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Legends and Lattes: A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes
3/5. Cute and pleasing story about an orc who retires from the adventuring business to open up a coffee shop/eventual bakery in a fantasy city that has never seen such a thing, also she has a sweet understated queer romance.
Nota bien: Tor has apparently recently acquired this title, previously self-pub, so if you want to wait for the professional editing, you can do that.
When I picked this up, I thought the subtitle was funny and cute. And then I read the book and didn’t think it was funny anymore because, in fact, the stakes in this book could not be higher to my mind. He intends the subtitle to be saying ‘hey, no one is saving the world here,’ which is true. But be real with me for a second: when’s the last time the emotional tension of a book turned on whether the world was going to get saved or not? I’m going to assume the answer is almost never if you’re anything like me, because for me, the emotional stakes of a book are all about what happens to the characters (including, yes, what they have to do in order to save the world). So to say this book has low stakes, when it features a protagonist working hard and well to make herself a new and different and kinder life, and having that life threatened, and then to have it brutalized in a way that made her feel brutalized . . . there’s nothing low stakes about that. Yeah it gets fixed and she’s okay, but that’s not my point. My point is, calling this book ‘low stakes’ is, I think, entirely wrongheaded if you are at all a reader like I am. Is it feel-good? Yes. Is it soft? Yep. Is it low stakes? No. These things should not be conflated.
I still liked it. I’m just putting it out there. He definitely tagged this one incorrectly.
3/5. Cute and pleasing story about an orc who retires from the adventuring business to open up a coffee shop/eventual bakery in a fantasy city that has never seen such a thing, also she has a sweet understated queer romance.
Nota bien: Tor has apparently recently acquired this title, previously self-pub, so if you want to wait for the professional editing, you can do that.
When I picked this up, I thought the subtitle was funny and cute. And then I read the book and didn’t think it was funny anymore because, in fact, the stakes in this book could not be higher to my mind. He intends the subtitle to be saying ‘hey, no one is saving the world here,’ which is true. But be real with me for a second: when’s the last time the emotional tension of a book turned on whether the world was going to get saved or not? I’m going to assume the answer is almost never if you’re anything like me, because for me, the emotional stakes of a book are all about what happens to the characters (including, yes, what they have to do in order to save the world). So to say this book has low stakes, when it features a protagonist working hard and well to make herself a new and different and kinder life, and having that life threatened, and then to have it brutalized in a way that made her feel brutalized . . . there’s nothing low stakes about that. Yeah it gets fixed and she’s okay, but that’s not my point. My point is, calling this book ‘low stakes’ is, I think, entirely wrongheaded if you are at all a reader like I am. Is it feel-good? Yes. Is it soft? Yep. Is it low stakes? No. These things should not be conflated.
I still liked it. I’m just putting it out there. He definitely tagged this one incorrectly.