Brigands & Breadknives

by Travis Baldree

Genres: Fantasy
Series: Legends & Lattes #3
Rating:

Synopsis:

Fern has weathered the stillness and storms of a bookseller's life for decades, but now, in the face of crippling ennui, transplants herself to the city of Thune to hang out her shingle beside a long-absent friend's coffee shop. What could be a better pairing? Surely a charming renovation montage will cure what ails her!

If only things were so simple...

It turns out that fixing your life isn't a one-time prospect, nor as easy as a change of scenery and a lick of paint.

A drunken and desperate night sees the rattkin waking far from home in the company of a legendary warrior surviving on inertia, an imprisoned chaos-goblin with a fondness for silverware, and an absolutely thumping hangover.

As together they fend off a rogue's gallery of ne'er-do-wells trying to claim the bounty the goblin represents, Fern may finally reconnect with the person she actually is when there isn't a job to get in the way.

I hesitated about starting Travis Baldree’s Brigands & Breadknives for a while: the first book came at a perfect moment for me and was delightfully cosy, but the second book (the prequel) didn’t quite hit the same spot, so I wasn’t sure where this one would fall. Ultimately, I didn’t like it as much as I like Legends & Lattes, but I think the choice to avoid sticking too close to the template of the first one and go for a less cosy, more quest-like adventure brought with it a breath of fresh air.

Which is not to say that it abandoned one of the things I like a lot about Legends & Lattes: the book follows Viv as she tires of being a mercenary and turns to something else that’s calling her more, and that’s essentially what’s happening for Fern here as well. Baldree could’ve written essentially the same story again, with Fern settling into the bookshop next door to Viv and finding contentment in a change of pace and location, but instead he chose something truer to the spirit of the original: Fern’s lost, and her relationship to her work has changed, and so she ends up setting out to seek something new.

There are elements of the way things turned out that I’d predicted, but also some differences — which I won’t say too much about, to avoid spoilers! I liked that it somewhat ducked my expectations, but in a way that beautifully made sense of everything.

Overall, I didn’t love it as much as Legends & Lattes, but I did enjoy it a lot. The characters are fun (I love Zyll most of all), we get to see more of the world, and we do see glimpses of Viv, Tandri, et al.

One sour note: a character declares they don’t go by a particular name anymore, and everyone continues to use it. It doesn’t matter why someone wants to change their name, even if you think it’s silly. If the name is upsetting for them or doesn’t fit with who they are in any way, then the right thing to do is accept that change. I didn’t enjoy this element being continuously ignored and used for humour, at all. Names are important. It wasn’t funny.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)