cozy fantasy – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

It’s possible that by the time I go to sleep tonight I will have finished five books this weekend, and two of them I did not like very much. One of them may have been my fault, as it demanded a more careful reader than I’ve had the energy to be lately, and one, to my dismay, turned out to be something called extreme horror, which is code for “mentions things being crusted in pubic hair four times in the first fifty pages,” at which point I noped out.

We had an afternoon wedding in Indianapolis today, and I read S.A. MacLean’s The Phoenix Keeper cover-to-cover on the drive, closing the book with perhaps a minute of driving to go until we got home, and it was wonderful. Pay no attention to the tagline on the cover, which is referring to the phoenixes, not the people; dating is one of the many things on the main character’s mind, and she goes out with two people over the course of the book, but this is very much not a romantasy, a genre that I’m growing a trifle tired of at the moment. It’s a subplot and while it works out delightfully (there’s that word again) it’s very much not what the book is about. Also, the blurb appears on the back of my lovely Illumicrate edition of the book, and not on the front, which is nice.

One subgenre I’m not tired of yet, though, is the cozy fantasy, and … oh, man, this book is a hoodie and a warm blanket and maybe a sleeping cat in your lap to go with it. The titular character, Aila, is a 28-year old zookeeper with an anxiety disorder and maybe a touch of the ’tism to go with it,(*) and the entire book takes place at the zoo, with only a couple of brief interludes to her apartment and one (1) date at a restaurant. The problem driving the narrative is getting a second phoenix for her zoo so that she can have a breeding pair (the author explicitly references how zoos brought the California condor back to viability in a foreword, and the parallels are not subtle) and then how she manages to convince these complicated animals to accept each other and mate.

There are complications. There’s another zookeeper she doesn’t get along with. It’ll all be fine.

Turns out I like books set in zoos, and while I’m normally a stickler for worldbuilding, “this isn’t set on Earth, there are magical animals, fuckin’ roll with it” is more or less all the worldbuilding you’re gonna get, and it’s really all the book needs. I mean, there’s drama; there are poachers to worry about, and there’s the relationship stuff, but a big part of being cozy fantasy is relatively low stakes, and again, you know it’s all gonna work out fine and it does. I really enjoyed reading this, and I’ll definitely check out whatever S.A. MacLean comes up with next.

(Also: this book does queernormative societies quite well; Aila goes out with a guy, and then goes out with a girl, and it’s all good, and there’s a trans character and her transness is revealed in the most natural and easy and clean way I think I’ve ever seen in a book before. I’ve talked about this before, but trans side characters can be tricky, and there’s no Sekrit Penis moment in this book and the reveal, such as it is, comes in what felt like perfectly natural dialogue. Extra points for all of that.)

(*) I can imagine a reader who feels like Aila is kind of A Lot. I am not that reader.)

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.