High fantasy is not usually the stuff of warm and cosy feels nor do second-chance stories of found family and hopeful new starts feature all kinds of mythical creatures.
These two genres do not normally share a narrative bed since one, the former, is usually all high stakes and intense action while the other, the latter, is concerned with the stuff of everyday life, although granted high stakes can be work at work here too, but in Travis Baldree’s absolute triumph of a debut novel, Legends & Lattes, fantasy meets happy reinvention in a way that makes your heart sing and the fantastical world you are gifted for a time as a reader to inhabit feel less dark and threatening and more alive with rich possibility.
It’s the premise that catches your eye almost immediately.
An orc barbarian named Viv, tired from a great decades of bloody adventuring decides its high time she walked away from sword wielding and contractual violence and opened, wait for it, a coffee shop in one of the Territory’s biggest cities, Thune.
Forget that no one bar some gnomes and their customers in another city called Azimuth have heard of coffee and that the first people she meets in Thune thinks she’s made to open a retail outlet selling the stuff – not that they will tell her outright; Viv may be sweet at heart but her height, build and sword are not to be trifled with – Viv has saved and planned and this complete change of life trajectory is going to work.
It was ridiculous, of course. A coffee shop? In a city where nobody even knew what coffee was? Until six months ago, she’d [Viv] never heard of it, never smelled or tasted it. On the face of it, the whole endeavor was ludicrous.
She smiled in the dark.
When at last she lay back on her bedroll, she started to list her tasks for the following day, but didn’t make it past the third.
She slept like the dead.
It’s likely that it’s Viv’s dedication to her unlikely dream, and the fact that she’s a sweet, lovely person when she’s not lopping the head off fearsome beasts and pulling out a magical that’s reputed to bring good luck, that makes meeting her such a delight.
Like so much else in Legends & Lattes, Viv is both the accepted fantasy trope, and most assuredly not, embodying the brutism and strength of orcs that we’ve seen in The Lord of the Rings and countless other stories, and yet articulating what all of us have wanted at one point or another – the chance to be someone else, to live a whole new life and to be committed enough to the dream to actually make it happen.
So compelling is her determination to set up a shop selling coffee that she quickly accumulates a bunch of new friends around her although as is the way of slowly agglomerating found families they start off as contractors, employees, neighbours and customers before becoming so much more.
The first person she meets is the woman who becomes her ageing neghbour across the street, Laney, a woman who’s terrible at baking but weirdly, quirkily hospitable, who’s soon joined by handyman Cal, a hob whose in demand for his woodwork but shunned by more people through sheer bigotry and ignorance.
Their loss really because Cal, while gruff and taciturn, knows his stuff and soon turns the old wooden livery Viv has purchased into a swish café that sports cosy booths, a kitchen for making the pastries to go with the coffee – this is Cal’s suggestion; Viv may not be an enthusiastic convert to coffee but isn’t fully across what needs to go with it – and the sort of ambience that people will come to.
Even if they still have no idea what coffee is.
That soon changes as Viv’s newly-hired employee Tandri, a succubus who’s doing her best not to use her persuasive gifts to her own ends, comes up with the idea of free coffee, a promotional gambit practically unheard of in a medieval town – that’s Thune’s delight; it’s definitely all feudal and wooden with horses and stables and cobblestones but also gloriously modern in its own postmodern way – that brings in customers slowly and then in a torrent, their patronage helped along by the delicious pastries made by a rattkin named Thimble who has a way with cinnamon and yeast.
Vivi’s coffee and Thimble’s pastry goods bring in people like student Hemington, Durias a chess-playing elderly gnome and a wannabe lute-playing bard called Pendry who’s also seeking a chance to live out his heart and not his assigned role in life, all of whom start coalescing around Viv and who turns her café, named naturally enough Legends and Lattes as a nod to her past, and her now present & future, into as much of a home as a business.
That’s not to say that Viv has it all her own way with local mafia-type figures, the Madrigal, threatening her with standover tactics, and an old mercenary partner, Fennus, wanting something she has and hellbent on taking it any way he can, and it does reach a rather fiery point where everything Viv has worked for hangs very much in the balance, but she gets through it all, painful and distressing as it is at times, because of her new found family around her.
Viv held her sword in her hands, head bowed.
She’d foresworn her old life, crossing a bridge to a new land, and now knelt in its ruin.
This was the bridge burning away behind her, leaving her in a desolation.
She tossed the blade back into the ash and took the only path that remained.
Though it is undeniably sweetly charming, Legends & Lattes is also funny.
Very, very funny.
Quite apart from the premise of a battle-weary orc opening a café selling something few people or creatures have ever drunk, which Baldree realises all kinds of witty cracks about baristas and the origin of the word “latte” (it’s a gnome thing), Legends & Lattes sparkles with beautifully realised dialogue that is as hilarious as it is wondrously heartfelt.
All of the characters have their issues and challenges and it’s part of the reason why they find an unconditionally loving and inclusive home with each other, but they’re either capable of being funny or finding themselves in situations that are downright comedic, and it’s this humour running through Legends & Lattes, mixed with some real humanity or orc-osity or whatever creatures find a home in the café, that make this novel such a delight to read.
It’s greatest gift is that it gives you fantasy and reinvention in one highly-imaginative package that embraces stellar worldbuilding, fully well-rounded characters that you quickly come to adore and root for, and a narrative that’s both intense and amusingly light and which reminds you that, much like unlikely genres, wholly disparate people can come together, find a home and family (and some damn good pastries) and a new path in life, one that faces down challenges and obstacles and comes out the other side, eager to see what lies ahead and armed with the coffee to face it all.