Life comes at you fast, and these past few years have come with a whole lot of extra life stuff to deal with. So it’s been a bit of a while since I’ve actually read much of anything, much less read anything to completion, and much less even than that read anything that’s left me with strong enough feelings to write another one of these.
But then I saw this book on a little shelf in a thrift shop a couple months ago offering “high fantasy and low stakes,” and it looked like the kind of chill, cozy, light read that might lull me back into reading more regularly.
The jury’s still out on that point, because busy life things are still happening and I only just finished this book; but regardless, Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree definitely delivers on the “slow down, take a breath, have a nice time” vibes it was giving. It is, in a word, charming.
The story follows Viv, a freshly retired orc barbarian who’s decided to swap her greatsword for a bean grinder and get away from the bloody, hectic life of a professional adventurer. To this end, she rolls up in the city of Thune with a nest egg and a plan: introduce the townsfolk to this wonderful gnomish concoction she fell in love with on her travels, a liquid hug in a mug called “coffee.”
Making hot bean water sound appealing is the least of her concerns, though. And although there are tense conflicts that pop up to raise the stakes (local mob bosses, slighted and suspicious ex-allies, magical mumbo-jumbo that may or may not be steering things), most of Viv’s story is focused on the more mundane and day-to-day struggles of starting up a new cafe: shop maintenance, building renovation, finding the right employees and business partners, figuring out a menu, experimenting with snack recipes, etc.
Put like that, the story doesn’t sound too exciting, and for the most part, it’s not. But that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s just a nice, wholesome time watching Viv struggle with social awkwardness around her new succubus barista, or try to convince the terse hobgoblin who helped her renovate the place to accept free drinks for his trouble, or wrangle the dire housecat that’s decided it lives in the cafe now and has a propensity to startle the customers and steal unguarded baked goods.
The few more dramatic plot points notwithstanding, this book is more concerned with casual lo-fi story beats. It’s a domestic fantasy to relax and study to, if you will. And that makes it every bit the warm, refreshing treat as the titular lattes.
If you’re looking to just feel comfy and nice, but in a nerdy fantasy kind of way, give this one a sip.
One of my favorite storytelling tropes is the found family. I thought Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the best movies of the past decade. I still unironically enjoy pirate stories. Badass ladies are badass.
So Seafire by Natalie C. Parker is checking a lot of my boxes.
Seafire is a swashbuckling dystopia following Caledonia Styx, a young woman on the run from a powerful warlord Aric Athair. After her family is ambushed and murdered by a crew of the warlord’s Bullets — loyal soldiers groomed from childhood for violence and controlled by mandatory drug addiction — Caledonia is forced to turn from refugee to pirate captain, sailing the high seas with her all-female crew of rebels and renegades aboard the Mors Navis, taking the fight to Aric’s forces by targeting his fleet of floating garden barges where the flowers that fuel his drug production are grown.
But when one of Aric’s Bullets tries to defect to Caledonia’s side, saving the life of her best friend in the process, the captain’s survival tactics and deep-seated beliefs are called into question. On the one hand, he represents everything she and her crew despise, and keeping him aboard could mean all of their deaths; after all, trusting a Bullet was what led to her family’s deaths. On the other, if he’s telling the truth, he might hold the key to taking down Aric once and for all — and to Caledonia being reunited with the little brother that she thought she’d already lost long ago.
This is kind of a hard review to write, just because I’ve already written it once already, so now I have to try not to repeat myself. Part of me just wants to drop a link here to my review of the first book in the series, The Grey Bastards, and leave it at that. And while I won’t actually be that lazy, I will go ahead and link that first review — check it out here, if you’ve a mind.
Honestly, I’m not sure at first what to say here besides: Did you read The Grey Bastards? Did you like it? Because this is more The Grey Bastards: more sprawling storylines weaving together in unexpected ways; more tough-as-nails, foul-mouthed, badass characters with flexible moral compasses; more unapologetic grit and grime and gut-strewing; more peeks into the nooks and crannies of a unique and beautifully built but cruelly unforgiving world; more sex; more violence; and more robust bacon flavor.
Also, to lift another similarity from the first review, more quick notes worth disclosing. First off, spoilers for the first Bastards book, obviously, so go read that if you haven’t yet before you read this. Second, for the sake of transparency, Jonathan French is still a friend of ours — someone we thanked as a mentor figure in our own debut self-published novel, and someone whose work we’ve been promoting at conventions and on social media and such as Bastards ambassadors (aka “ambastards”). We got advanced reader copies of The True Bastards about a month before the book goes/went on sale to the public, depending on when you’re reading this.
