Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree is a fun and cozy found family story about a retired adventurer opening up a coffee shop in a D&D-style city.
Legends and Lattes
Travis Baldree
Tor
November 8, 2022
In this world, the idea of the coffee shop doesn’t yet exist in most places. Instead, coffee is an “exotic gnomish sensation,” so the process of opening up a coffee shop reads like one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books in the Industrial Revolution series — when protagonist Moist Van Lipwig initiates a postal service, for instance.
In Legends and Lattes, Viv the orc has spent her career thus far as part of an adventuring party, providing muscle for paid heists. She’s sick of it, and ready to start a new life. Coincidentally, she tried and loved coffee in a gnomish city, and decides to bring her appreciation for it to a new city.
Along the way, coffee shop staples such as delicious pastry, chalkboard signage, the cafe cat who just comes by, and the student who works in the cafe for hours but never orders anything, are all grappled toward and achieved. Like with Pratchett’s Moist books, there’s a cozy sense of inevitability to how the institution has come to be in our own world, as these things materialize in Viv’s.
Of course there’s a certain amount of intrigue brought to Viv’s endeavor, as unsavory elements from Viv’s past and unsavory elements of the city itself each provide some menace. But not, like, a lot of menace. The publisher’s marketing page for Legends and Lattes calls it “high fantasy and low stakes” and the reader is never really worried about whether Viv will be okay.
Rather, the focus is on the relationships Viv develops with her talented but underestimated team. Like Viv, each of them –carpenter, baker, barista and so on– has been judged based on their appearance and race, but has a lot more than their stereotypical role to offer. They work together cozily, appreciating and respecting each other’s range and abilities.
Legends and Lattes has a few romance elements, but not as many as I had expected. Instead, it offers much more of a found family plot than a romance, which surprised me because at least three of my friends have read Legends and Lattes as part of romance book clubs. Perhaps it was the fandom tropes that led many to assume the romance would be the focus?
While I am extremely fandom-adjacent, every now and then the fact that I don’t actually read fan fic bites me right in the context comprehension, and thus I was about 30% into this book before it dawned on me that it is a coffee shop AU.
Baldree’s success with this book offers its own cozy plot. A professional audiobook narrator, he originally wrote Legends and Lattes as a NanoWriMo project in 2021 and then self-published the result a mere three months later.
When it got a lot of buzz on Booktok and elsewhere, the publisher Tor approached him to publish it traditionally and the rest, as they say, is history. The new paperback edition from Tor includes a fun prequel story, “Pages to Fill,” which could have easily been a flashback chapter early in the book. Also, “Pages to Fill” is a banger of a title for a short story added to a new edition of a book.
Overall, Legends and Lattes is a perfect book for this time of year (at least in the northern hemisphere). As the days get darker, curl up with an aromatic beverage and read about these nice people succeeding.
