Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree

Book Description

Viv’s career with the notorious mercenary company Rackam’s Ravens isn’t going as planned. Wounded during the hunt for a powerful necromancer, she’s packed off against her will to recuperate in the sleepy beach town of Murk―so far from the action that she worries she’ll never be able to return to it. Still, adventure isn’t all that far away. A suspicious traveler in gray, a gnome with a chip on her shoulder, a summer fling, and an improbable number of skeletons prove Murk to be more eventful than Viv could have ever expected.

Review

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree is a fun, fantasy adventure. Like his first book, Baldree filled this novel with warmth, love, and sweet cozy moments. I listened to the audio version of this story because Baldree reads it himself. An experienced audiobook narrator, Baldree’s performance of his book brought the perfect touch of heart and whimsy to his story.

When Vivian, an injured orc is forced to recuperate in a small town, she falls in love with reading.

I’m pretty sure we can all get behind this story. What’s cozier than a bookshop, you ask?

Here’s where it gets sticky.

Genre-hopping Whiplash

Baldree wrote Legends & Lattes as a cozy fantasy. The stakes are low (Will Viv’s coffee shop be successful?), the action is minimal, and the point is watching the sweet story unfold. In contrast, Bookshops & Bonedust is a sword and sorcery fantasy. The stakes are extremely high, the novel is full of action, and at times, the situation the characters face is dire.

From a character perspective, this makes sense. When we meet Viv in Legends & Lattes, she’s retired from her life as a mercenary, and the novel shows her as an older, wiser character. In the prequel, she’s young, fiery, and still thinking “sword first”.

But while the stories happen twenty years apart for Viv, they are only a year apart (or less!) for us readers,

Readers who started with Legends & Lattes will read Bookshops & Bonedust to get more of the same vibe. There is some of that here, but there is also action and violence. Plus, we know that what happens in this story has little effect on the older Viv.

In contrast, readers who start with Bookshops & Bonedust might become unhappy with the slower pace and lack of action in Legends & Lattes.

Separately, each book is wonderful. Taken together, the books diminish each other.

This is a terrible thing to do to either book!

It left me wishing Baldree had written about a different mercenary orc left to recuperate in Murk. Or at the least that he’d sprinkled in more Easter eggs for readers who’d read Legends & Lattes first.

Despite these criticisms, I adored Bookshops & Bonedust. It’s set to drop in November. Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with an audio ARC of this book. I’d already preordered my copy, but now I look forward to reading it again!

Content Warning

Alcohol, Enslavement, Queer Romance, Violence, Wounds

The header photo is a composite image. Base image by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash