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Thoughts about Legends & Lattes
Oct. 13th, 2023 02:27 pmIn first place: this is not a review.
If you are Travis Baldree, the author, please don't read this. It will do you no good reading some random person's thoughts about your beloved baby. Your book is loved! Bask in that. This is not a place of honor.
If you are a reader that enjoyed the book, don't read this as well. I'm not trying to make fun of anyone for liking things. These are my thoughts and I'm mostly posting them so I can use the search and tags to find them for future reference.
Because, yes, whenever I have to sit down and think really hard about how and why a book bothered me, what I'm actually thinking about is "Why do I hate this?" and "What would I have done here?" and "What can I learn from this book?" If I sound harsh, imagine how much worse it is inside my mind.
That said, what bothered me about Legends & Lattes is that for a book recommended as a gentle, breezy read full of heart, it felt very lacking in emotion. But allow me to unpack that sentence for *checks* about 2k words:
Setting
It bothers me how much that setting is superficial and derivative. The world feels flat and not in a fun way. There are some attempts at Pratchett-like jokes (the "latte" from the title is indeed coffee with milk, but it comes from the name of the gnome that invented the drink!) but the fact that the world and the city feel extremely depersonalized, deeply generic took away what little fun I could have with those small jokes.
Most coffee shop AU fanfiction does this sort of thing-- the setting is not only sidelined but mostly ignored-- but then at least the reader already cares enough for the characters that the world isn't important.
The issue here was the lack of research. I'll go back to this point later.
Characters
This might sound rough, but for a story in which more than one character raises a stink at being possibly seen as a racial stereotype, there are certainly a lot of stereotypes going on. They're just not the D&D 3rd Edition stereotypes, but modern takes, and believe me when I say I mean modern in a snide art history way. I mean, the protagonist is a smart, resourceful, non-aggressive orc. This is not as mindblowing as it would be in the 1980's. At this point, I've seen that same character in everything, from webcomics to anime to blockbuster movies.
There's a gnome thief with spiky hair who is gleeful about murdering people in their beds. There's a human bard with a guitar-analog, he looks and acts like a grunge kid. There's an autistic-coded human mage.
The book depends on us knowing what it means that this is a dwarf and that is a "hob" (can't have hobbits or halflings, both are copyrighted) and that one over there is a succubus (because you also can't have tieflings, but it's fine if your horned, tailed infernal is something else). Also, Our Elves Are Different (they're called fey).
Okay, so maybe calling someone out for having 2D side characters and rehashed tropes for races is unkind since you can do a lot even doing those things. But it really shows up as a lack of craft when you're halfway through a book and notice you still don't know enough about the protagonists that you'd care to cheer for their romance. I'm supposed to be invested in Viv's success just because she worked hard for it and seems like a nice enough person, but I don't know anything about her. She's very blank, which the author seems to have picked up on since he sells her lack of personality as a crisis and part of the reason she's retiring from adventuring.
But when Tandri calls out Viv for not having a bed, I was reminded that she also, as far as I knew, has no home. She never showed anything besides a little mystery concerning her schooling, and a decent-person level of emotional investment in her job. She also had very little personality besides being smart and snarky. It felt like as much as you'd know from a coworker you see every day but have no other contact with, which is not how I expect romance to brew.
And that goes for everyone else. No one talks about having a life outside the coffee shop. The city has little else going on even if it's talked about as being big and bustling. It's like a game with a map you can't open.
The only characters I truly loved were Thimble, the ratkin baker, and Amity, the shop's dire-cat. I am always there for shop cats but Thimble was interesting for not feeling like a human in a suit (unlike the other non-humans in the book).
The other side characters lack personality and humanity in a way that mirrors city NPCs from a game. Everyone feels like a cardboard cutout of a client in a child's play.
The lack of research
This targets me in specific since I'm a certified cook and pastry chef who has owned a coffee shop and has an interest in traditional methods and techniques. So, please, understand that this was the first time I felt the way doctors feel while reading CPR techniques in books.
I don't think most readers would care that you can't just fire up a wood stove and expect it to heat enough to bake bread in the next action, but it grated at me. You need to get the fire going at 4am if you want bread by 8!
I don't think most readers even know you need to keep your wood stove lit throughout the day or were wondering where they kept the huge amounts of wood they'd need to bake all those cinnamon rolls. Or about the cinders.
I also don't think most people can tell that glaze Would Not Work Like That or that bread needs yeast and you need a basement to keep it alive (how is it that that shop had no basement at all?), or know that the biscotti recipe is ancient as fuck, and very similar to the rations Ves was eating a few pages earlier so she would have thought "wow this is sweet, nicer hardtack!" because that's how people think when they eat something previously unknown.
