My biggest problem with Bookshops and Bonedust, Travis Baldree’s follow-up (and prequel to) his most excellent Legends & Lattes, is the title. I cannot, for the life of me, remember the Goddamned name of this book, and I actually had to make sure to upload the cover image first so that I got it right. Bonedust? That word I can remember. But is it Bookstores? Bookshelves? Bookshops? Bookstops? I can’t remember. I’m most likely to go with Bookshelves, but this is turning into trying to remember Bangledoof Clumperplum’s real name at this point; it’s not going to happen and the people I’m talking to will know what I’m referring to anyway.

Legends & Lattes came in second place on my Best Books of 2023 list, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I’ve become that I should have given two first place awards last year. Because Legends & Lattes *wasn’t* the best book I read last year, but I think with the benefit of a little more hindsight it was my favorite book of last year, and I’m not certain that the list has really had a reason to make that distinction in the past. Despite all that, this sat on the shelf for a little longer than you might expect it to, as I wasn’t terribly happy with the notion that Baldree had decided to write a prequel to L&L and not a proper sequel as the universe clearly demanded.

Well.

Bookstamps & Bonedust might actually be a little better than Legends & Lattes, if only for the presence of Potroast, that adorable little beast in the bottom left corner of the cover. Potroast is a gryphet, a word I’m pretty sure Baldree made up for this book, and one way or another appears to be half pug and half owlbear, and somehow taking what was already the best combination of two animals ever envisioned and combining it with a third animal has resulted in literally the best thing ever. Viv is still wonderful, and the rest of the side characters in this book are at least mostly up to the standards of B&B. 

The problem is that Tandri’s not in it, and Viv has another love interest, or maybe what the kids these days would call a situationship(*) and while watching the whatever-it-is blossom between those two characters is great, you know it’s not going anywhere, because Viv and Tandri are perfect, and Viv has to be single to meet Tandri, and so you spend the whole book wondering if something godawful is going to happen to the new love interest, and it doesn’t because this isn’t that kind of book, but it’s still super bittersweet because Baldree makes you want to root for the two of them to be happy forever together even though he’s already established that that can’t and won’t happen. And that’s … kinda bleh. Can we have a throuple in Book Three, maybe? Please?

(We can’t, but I’m not going to tell you why. Let’s just say that there’s an epilogue that sets up Book Three as an actual sequel pretty nicely and you find some stuff out.)

The other problem Bookcases & Bonedust has is that, structurally, it’s very similar to Legends & Lattes, with the main difference being that Viv is stranded in this little town she’s in because of a bad wound she’s taken in battle; she is convalescing for the entire book, and she sort of falls ass-backwards into this local bookstore that serves as the center of all the story’s shenanigans. But the broad strokes of the story are pretty damn repetitive, right down to a ratkin character and pastries forming a more important part of the narrative than you might expect from a typical fantasy book.

The verdict? I loved it and you should read it, but it’s a better book if you haven’t read Legends & Lattes yet, and I think whichever book you read second is going to suffer a little bit regardless of which order you read them in. There are absolutely worse problems for a book to have, and I still maintain that I can read about Viv forever, and if there are a hundred thousand of these books and they’re all the same plot I’m fine with it, but it’s not the breath of fresh air that the first book was, mostly because time rather annoyingly insists in moving in one single direction and it can’t be. 

(*) Probably not, because I’m sure I’m using the word wrong, but it’s a fun word nonetheless.