Review: Bookshops & Bonedust

Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an unusual one: a prequel (to Legends & Lattes that has the main character in common, shows how she obtained the sword that is a minor but significant symbol of her old life in Legends, but has basically no other overlap apart from the epilogue. They're set 20 years apart, and certainly that's enough time to fall out of touch with people when you're a travelling mercenary, so it's plausible enough.

Mechanically, it's to mostly a good standard, with a few small flaws. There are a couple of dangling modifiers, and the usual excess commas between adjectives (very few authors or editors seem to have a good grip on the coordinate comma rule); the seaside inn is named after a freshwater fish (The Perch), there are a couple of mentions of a "passenger frigate" when a frigate is specifically a warship, and the author writes "wrangle" where he means "wangle". In the scheme of things, this, and a couple of other even less significant glitches, are nothing compared to the mess in most of the books I read. It's well crafted overall.

Although it's mostly cosy fantasy, it isn't just a low-stakes slice-of-life idyll. It could easily have gone that way; Viv, the protagonist, is a mercenary in a sword-and-sorcery world, but she's recovering from an injury in a quiet town. It could have just been about her developing friendship with the owner of the local second-hand bookshop, her discovery of the joys of reading, and her awkward romance, acknowledged from the outset to be short-term, with the baker. That probably would have worked fine for many readers (though not all), but the author gives us a bonus subplot with the threat of the necromancer that Viv's party was pursuing when she was wounded, and a creation of hers who becomes an important character. There is (eventually) action, though Viv's status as a mercenary is always in the picture, reminding us that action is a possibility.

For me, this blend worked, alongside the strong work developing not only the various characters but also the relationships between them. It's more intelligent and definitely more sentimental (in, for my taste, a good way) than the average sword-and-sorcery tale, but also more suspenseful and exciting than the average slice-of-life cosy. It's not, in its own terminology, "moist"; although Viv reads several romances that are implied to be explicit, there's nothing explicit in the book itself, and we're left to fill in our own interpretation of whether or not her romance with the baker ever progressed beyond kissing.

It has enough development of the characters, enough reflection on life, and enough touches of beautifully-phrased but not self-indulgent language to make it to the Gold tier of my 2024 Best of the Year list.

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