribing Viv with delicious baked goods. They develop the chastest of romances, which basically amounts to them talking walks, feeding the fish and holding hands occasionally. Both know that Viv isn't going to be staying in Murk for very long, so their flirtation has a definite end date.
While Viv is worried that her time in Murk is going to be too uneventful and boring, some strange artefacts left behind by the dead fellow on the beach, turn out to be rather exciting and may have links to the necromancer that Viv's mercenary band were hunting.
This was the December pick for my IRL book club, and we met in early January to discuss it. While most people liked it, a few people disliked it because they felt it was just too bland and uneventful to really hold their attention. Most of the readers agreed that the book was not without its flaws, but you don't read a book like this when you want to be overly critical and therefore they weren't too bothered. This, like Legends & Lattes is like candy for your brain, and the occasional plot inconsistency or lack of consistent world-building shouldn't distract from the silly cosiness of the read. The majority of us were in agreement that we liked Legends & Lattes more, and a few of the flaws with this book came from the fact that it was a prequel and therefore hampered by a few things already established in Baldree's first book.
One of the readers pointed out that the way the book depicts what a great experience reading can be, and the way it opens Viv's eyes to adventures and new perspectives through reading is very pedagogical, and that a book where so much of the plot centres around books, how great hanging out in a bookshop, and reading can be, it will hopefully get more reluctant readers to try more books. Which can only be a good thing.
Judging a book by its cover: The cover of my paperback copy of this is in the same style as that of the first book, with more seaside elements and the mysterious book Viv finds very much the focal point.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
