I loved it. I enjoyed the general setting - a quiet seaside town in a fantasy world - a lot. The characters are great, too. They have their outlooks and motivations and their little quirks and it's all presented in a well-paced manner that doesn't feel forced.
I loved how this is also a book about books and bookshops. The excerpts of the books from this world were fantastic and were woven well into the overall story. That story was also really nice and captivating. I adored the cozyness and how accepting everyone was. An early highlight of the year for me!
The audiobook is narrated by the author who does a great job with it.
I don't know what else to say about this book beyond comparing it to Legends & Lattes. It's more of the same; that's all I wanted. Great work, A+, understood the assignment.
I really well enjoyed the accompanying book Legends and Lattes which was published first. I of course needed to pick up its prequel. I found I enjoyed this book even more than the first. A little more action than the previous book but I would still solidly place this book in the cozy fantasy genre. I found myself breezing through the pages and reading during breaks at work just to finish. I again would recommend this for a relaxing read.
This was a fun prequel to Legends & Lattes. It was a much stronger book for me with much more depth; Viv is stuck injured in a small seaside town and has to figure out what to do with herself while she's recovering. It's a cozy book about finding new directions, supporting friends who are stuck, and connections even when they're temporary. These are very different books, but it made me want to go reread Bujold's Memory, which is also a book centered on sorting out your life when its expected trajectory has been suddenly altered.
It's also a book about loving books and caring for a bookstore, which immediately endeared itself to me. Fern (the foul-mouthed rattkin who owns said bookstore) recommends Viv a series of books from different (in-world fantasy takes on) genres. The snippets from these books are entertaining but each one ties implicitly and explicitly …
This was a fun prequel to Legends & Lattes. It was a much stronger book for me with much more depth; Viv is stuck injured in a small seaside town and has to figure out what to do with herself while she's recovering. It's a cozy book about finding new directions, supporting friends who are stuck, and connections even when they're temporary. These are very different books, but it made me want to go reread Bujold's Memory, which is also a book centered on sorting out your life when its expected trajectory has been suddenly altered.
It's also a book about loving books and caring for a bookstore, which immediately endeared itself to me. Fern (the foul-mouthed rattkin who owns said bookstore) recommends Viv a series of books from different (in-world fantasy takes on) genres. The snippets from these books are entertaining but each one ties implicitly and explicitly into the themes and plot. Mystery! Action! Romance! Friendship! Local authors! Maybe it's a little too on the nose, but it worked really well for me.
(As a super minor aside here, it's also interesting to me about where the tension in this book comes from. Certainly, there's a larger necromancer in the background that creates the larger plot. Secondarily, money in the book is also a concern, but it's less that any of these characters will starve and it's more an emotional worry--Fern is concerned that her bookstore will fold and she will have failed her dad and her own dream. There's a lot of discussion of Viv paying for baked goods and her room and board, but despite being a young mercenary there's never any "how am I going to support this lifestyle of staying at this inn all summer" worries. It reminds me of the kind of cozy worldbuilding that Zandra Vandra does, where there's emotional tension but the normal grinding terribleness of the world has been softened at the edges.)
I love this series so much. Everything about this book was wonderful. These are the books I look forward to the most because of how cozy they are. I just can't get enough of Viv and how she chooses to live her life, it's wonderful. The epilogue was the icing on the cake. I hope there is at least one more book.
This prequel to Legends & Lattes doesn't have quite the same charm as that novel, but it's still a fun, low-stakes fantasy. The characters in this one were the highlight, with the ratfolk and bone homunculus being delights.
