#REVIEW: Brigands & Breadknives, by Travis Baldree

On December 19, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

A warning: I haven’t even written it yet, and I feel like this review might be a little unfair, so adjust your expectations accordingly. This is the third Travis Baldree book I’ve read and the third review I’ve written of his books, which means that I’ve cursed at autocorrect for changing “Baldree” to “Balder” approximately one hundred and forty thousand times.

I loved his first two books. Legends & Lattes was my second-favorite book of 2023 and Bookshops & Bonedust, the prequel follow-up, was an honorable mention. And I’m going to be a bit of a wanker and quote myself in my write-up of L&L for the Best Books of the Year post:

The sequel is on my shelf right now and I haven’t read it yet because it’s set before Viv opened the shop and I’m not sure I’m nearly as interested in her as an adventurer. I want more of the coffee shop. I will read about Viv and Tandri making delicious coffee and being quietly and happily in love for a hundred years, and I will love every second of it.

And Brigands and Breadknives is about Fern, the ratkin bookseller from Bookshops & Bonedust, so it’s still not a book about Viv and Tandri. Now, I knew this going in! Fern’s right there on the cover, and Viv and Tandri are nowhere to be seen. But I figured that since it was at least a chronological sequel to L&L, we’d have a good amount of both of them in there anyway, right?

Not only do we get very little of Viv and nothing of Tandri, the book starts with Fern screwing both of them over, and to make things worse, abandoning Potroast, who was absolutely the best thing about the second book. This book is basically about Fern’s character flaws. I mean, there’s other stuff going on, but I came very close to abandoning this book, which was shocking to me. And what makes this somewhat unfair is that I’m basically punishing the book because Travis Baldree, for the second book in a row, didn’t write the book I wanted him to write, which … isn’t exactly his job as an author? But I didn’t like Fern as a character nearly as much as Viv and Tandri going in, and when Fern gets drunk and pulls a huge asshole move within the first few chapters, I switched from “I don’t like her as much as I like these two characters I really like and this cool pug-owlbear thing” to “I don’t like this character at all, and I want the people I liked back.”

I dunno. It’s not a bad book. I can’t and won’t make that claim. It has a lot of the same strengths that made the previous two books such a pleasure to read, so it’s entirely possible that someone else with slightly different preferences about the characters might have different feelings, and I wouldn’t argue with someone who really liked it. But, man, it just wasn’t what I was looking for, and I still want my damn Viv and Tandri book. They got married! OFF-SCREEN! Write that goddamn book, Travis Baldree!

A slight sidenote, and I’m gonna quote myself again, because I suck:

Still looking for that word, and yes, this was a reference to this book.

#REVIEW: BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST, by Travis Baldree

On January 19, 2024March 18, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

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.

#REVIEW: Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree

On August 24, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I feel like, especially in the last couple of years, I say things like this a lot around here: if you look at this book cover you will immediately know most of what you might need to determine whether you should read this book, and your determination will very likely be one hundred percent correct. You should absolutely judge this book by its cover. That’s it. That’s the book. There’s a big barbarian-lookin’ orc chick (you’d be forgiven if you chose some other humanoid species; I thought she was an ogre at first) and something vaguely demonoid (a succubus, as it turns out) and they’re running a coffee shop. The only real question might be whether this is a full-blown fantasy world that happens to have coffee shops in it or if it’s some sort of urban fantasy thing, and, well, it’s full-blown fantasy, albeit in a world where coffee is mostly unknown.

You already know if you want to read this. If you want to read this, you and I can be friends. If you don’t want to read this you should read it anyway, because it’s fucking delightful, a word I have been using a lot to describe books lately. I asked BlueSky if I could get away with calling it “delicious,” and apparently I have decided I can since I’m doing it again here. The characters are wonderful– the being responsible for the pastries is a particularly inspired choice– and the plot is pleasantly low-stakes and predictable in a way that is somehow warm and comfortable and, dare I say it, cozy, as I know that “low-stakes and predictable” is not a phrase often associated with praise. You will make one wildly incorrect prediction and you will be happy to be wrong. The rest of it? Not so much. I have already preordered the sequel, due out in November.

That’s really it. This book got nominated for the Best Novel Hugo, and while I can’t name any of the other nominees off the top of my head I feel like it would be a perfectly acceptable choice and I’d be happy if it won. It will make you happy as well. You should read it.