Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree tells the story of an orc named Viv, who one day decides to put down her sword and retire from adventuring in order to open a coffee shop.

I didn’t like it.

Now, I know I’m a horror guy, on the surface “cosy fantasy” might not seem like my cup of tea, but really, I’m not opposed to the concept. I like my cosy games, I was there with the rest of you playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020, I recommend Wytchwood to anyone that will listen, and I will never not love Pokemon.

Cosy and cute are not a problem. Low stakes are not a problem either; I can’t tell you how many times I read Enid Blyton’s The Caravan Series as a child, and nothing bloody happens in those. Ditto Anne of Green Gables.  I can happily read or watch something low-stakes as long as the worldbuilding and character work are there, and therein lies the root of my issue with “Legends & Lattes”.

This book is set in a cut-and-paste Dungeons & Dragons-inspired fantasy world. The reader is expected to know what this world looks like, therefore there is no meaningful development or description devoted to it. I could give it the benefit of the doubt and say it’s intentionally familiar for the sake of “coziness”, but honestly to me it comes off lazy, derivative, and devoid of flavour.

Our main character, Viv, is an orc. If you’re remotely familiar with the fantasy genre you’ll know that orcs tend to be written as violent, stupid savages. Viv is clearly not this, but she mentions offhand a couple of times how people have a certain image of orcs, but this is never expanded upon. We never meet any other orcs, Viv never talks about orc culture, so we never learn what exactly orc stereotypes are in this specific universe, how true they are, how Viv defies them. The book doesn’t have to tell you what orcs are, you already know!

We also meet a few gnomes in this book. The gnomes presented here are inventors, builders, tinkerers, etc. Standard. Once again, it’s assumed you’re already aware of this archetype.

There’s a ratkin. The clue is in the name. Any elaboration on their culture, language, interspecies relations, place in the world at all? What do you think this is?

We also have a succubus, who also exists to say “not all succubi”. This one struck me as an odd choice, while the point of the character is that she’s NOT hypersexual, her presence is jarring, if only because succubi are usually supernatural yet here she is as mundane as any other person.

And that mundanity is part of the problem. When I read fantasy, I want to be transported. There’s no magic anywhere here, in any sense, we’re just supposed to be so charmed by D&D coffee shop AU we throw all our usual standards out the window. I cannot describe on paper how hard I rolled my eyes when the ratkin (I’ve forgotten all the character names already) presented the group with chocolate as if it was the Holy Grail, nor can I believe that coffee is so mind-blowing to residents of a city that is supposedly a magic hotspot (if only because coffee was an acquired taste for me personally).

The closest I came to DNF’ing Legends & Lattes was probably when Viv first used “Eight hells!” as an exclamation. There’s eight hells in this universe, as opposed to the Nine Hells of the Forgotten Realms in Dungeons & Dragons, and definitely not to be confused with the seven hells referenced by the Faith of the Seven in A Song of Ice and Fire. I’m not against cheeky references to other fantasy properties, but here this just compounded the lazy worldbuilding.

I am completely and utterly baffled at how popular this book is. Ordinarily, even if a book isn’t to my personal taste I can understand the appeal, but I’m not sure why you’d spend money on this when there’s reams of coffee shop AU fanfic out there for free. I feel like Christopher Plummer in The Sounds of Music.

I only finished Legends & Lattes out of spite, and I’m thankful I bought it second hand. I was going to finish this review with a list of alternative recommendations, but, you know what, I stand by what I said before: don’t spend any money, AO3 has you covered.

Review by Dai Baddley