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A trad-published D&D coffeeshop AU in which an orc mercenary, Viv, retires from adventuring and opens a coffeeshop. That's it, that's the book.
For a fantasy novel, there's a surprising lack of fantasy. Viv being an orc only means that she's big and strong and people assume she's a brute. There's no orc culture or anything else that would make her different from being a big tough human warrior in a world with gender equality. Her staff is of various D&D races and classes, but in a way that's similar to her being an orc - we only get a tiny bit of physical description of how they're different from being human, and otherwise they act exactly like modern humans. The coffeeshop serves iced coffee, hot coffee, lattes, cinnamon buns, chocolate croissants, and biscotti.
Given that this is a fantasy world which is basically modern America with window dressing, I'd have wanted something more Terry Pratchett-esque, where it has some commentary on the society that it really is. This isn't that, though it does have some mild commentary on not judging by appearances.
It's very cute and cozy. I liked it but I didn't love it. It's in a genre I enjoy - a book centered around the process of creating something rather than centered around conflict - but for me, it was just slightly skewed from being a book I'd have loved. It hit a sort of uncanny valley for me in that it was too similar to our real world to provide the fantasy-genre pleasure of exploring what a coffeeshop in a D&D world would be like, but its similarity to our world didn't reveal anything about our own world.
I'd have been much more interested if it really got into the fantasy aspect, serving food and drink that you can't get at Starbucks, having to deal with genuinely different cultures, maybe having some races be allergic to others' delicacies, etc. Diane Duane's Star Trek novels do that sort of thing extremely well. But it clearly wasn't what Baldree was interested in.
This was a smash hit so there's clearly an eager market for cozy, process-based fantasy. Good! I'm sure I'll love some of what's written as a result of this book making the big leagues.
For a fantasy novel, there's a surprising lack of fantasy. Viv being an orc only means that she's big and strong and people assume she's a brute. There's no orc culture or anything else that would make her different from being a big tough human warrior in a world with gender equality. Her staff is of various D&D races and classes, but in a way that's similar to her being an orc - we only get a tiny bit of physical description of how they're different from being human, and otherwise they act exactly like modern humans. The coffeeshop serves iced coffee, hot coffee, lattes, cinnamon buns, chocolate croissants, and biscotti.
Given that this is a fantasy world which is basically modern America with window dressing, I'd have wanted something more Terry Pratchett-esque, where it has some commentary on the society that it really is. This isn't that, though it does have some mild commentary on not judging by appearances.
It's very cute and cozy. I liked it but I didn't love it. It's in a genre I enjoy - a book centered around the process of creating something rather than centered around conflict - but for me, it was just slightly skewed from being a book I'd have loved. It hit a sort of uncanny valley for me in that it was too similar to our real world to provide the fantasy-genre pleasure of exploring what a coffeeshop in a D&D world would be like, but its similarity to our world didn't reveal anything about our own world.
I'd have been much more interested if it really got into the fantasy aspect, serving food and drink that you can't get at Starbucks, having to deal with genuinely different cultures, maybe having some races be allergic to others' delicacies, etc. Diane Duane's Star Trek novels do that sort of thing extremely well. But it clearly wasn't what Baldree was interested in.
This was a smash hit so there's clearly an eager market for cozy, process-based fantasy. Good! I'm sure I'll love some of what's written as a result of this book making the big leagues.
