Book Review: Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes (plus Let's Get Book Together book group tonight!)

Legends & Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes

by Travis Baldree (Baldree)

 

Legends & Lattes is a book with serious buzz. The author, a professional audiobook narrator, drafted it during National Novel Writing Month in 2021 then self-published it on Amazon in February 2022. It became an instant word-of-mouth success thanks to social media. Traditional publisher Tor Books hustled to put out a trade paperback by November 2022. Nine translations are currently in progress. And, of course, there’s an audiobook version performed by the author. An amazing success story!

 

The story opens with Viv, an orc warrior, delivering the fatal sword strike to an enormous monster. She wrenches a fabled stone out of its head and walks away into retirement on the spot and without explanation to her Dungeons & Dragons style adventuring party. Viv has a secret plan: open a coffee shop in a city where the ley-lines and the stone will bring fortune. She’ll need all the luck she can get, as she has no experience running a business and the people in this city have never heard of coffee. What she does have is patience, strength, and way of sizing up people (all of whom are considerably smaller than herself). Some of the obstacles seem like they’d be easier if she picked up her sword, but she wants a fresh start with herself as well. On top of all this, one member of her old adventuring band is not satisfied with how things were left off.

 

This book is as cozy and warm as the coffee shop Viv and her new friends create.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart by Stephanie Burgis or A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher.)

 

( official Legends & Lattes page on the official Travis Baldree web site )

 

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

 

Join the discussion of this book tonight at the December 2022 meeting of the Let’s Get Books Together book discussion group at the Gere Branch Library, at 6:30 p.m.