Also, hardtack WAS EATEN SOFTENED IN MILK OR WATER. It's not like you have to invent dunking biscuits when biscuits already exist!
Yeah, see what I mean about being targeted by the lack of research? *deep breaths* As you can see the whole food industry part of it bothered me deeply. I should just leave it at this.
...
Okay, I'm not done complaining about the lack of research because there is the spices thing.
Lack of Research Part II: The Spices Attack
So you're setting this in pseudo-europe in a... feudal... country (there is not a wisp of thought given to government, I can't tell if it's feudalism or some other more interesting sort) in which spices are rare, but at the same time you can buy them from A Guy.
No.
It's one or the other!
Either spices are rare because you have to be noble/rich/own a ship to know they exist, or the local equivalent to the great navigations has already solved the rareness issue and EVERYONE eats spicy food.
I won't get into the sugar debate because who knows what the local sugar is made of. Cinnamon and cardamom, on the other hand, were called by name and considered special items you had to Know a Guy to get. Since the author establishes that you can mail-order things from who-knows-where-gnomedom-is, I assume there are good, safe trade routes, so it's not like spices are rare, which makes it a worldbuilding issue that bothers me in several ways. There are levels of thought here and I'll separate them:
And I have to remind you, this is a book about food. It annoys THE FUCK outta me that the dude burned the really cool concept of introducing coffee shops into a fantasy setting and didn't even bother going into the fun details about trade, religious taboos, that whole thing about coffee shops in Renaissance being the gathering spot for philosophers (Genshin Impact writers remembered to nod to that. GENSHIN IMPACT!) There is a whole lot to pull out of the concept and the dude just wrote a coffee shop AU.
Other craft-related issues
I would probably have overlooked most of the other issues if the writing was interesting. This is a horrible thing to say, but when I say I was bored, I mean I wasn't even finding it funny or beautiful. The author has a good grasp of language and can be very concise, which are good things. Sadly, he's a little too concise with description, depending too much on the reader knowing what he means instead of painting a picture.
He's also not very good at displaying personality or motivation through dialogue. There was a clear feel of "first draft" to all of his dialogue. You know when all characters just say what they think and go away? Good dialogue tags, though.
In terms of plot, well, this is slice-of-life so I'm not judging him there. He's not very good with pace and calendar time, though, which are aspects of slice-of-life as a genre. I understand it's a hard balance, you need to establish the routine without being so repetitive it stops being soothing and starts going into Haruhi Suzumiya places, but it feels like he spent a lot of time on practical details that weren't relevant to any of the emotional threads in the story (and slice-of-life is a lot about emotion and the coming together of things) and passed a lot of time when we should be right there next to the characters as they got to know each other.
If only the slice-of-life felt like those isekai anime/manga/light novels... But I guess what makes those is really the setting. I can read countless volumes about a woman getting reborn as a side character from a book and setting up a chocolate empire in a fantasy setting so she'll survive. I'll even go along with her inventing chocolate from a vague idea of how it's made, but that only really works because the author read a bunch of things about chocolate and will gleefully infodump.
Most of these issues would be forgiven if he had a distinct authorial voice. I don't know if he was edited into silence or if he never really had much of a voice, but there wasn't even a faint feeling of style. It didn't feel like he was imitating someone else's voice, like it does in so many first novels, but more like there wasn't anything there. So it bored me. I dropped the book at about 70%, not really remembering to pick it up again.
Maybe expecting the person writing a coffee shop AU to know about coffee, pastry, and shops is too much, but this is a published novel.
Anyway, DNF.
If you are Travis Baldree, the author, please don't read this. It will do you no good reading some random person's thoughts about your beloved baby. Your book is loved! Bask in that. This is not a place of honor.
If you are a reader that enjoyed the book, don't read this as well. I'm not trying to make fun of anyone for liking things. These are my thoughts and I'm mostly posting them so I can use the search and tags to find them for future reference.
Because, yes, whenever I have to sit down and think really hard about how and why a book bothered me, what I'm actually thinking about is "Why do I hate this?" and "What would I have done here?" and "What can I learn from this book?" If I sound harsh, imagine how much worse it is inside my mind.
