The Overuse of Cosy

[mtvessel]

Feb 2024 / Dec 2024
Legends and Lattes / Bookshops and Bonedust - Travis Baldree – Tor, 2022/2023
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They're so annoying. Those alliterative titles, clearly intended to evoke early roleplaying games (Dungeons and Dragons, Tunnels and Trolls, Call of Cthulhu). They're so trite and twee.

And yet.

The setting - about as generic a fantasyland as you can imagine. No history, no attempt to give character to the land in which the stories are set, barely a mention of political or religious institutions. Both books have cities with a city watch, but no indication of who controls them or how it all gets paid for.

And yet.

The peoples are standard fantasy fare, largely drawn from D&D. The characters are orcs, elves, dwarves, humans, gnomes and ratkin (Warhammer skaven). Oh and a "succubus" who from her description is actually a tiefling. There's some mild racism but otherwise very little to delineate them.

And yet.

The main character is a classic orc barbarian adventurer. Female at least - she's called Viv - but the opening chapters of both books describe violent battles where she shows stereotypical hotheadedness. Legends and Lattes sees her retiring from her adventuring party with plans to open a coffee shop. She finds a run-down ex-stable to transform and recruits a goblin builder, a ratfolk pastry chef and the afore-mentioned tiefling succubus as a cashier. Then she has to persuade the suspicious locals to try her product. And that's just the start of her troubles. Not that those are very major, mostly.

If presenting a modern-day coffee shop espresso machine as a "gnomish invention" in a fantasy setting makes your teeth grind, you are probably not going to get much out of this book. But I was drawn in by the community building and the sensuous descriptions of hot coffee and fresh pastries, which are undoubtedly good things.

Bookshops and Bonedust is much the same, but from an earlier point in Viv's adventuring career when she is recovering from an injury and decides to help out a crabby bookseller called Fern in a small seaside village. She also meets a gnome called Gallina and starts a relationship with Maylee, a feisty dwarf baker. For me it is a more successful novel - the concept of books fits better in a mediaeval fantasy setting than coffee, even if the tomes that the protagonists excitedly discuss are clearly romantasy series with modern notions of character development rather than anything appropriate to the period (and let us not consider the economics of publishing in a pre-industrial age, even one with magic - the author certainly doesn't). The threat is also rather more high stakes than in Legends and Lattes and cleverly introduced into the story.

I am getting rather tired of the overuse of the term "cosy" that has been increasingly creeping into descriptions of books, TV and video games, and which more often than not is an excuse for derivative, unambitious and twee storytelling. All three such epithets could certainly be aimed at these two books, but nonetheless I very much enjoyed spending time with them, and I am slightly puzzled as to why. The warmth of the writing has a lot to do with it, but perhaps it is also because they are close to the everyday fantasy stories about ordinary folk living in a magical world for which I have long advocated. And because companionship, tasty food and drink, and reading are all joys that should be celebrated more often than they are. So Baldree, you've got away with it this time. But I've got my eye on you.