Take all of that into consideration if you want — but also know that, like The Grey Bastards before it, we don’t need no incentives to tell people that this book is damn good. This shit is my jam, and I was gonna read it and love it whether or not the author knows what my face looks like. The fact that I got to do it a month ahead of most other people was just a nice bonus and an incidental early birthday present.
Judge this book by its cover. I did, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).
Just to be thorough, I did a quick image search of each individual novel’s cover art, and my initial thesis still holds up. Badass lady jumping down a dragon’s throat, small woman with big hammer versus ice dragon in a frozen wasteland, dragon attacking ship on a storm-wracked sea, they all check out. And they’re all pretty good indicators of what kinds of stories to expect on the following pages.
I know it’s gauche to start an essay with a definition, but bear with me for a second, I promise it’s relevant.
Pulp fiction is technically defined by how it’s published, in magazines made with inexpensive wood pulp paper, priced cheaply to be sold and read in bulk. Sometimes this “quantity over quality” approach applied to the stories themselves, but sometimes it didn’t; pulp fiction, like all fiction, is only as good or as shoddy as the author writes it.
But beyond the technicalities of publishing, pulp fiction also developed a sort of overarching genre definition based on some recurring themes that tended to crop up in the stories again and again, regardless of categories like fantasy, noir, horror, etc. — namely, big, bombastic heroes squaring off against sinister, mysterious villains in dangerous, exotic locales, featuring beautiful women of both the damsel and the deadly variety.
All of this is to underscore that pulp fills a certain niche in fiction, and that The Bone Queen by Andrea Judy (disclaimer: another indie author friend of ours for several years now) falls squarely into this niche, so the answer to the question “But is it good, though?” will vary depending on where a reader stands in relation to said niche.
Do I like it? Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. The narrative isn’t deep or particularly nuanced; it doesn’t ask any tough questions or make many thoughtful moral arguments; and the fact that it’s an origin story for a character named “the Bone Queen” means you kind of know where the book is going to end up, more or less, from the word “go.” But it’s an entertaining trip getting there, straightforward and simple and fun, and full of rotten, visceral imagery, dark magic, and bone-crunching (in the most literal sense possible) action.
Big, tough, ripped, brutal badasses, for years they’ve been the go-to choice in fantasy for evil power players in need of intimidating mooks. More recently, modern fantasy has granted them a PR boost, both in reimaginings and in original stories. Black-and-white morality is out of fashion, shades of gray are in, and this gives orcs the opportunity to take the powerful, intimidating, dangerous image they’ve cultivated through decades of villain status and turn it toward nobler (or at least more sympathetic) pursuits.
No character is more interesting than the reformed villain. Put simply, orcs are the bad boys of the fantasy world.
And the warhog-riding half-orc bikers of The Grey Bastards are the bad boys (and girl) of the orc world.
Mix Sons of Anarchy with Shadow of Mordor and you’ll get a world similar to the Lot Lands of Jonathan French’s The Grey Bastards, where gangs of orc-human hybrids ride monstrous swine called barbarians as they patrol their anarchic wasteland, keeping the humans of Hispartha safe on one side by fending off the raiding parties of full-blooded orcs that routinely probe their lands from the other.
Although, confession, I don’t know how accurate this analogy still is when it comes to quality, because I’ve never actually seen Sons of Anarchy or played Shadow of Mordor. I’ve heard pretty good things about both, though, which makes me think the comparison still holds up. Because I have read The Grey Bastards, and yeah, it’s good. It’s really, really good.
It’s been a while since my last review, in part because it’s been a while since the last time I read a book and came away with enough to say about it to warrant writing it up, but in bigger part because I’ve been working harder on a book of my own. My wife and I have recently finished writing our first full-length, publishable novel together and are now in the process of editing so we can start looking for an agent and a publisher. Between that and my new job, my blog’s fallen down the list of things toward which my literary efforts need to be put.
During the tail end of writing this novel, though, I pulled down The Book of Kings from our shelves, a collection of “20 all-original stories of kings and kingdoms, both traditional and fantastical, recounted by such noble tale-tellers as (a bunch of names that probably look at least somewhat familiar).” Our own story is largely centered around the activities of a royal family and the assassin who’s living in their midst, so I thought it would be a good source of inspiration and motivation while I already had kings and their doings on the brain.
Very few fantasy fans can get away with admitting that they aren’t all that big into sweeping, high epic fantasy à la Lord of the Rings or the Pern stories or everything that Terry Brooks writes. Many non-fantasy fans, however, can point to these tales as examples of why they aren’t into fantasy. Like it or not, it’s hard not to see the latter group’s point, as a lot of high fantasy is riddled with confusing terminology, rehashed stories, and genre clichés. This is not to say that these stories are bad, per sé, just that they can easily turn off readers who aren’t in the right kind of crowd.