That said, what bothered me about Legends & Lattes is that for a book recommended as a gentle, breezy read full of heart, it felt very lacking in emotion. But allow me to unpack that sentence for *checks* about 2k words:
Setting
It bothers me how much that setting is superficial and derivative. The world feels flat and not in a fun way. There are some attempts at Pratchett-like jokes (the "latte" from the title is indeed coffee with milk, but it comes from the name of the gnome that invented the drink!) but the fact that the world and the city feel extremely depersonalized, deeply generic took away what little fun I could have with those small jokes.
Most coffee shop AU fanfiction does this sort of thing-- the setting is not only sidelined but mostly ignored-- but then at least the reader already cares enough for the characters that the world isn't important.
The issue here was the lack of research. I'll go back to this point later.
Characters
This might sound rough, but for a story in which more than one character raises a stink at being possibly seen as a racial stereotype, there are certainly a lot of stereotypes going on. They're just not the D&D 3rd Edition stereotypes, but modern takes, and believe me when I say I mean modern in a snide art history way. I mean, the protagonist is a smart, resourceful, non-aggressive orc. This is not as mindblowing as it would be in the 1980's. At this point, I've seen that same character in everything, from webcomics to anime to blockbuster movies.
There's a gnome thief with spiky hair who is gleeful about murdering people in their beds. There's a human bard with a guitar-analog, he looks and acts like a grunge kid. There's an autistic-coded human mage.
The book depends on us knowing what it means that this is a dwarf and that is a "hob" (can't have hobbits or halflings, both are copyrighted) and that one over there is a succubus (because you also can't have tieflings, but it's fine if your horned, tailed infernal is something else). Also, Our Elves Are Different (they're called fey).
Okay, so maybe calling someone out for having 2D side characters and rehashed tropes for races is unkind since you can do a lot even doing those things. But it really shows up as a lack of craft when you're halfway through a book and notice you still don't know enough about the protagonists that you'd care to cheer for their romance. I'm supposed to be invested in Viv's success just because she worked hard for it and seems like a nice enough person, but I don't know anything about her. She's very blank, which the author seems to have picked up on since he sells her lack of personality as a crisis and part of the reason she's retiring from adventuring.
But when Tandri calls out Viv for not having a bed, I was reminded that she also, as far as I knew, has no home. She never showed anything besides a little mystery concerning her schooling, and a decent-person level of emotional investment in her job. She also had very little personality besides being smart and snarky. It felt like as much as you'd know from a coworker you see every day but have no other contact with, which is not how I expect romance to brew.
And that goes for everyone else. No one talks about having a life outside the coffee shop. The city has little else going on even if it's talked about as being big and bustling. It's like a game with a map you can't open.
The only characters I truly loved were Thimble, the ratkin baker, and Amity, the shop's dire-cat. I am always there for shop cats but Thimble was interesting for not feeling like a human in a suit (unlike the other non-humans in the book).
The other side characters lack personality and humanity in a way that mirrors city NPCs from a game. Everyone feels like a cardboard cutout of a client in a child's play.
The lack of research
This targets me in specific since I'm a certified cook and pastry chef who has owned a coffee shop and has an interest in traditional methods and techniques. So, please, understand that this was the first time I felt the way doctors feel while reading CPR techniques in books.
I don't think most readers would care that you can't just fire up a wood stove and expect it to heat enough to bake bread in the next action, but it grated at me. You need to get the fire going at 4am if you want bread by 8!
I don't think most readers even know you need to keep your wood stove lit throughout the day or were wondering where they kept the huge amounts of wood they'd need to bake all those cinnamon rolls. Or about the cinders.
I also don't think most people can tell that glaze Would Not Work Like That or that bread needs yeast and you need a basement to keep it alive (how is it that that shop had no basement at all?), or know that the biscotti recipe is ancient as fuck, and very similar to the rations Ves was eating a few pages earlier so she would have thought "wow this is sweet, nicer hardtack!" because that's how people think when they eat something previously unknown.
Also, hardtack WAS EATEN SOFTENED IN MILK OR WATER. It's not like you have to invent dunking biscuits when biscuits already exist!
Yeah, see what I mean about being targeted by the lack of research? *deep breaths* As you can see the whole food industry part of it bothered me deeply. I should just leave it at this.
...
Okay, I'm not done complaining about the lack of research because there is the spices thing.
Lack of Research Part II: The Spices Attack
So you're setting this in pseudo-europe in a... feudal... country (there is not a wisp of thought given to government, I can't tell if it's feudalism or some other more interesting sort) in which spices are rare, but at the same time you can buy them from A Guy.
No.
It's one or the other!
Either spices are rare because you have to be noble/rich/own a ship to know they exist, or the local equivalent to the great navigations has already solved the rareness issue and EVERYONE eats spicy food.
