20. A debut novel: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

List Progress: 2/30

There are plenty of stories that people find comforting, but rarer is the story that is actually about comfort. Legends & Lattes, the 2022 debut novel by video game designer Travis Baldree, follows an orc woman in a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired world who has decided to leave the world of adventuring behind and start a coffee shop. She wants to build a place where both she and others can find peace and relaxation, and the reader is included in that dream. With the help of a magical luck-bringing artifact, Viv builds her shop and gathers other outsiders with cozy dreams into a group of friends around herself. But when her dream is threatened, can she defend everything she has worked for? Yes, because this is not the sort of book for a bitter ending, but the journey to get there is sweet.

Legends & Lattes is more than a little slight. Lore about the world and cities will not be detailed, and even many details about main characters are lacking. But that is part of the story being told: the lives that brought them all here don’t matter as much as what they are trying to build now. But the logistics of the actual coffee shop are also fairly light. Coffee is a foreign delicacy in this setting and Viv fell in love with it as soon as she tried it, but the book has fairly little to say about the preparation and development of coffee beverages; coffee is fairly love-it-or-hate it in our world, yet everyone in this culture without a coffee-drinking palate adores it from the off. One of her new friends is a baker and he seems to create real-world desserts perfectly the first time on every shot, with no flubs or experimentation needed. Real-world coffee shops have pain au chocolat, so he knows how to make pain au chocolat. (As a home baker, Thimble jumping directly from enriched doughs to apparently inventing laminated pastry in one jump had me sighing.) Real-world coffee shops have iced coffee and to-go mugs, so their shop gets iced coffee and to-go mugs, even if they don’t really fit the established style of the setting. Legends & Lattes is about vibes, and the vibes need iced coffee, so iced coffee they shall have.

But the nitpicks are what come up when a book doesn’t have a great deal of conflict to discuss otherwise filling the pages. There are opponents and obstacles to overcome, but Viv and her closest friend Tandri are well up to the task set before them. Legends & Lattes is fun and cute, but there is not much more to dig into and not much more to return to. A nice treat certainly, but not a full meal. 

Would I Recommend It: Soft yes.