Book Review: LEGENDS AND LATTES
LEGENEDS AND LATTES is a breakout indie novel that has recently been picked up by Tor to become a traditionally published one. It is no surprise its managed to take the indie world by storm because it is a fantastically written book with a unique premise, excellent use of its genre, good cover, and reassuringly fun feel in a sea of grimdark or epic struggles. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter. No, what Legends and Lattes manages to pull off is almost unprecedented: it is a book about incredibly low stakes in a high-fantasy setting. What is at stake for our heroine? Whether she can make her coffee shop work out or not. Which is nothing and everything.
Viv is an orc barbarian adventurer who achieves the biggest score of her life when she slays the Scalvert Queen with her fellows. Rather than take any of the xenomorph-esque monster’s treasure, she instead takes a strange rock in the center of its stomach. Viv has long had a dream and wants to retire from adventuring to make it happen: open a coffee shop in the city of Thune. Coffee is a gnomish invention in this world and virtually unknown to the public. Viv loves it, though, and believes that she could make a living selling it.
Almost as soon as she begins building her coffee shop, though, she starts to attract a strange menagerie of oddball fantasy creatures: a succubus university student, a humanoid rat baker with a genius at confectionary, a hobgoblin carpenter, and a few other peculiar denizens. Part of what I like about the book is it also avoids fantastic racism. The only person to suffer any sort of prejudice is Tandi and that's because succubi are believed to be inherently promiscuous.
I knew this book was special when Viv was confronted with a local thieves guild shaking her down for protection money and the choice was not whether she could fight them or not. Viv absolutely could fight them. The choice is whether she should because she doesn't want to go back to violence. It's an interesting take that violence is treated as a failure in a fantasy novel, and she just wants to sell her coffee in peace.
There’s a surprising lack of villains in the book, even antagonists. The Madrigal is the leader of the thieves guild but is more interesting in prettying up her territory in hopes of bringing in more business. She wants Viv to pay up but not actually have to engage in violence because that’s bad for business. Viv also has a former teammate of hers that wants the Scalvert Stone because he believes it must surely be more valuable than all the treasure she left behind.
In conclusion, Legends and Lattes is something that fills a hole in my reading that I didn't even know I had. Its characters are lovable, its plot fun, its atmosphere breezy, and even has a surprising LGBT romance that I enjoyed. I think you should check it out of you love Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft fantasy.