I Read Books: Legends And Lattes

 

Legends And Lattes

Viv is an orc mercenary in a fantasy-roleplaying-game-style adventuring party; having made enough money and taking the stone from the skull of a Scalvert Queen she retires to open a coffee shop. The Scalvert’s stone is supposed to create a “ring of fortune” for it’s owner when on a leyline. Viv travels to Thune, which she selects as a city generally open to fantasy beings of various races, and also doesn’t have coffee (a gnomish invention), detects a leyline on an abandoned stable and sets to work.

This then enters the “charming characters solve moderately difficult problems” section of the novel. First turning a stable into a coffee shop. Viv has money, the most important thing. Where she lucks out – where she is fortunate – is in the people she meets, a hob carpenter named Calamity who is able to do just about whatever she wants, a succubus Tandri to serve, who is also an artist and helps with the next problem – how to get people who don’t know what coffee is to want to drink coffee (promotion). Once open success isn’t instant but does grow rapidly, with the help of a ratkin baker Thimble, a bard who plays and a handful of other regulars.

The next problem to arise is protection. The local crime boss Madrigal has her lackies come by and make demands. Viv’s instinct is to resist; contacting her old adventuring companions, she reconciles with them (it was the work she was tired of, not them – or at least most of them) and they use their contacts to come to an arrangement. It turns out that even crime lords like coffee and cake*.

This leads to the final problem of the novel; one of Viv’s old adventuring companions comes to believe that she cheated him by taking the Scalvert stone. His attempts to seize it threaten the coffee shop.

It seems meanspirited** to suggest that a novel with “high fantasy, low stakes” doesn’t engage with larger questions. There’s a little light racism (especially against Tandri, where more than one character is suspicious she might use magic to seduce them) but they get along okay. The gnomish engineering, including the coffee machine, is fully steampunk, but everything else is muscle-powered; very 19^th and even 20^th century. The purpose of the novel is to create a 21^st century coffee shop (perhaps a particular real one) in a generically high fantasy city, and it performs it admirably, warmly. Am I complaining that the world-building is insufficient? That the Scalvert Stone explanation for how events morph around creating a coffee shop seems a bit arbitrary?

I guess I’m not really. This is enjoyable, and does what it says sweetly. But maybe, if someone were inspired by this to write more cosy fantasy, perhaps they might consider that coffee may be comforting, but it’s also dark and bitter.

Read This: Orc decides to give up violence and open a coffee shop
Don’t Read This: It’s just “charming characters solve moderately difficult problems”

 

* There are cafes and restaurants in the real world that are fronts for organised crime, and in some cases they are excellent; criminals like to eat in pleasant surroundings too! For reasons that are adequately explained Madrigal does not decide to take it over, which would cause a much more severe problem for Viv.

** Possibly hypocritical too; I’ve had a cozy fantasy flash fiction published in an anthology and if it’s not quite a piece of fluff, it’s certainly lightweight.