2025 fantasy. Fern the bookseller, whom we met in Bookshops &
Bonedust, sells up and moves to the city of Thune to set up again
next to Viv's coffee shop. But it turns out that's not enough to fix
her life.
For all it starts off that way, this is not another book about
fantasy small business. (Many other writers are churning out
imitations of Legends & Lattes after all.) Instead, after some
drunken bad decisions, Fern finds herself on the road with an elven
bounty hunter and her goblin prisoner, realising that she simply
isn't finding bookselling satisfying any more but she doesn't know
what else she can, or should, do.
So yeah, this is a midlife crisis burnout book. It's also a fantasy
journey book, and many of us have read rather too many of them; and
for all it has gnomish coffee machines this world was established as
rather too close to generic modern D&D style fantasy for it to come
over as distinctive now. There are good bits, like the cult that
worships a tentacular god and the prisoner who is clearly a
manifestation of elemental chaos in the manner of a T. Kingfisher
animal companion; but there's an awful lot of what comes over to me as
fantasy polyfilla (or spackle), weather and fights and camping.
Which is a shame, because the bits about people are great, if very
much incomplete. The relationships among the group on the road, and
their problems that may not be solved by conversation but can at least
be brought to light, are splendid; but just as we seem to be getting
somewhere, it's time for some more procedural fantasy padding.
Still decent, though, and if you aren't as burned out on genre fantasy
as I am you'll probably enjoy it more than I did.