2022 fantasy. Viv the orc settles down after a life of adventuring… to
open a coffee shop.
The subtitle is "A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes", and
that's part right. For me high fantasy implies big important matters,
not street-level shenanigans (say, Tolkien rather than Howard), and
this certainly isn't that; but it is small, slice-of-life stuff, and
while what happens matters hugely to the people involved nobody's out
to save the world.
It's a fantasy about people being nice to each other, even if they are
Those People they've been told are the Enemy. And, obviously, about
found-family, as Viv does the thing (apparently revolutionary) of just
treating people as potential friends until they give her reason to act
otherwise. (Done less well, this could fall into the trap found in
some Victorian stories of doing well because others will then be
good to you, but Baldree avoids that problem by giving us a lot of
Viv's thoughts.)
There are plot threads of a sort, about a magical stone and its
purported effects, about the local criminals wanting their cut of the
new business, about an old adventuring rival; but while these spur
some action they're mostly there to give those people an opportunity
to be the people they are, like a gentler version of the constant
stream of stressors in a soap opera.
There's not much worldbuilding here (this is a post-Dragonlance
fantasy in which gnomes have technology, including ceiling fans and
espresso machines), and there are no significant surprises. It's a
comfort read, it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and as that it
works very well.
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