I won't get into the sugar debate because who knows what the local sugar is made of. Cinnamon and cardamom, on the other hand, were called by name and considered special items you had to Know a Guy to get. Since the author establishes that you can mail-order things from who-knows-where-gnomedom-is, I assume there are good, safe trade routes, so it's not like spices are rare, which makes it a worldbuilding issue that bothers me in several ways. There are levels of thought here and I'll separate them:
- Spices were traditionally used to make food taste more filling. The reasoning here is that you fool your brain into thinking you're eating something more interesting than cabbage and radish stew if it tastes really good. This reasoning still works and you should use it in any vegan recipes.
- Other traditional uses are masking bad ingredients (raw ingredients spoil fast! Unless you're introducing magical refrigeration, you need a coldroom and trustworthy suppliers to work with anything that might spoil) and making a meal last longer, since several spices work or were believed to work as conservatives and, I can't stress this enough, refrigeration wasn't on the cards.
- I cannot talk about spices without a reminder that for a long-ass time, humanity believed that what made you feel bad wasn't that the meat you bought yesterday from that dodgy butcher was less than fresh, but the fact that it was stinking. To this day we associate good smells with safe food. So it doesn't matter if the spices won't really keep the food fresh since food spoils at the same rate whether or not you pump it full of cumin and garlic, people did it based on belief.
- So the moment it was possible to buy spices at the market, everyone who could afford it bought them. I'm sure you understand supply and demand, so I'm also sure you understand that the spice merchants wouldn't be as rich if there wasn't demand for their products.
- The whole thing about why spiceless French haute cuisine was considered refined was that it didn't taste like poor people's food, which was chock-full of spices for the aforementioned reasons. There are several historical recipes that attest to this (I'm writing this as a memo to myself so I won't bother quoting anything.)
- Anyway it annoys me because it's such a fucking easy research. History of food is absolutely the low-hanging fruit of new history, there are a bunch of books but most of them will give you a good idea of the facts.
- And the facts say that, if you really wanted to do the "I know a guy" thing, all you had to do is have Thimble stop Viv from buying low-quality cinnamon at the regular market and taking her to see his guy.
And I have to remind you, this is a book about food. It annoys THE FUCK outta me that the dude burned the really cool concept of introducing coffee shops into a fantasy setting and didn't even bother going into the fun details about trade, religious taboos, that whole thing about coffee shops in Renaissance being the gathering spot for philosophers (Genshin Impact writers remembered to nod to that. GENSHIN IMPACT!) There is a whole lot to pull out of the concept and the dude just wrote a coffee shop AU.
Other craft-related issues
I would probably have overlooked most of the other issues if the writing was interesting. This is a horrible thing to say, but when I say I was bored, I mean I wasn't even finding it funny or beautiful. The author has a good grasp of language and can be very concise, which are good things. Sadly, he's a little too concise with description, depending too much on the reader knowing what he means instead of painting a picture.
He's also not very good at displaying personality or motivation through dialogue. There was a clear feel of "first draft" to all of his dialogue. You know when all characters just say what they think and go away? Good dialogue tags, though.
In terms of plot, well, this is slice-of-life so I'm not judging him there. He's not very good with pace and calendar time, though, which are aspects of slice-of-life as a genre. I understand it's a hard balance, you need to establish the routine without being so repetitive it stops being soothing and starts going into Haruhi Suzumiya places, but it feels like he spent a lot of time on practical details that weren't relevant to any of the emotional threads in the story (and slice-of-life is a lot about emotion and the coming together of things) and passed a lot of time when we should be right there next to the characters as they got to know each other.
If only the slice-of-life felt like those isekai anime/manga/light novels... But I guess what makes those is really the setting. I can read countless volumes about a woman getting reborn as a side character from a book and setting up a chocolate empire in a fantasy setting so she'll survive. I'll even go along with her inventing chocolate from a vague idea of how it's made, but that only really works because the author read a bunch of things about chocolate and will gleefully infodump.
Most of these issues would be forgiven if he had a distinct authorial voice. I don't know if he was edited into silence or if he never really had much of a voice, but there wasn't even a faint feeling of style. It didn't feel like he was imitating someone else's voice, like it does in so many first novels, but more like there wasn't anything there. So it bored me. I dropped the book at about 70%, not really remembering to pick it up again.
Maybe expecting the person writing a coffee shop AU to know about coffee, pastry, and shops is too much, but this is a published novel.
Anyway, DNF.
