Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
308 pages
Published 2022
Read from March 10 to March 12
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Small-press publication is such an unpredictable beast. A couple weeks ago my Twitter feed -- almost entirely composed of small-press and indie writers -- exploded over Legends & Lattes, a queer cottagecore fantasy romance set in a D&D-adjacent world. It has hundreds of five-star reviews on Amazon and has presumably sold many more copies than that. Meanwhile, a couple months back I edited and published Queer Blades: An Anthology of LGBTQIA2+ Adventure Fantasy, which contains nine excellent short stories and novelettes of queer fantasy romance (one of them cottagecore!) from a delightful assortment of rising genre stars. It has, as of this writing, sold three copies and received zero reviews of any sort. I'm slightly biased toward the book I edited, naturally, so while I won't say that Queer Blades is necessarily better than Legends & Lattes, I do think it deserved somewhat more than three copies sold.
I'm somewhat embittered by that fact. I'm happy Legends & Lattes has found success! But sales are a result of marketing more than anything else, and I'm super not good at the marketing side of running a small press.
All of that is an unnecessary and somewhat petulant prelude. Legends & Lattes itself is a warm and frothy confection, an avowedly low-stakes high fantasy about an orc adventurer who retires from the blood-money lifestyle to establish the coffeehouse of her dreams. The book does exactly what it says on the cover, and it does so with a minimum of flourish but a whole lot of heart.
I will mention one small but glaring detail: almost every secondary, tertiary, and incidental character beyond the two leads is male. Whenever a random guard, organized crime enforcer, or city worker is introduced, they're almost invariably a dude. I'd say it reminds me of 1990s fantasy novels in that regard, except even in the 1990s Robin Hobb had already addressed that problem.
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