Banewreaker, the first book in Jacqueline Carey’s two-part volume The Sundering, will probably not change any opinions in this respect, then, as it’s sweeping high fantasy to the core. This, as it turns out, is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
I sit with my girlfriend in a plastic booth at McDonald’s and watch as Ms. Li unwraps her McFish sandwich. She had paid for it, and for our McFood as well, with a hundred dollar bill from the early 1900s that the cashier lady had to counterfeit check twice before just about emptying the register to make the change.
Spreading the McFish paper out carefully on the fake marbling of the plastic table, Ms. Li bites open a packet of mayonnaise, which she squirts across her fried McSquare of McFish. This is followed by a full packet of grape jelly, which plurps down over the squirt of mayo and sinks through before Ms. Li replaces the McBun.
Before we leave, she’ll wrap our last two unopened McKetchup packets in a wad of about fifty McNapkins and shove them into the unseen depths of her musty purse. Right now, though, as she eats, she explains to us in her broken and confused English that she doesn’t ever go to the dentist because dentistry terrifies her. According to her, a friend or sister or cousin (I couldn’t discern which even as the story was first being told) went to the dentist once to get a tooth pulled and her gums just never stopped bleeding afterward. She eventually bled to death from the gap in her teeth, and that was enough to damn oral hygienists everywhere in Ms. Li’s eyes.
I’m not sure I entirely believe the story. I’m not sure I entirely believe anything about Ms. Li.
Fantasy and satire are two of my favorite genres in any medium, but especially so in books. Satirical fantasy, then, holds a special place on my shelves. I grew up on Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and desire to imitate him and his style is what led me in middle school to begin writing in earnest, for fun, and for myself rather than just for my teachers and their assignments.
So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis that promised “a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and – most problematic of all – a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist.” I expected another lighthearted riff on the familiar archetypes. Murderous unicorns? Unicorns are not typically described as such! Oh teehee, how unexpectedly humorous!
I keep realizing, forgetting, and re-realizing that the first step to any writing project is forcing yourself to start.
I love writing, but even after more than a decade of doing it for both work and fun, I still have to drag myself to the page or screen & force my hands to move at first. I’m not sure why – maybe because writing is an industrious hobby and I default to leisure when left otherwise unemployed. Maybe because the acts of creation and production so impress me that to begin either of them myself on any scale feels, for a moment at least, like a grand undertaking, the beginning of a long journey. Maybe because my perfectionist outlook tends toward the nitpicky at times, and so commencing a thing grates a bit when there is always so much more that I could do to prepare first.
Seafire is a swashbuckling dystopia following Caledonia Styx, a young woman on the run from a powerful warlord Aric Athair. After her family is ambushed and murdered by a crew of the warlord’s Bullets — loyal soldiers groomed from childhood for violence and controlled by mandatory drug addiction — Caledonia is forced to turn from refugee to pirate captain, sailing the high seas with her all-female crew of rebels and renegades aboard the Mors Navis, taking the fight to Aric’s forces by targeting his fleet of floating garden barges where the flowers that fuel his drug production are grown.
Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).
But beyond the technicalities of publishing, pulp fiction also developed a sort of overarching genre definition based on some recurring themes that tended to crop up in the stories again and again, regardless of categories like fantasy, noir, horror, etc. — namely, big, bombastic heroes squaring off against sinister, mysterious villains in dangerous, exotic locales, featuring beautiful women of both the damsel and the deadly variety.
And the warhog-riding half-orc bikers of The Grey Bastards are the bad boys (and girl) of the orc world.
During the tail end of writing this novel, though, I pulled down The Book of Kings from our shelves, a collection of “20 all-original stories of kings and kingdoms, both traditional and fantastical, recounted by such noble tale-tellers as (a bunch of names that probably look at least somewhat familiar).” Our own story is largely centered around the activities of a royal family and the assassin who’s living in their midst, so I thought it would be a good source of inspiration and motivation while I already had kings and their doings on the brain.
So when I picked up Sir Apropos of Nothing, I did so based on the title pun and the back-of-the-book synopsis that promised “a berserk phoenix, murderous unicorns, mutated harpies, homicidal warrior kings, and – most problematic of all – a princess who may or may not be a psychotic arsonist.” I expected another lighthearted riff on the familiar archetypes. Murderous unicorns? Unicorns are not typically described as such! Oh teehee, how unexpectedly humorous!
