pagesofjulia

I am crazy about these books, and their narration (by the author, who has more audio-narration credits than author ones to his name). This is the third in the Legends and Lattes series, and there is a collection of related short stories promised which I am definitely excited for, but I deeply wish for more novels!

As a series, I find the chronology interesting and a little unusual. In Legends and Lattes, we saw Viv end her mercenary career and open a coffee shop (bravely, in a town that had never heard of coffee). As far as Viv’s storyline, we left her fairly settled – no obvious sequel there. So, instead, book two, Bookshops and Bonedust, rewound time and saw a young Viv, early in the career we have seen her leave behind. She faced a different challenge there, and resolved it as she made an important new friend – and then rode off into the sunset to make an earnest go of that mercenary career. (We have now seen her start it, and end it, but the time itself is still largely untouched. Maybe that’s where another novel fits!) In book three, we now follow up with Fern, the friend Viv made in book two and then parted from. Years later – following Viv’s successful coffee shop, marriage, and settling – they reunite. And then Fern goes off on her own adventures, leaving Viv largely outside of the narrative. So firstly, as a series, I find this one fascinating in its sequencing. I like it fine. I wonder about the author’s creation process, and suspect he’s one of those who discovers his stories as they unfold for him, no plotting. Whatever it is, it’s working!

So. Fern, years after the events of Bookshops, has left her bookshop and her lifelong home behind. It will take much of the book to clearly label what she’s experienced: depression, ennui, boredom? In some desperation to find a new spark, she takes an old friend – Viv – up on an offer via correspondence, and travels to the city of Thune with an elderly Pot Roast in tow. They reunite, it is wonderful, and Viv (and Tandri and Cal and Thimble) help set Fern up in a new bookshop. But this does not solve her existential suffering. And so Fern gets drunk and flees: specifically, she semi-on-purpose goes to sleep in the cart of wildly famous, centuries-old hero Astryx One-Ear, the Oathmaiden, a warrior elf of great renown. Thus she stows away and becomes a member of a rollicking expedition to transport the bounty prisoner Zyll, an orange-haired goblin, across the Territories.

The motley crew is then made up of Astryx (ancient elf warrior), Fern (former-bookseller rattkin), Zyll (goblin criminal of few but hilarious words), occasionally a demonic chicken sort of thing, Astryx’s fabled Elder Blade, Nigel, who is sentient and talks (quite a lot), and eventually a former Elder Blade which has been “diminished” into a breadknife. He winds up with Fern, who calls him Breadlee. They encounter courtly and polite antagonists as well as murderous and duplicitous ones. The ending is a wonderful and wildly funny surprise. Zyll’s one-liners are K I L L I N G me; I can’t stop thinking about her.

These books are funny, sweet, thoughtful, imaginative, and totally absorbing. Please, Travis, please, write more of this world.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: audio, cozy, fantasy |