Review: Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife

Recipes for an Unexpected Afterlife by Deston J. Munden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is much compared with Legends & Lattes , and for once that's accurate. Not only were they discovered by the same "tastemaker" (which is apparently a thing now), they both feature a retired Orcish warrior taking on a cozy project in food-and-beverage retail. My own feeling is that if you liked one, you'll probably like the other, though this isn't just a clone of Legends; the plot is different in detail, and so is the main character's backstory, which plays into the frontstory a lot more in this book than in the other.

The MC is not just an orc, but an undead orc, killed and then raised by a typical evil necromancer a couple of hundred years before and forced to commit atrocities as a mind-controlled thrall. He and five others broke free from the necromancer's control (exactly how is carefully not stated), destroyed him, and founded a city in which the living, the undead and those summoned from other realms could live together peacefully and prosperously. He then served the city for a long time as a member of an elite guard, but now a new ruler is taking over, and she decides it's time for him to retire from the guard, undergo a necromantic process that restores him to something much closer to life, and do what he wants instead of serving the will of others. But what does he want?

Back during the relatively brief time he was alive, he was an Orcish war chef (which I kept reading as "war chief," but it's chef), a special traditional role that's like an army cook, but respected. So he decides to open a restaurant and start cooking again. After so long, he doesn't know if he can do it, but he rapidly acquires a group of friends who encourage him: a professor who's also some sort of gang boss (but in a good way?), his restaurant employees, and a ten-year-old girl he happens to meet. This young girl turns out to have a connection to his past that requires some working through.

Although this is definitely cozy, it's not just slice-of-life without conflict. There's a rabble-rouser in the city who hates the undead (and the summoned, but mainly the undead) and believes that the living should have everything, and he and his faction cause escalating problems. And the orc and one of his oldest friends, another of the six founders of the city, come into conflict over the little girl's heritage and what it means.

From a plot point of view, all of this works excellently, and the MC has a considerable character arc which is believable and moving, involving a change of name - which is why I'm not using his name in my review. There are some indications that the author needs more experience (and more editorial input), though. To me, the employees weren't distinct enough, and I had to keep thinking hard to remember which was which, even though they were each a different kind of undead or summoned entity (it says at one point, I think, that he'd also hired living employees, but if this was true I missed which one that was, unless the vampire doesn't count as truly undead). At one point, there are two different and contradictory explanations for the origin of the orphanage (noblemen's buildings claimed by the state or a donation by the former owner) within a single paragraph. A person has grey hair on one page and brown hair on the next. I've already mentioned the careful skirting of the plot hole about how mind-controlled thralls broke out of their conditioning and overthrew the necromancer. I was sometimes taken by surprise, too, by how much or how little time had passed between two indicators of when things were happening, given the events in between.

Relevant to that last point, the author has the common fault of often not using the past perfect tense when talking about events that happened prior to the current narrative moment, which I always find disorienting and distracting. What I mean is that in a sentence that should run "she needed to trust the system she and her family had created" or "the room had never looked better" or "he had never truly let it all sink in," the "had" gets left out, resulting in a moment of temporal whiplash while I parse it.

The author also reaches beyond his vocabulary at times, and unfortunately "mediocrity" is one of the words that's apparently beyond his vocabulary (he writes "mediocracy" instead). In fact, it has a lot of small glitches, like missing words, vocabulary errors and fumbled idioms. They're not in every sentence or even on every page - there are usually two or three per chapter - and (standard disclaimer) I read a pre-release copy via Netgalley, and there may be more copy editing to come.

While all of these minor issues reduced my enjoyment (they may or may not affect yours), overall I did think this was a strong debut. It's positive and hopeful - relentlessly so at times, insisting that nobody is born evil, that we're shaped by our environment and, secondarily, our choices. The city of necromancy is, we're told over and over, one of the safest in the kingdom, though it's having an atypical time in this particular story. A dupe of the populist manipulator comes round relatively easily to a verbal appeal and admits he was fooled, which I found slightly unrealistic, but I suppose if "it's too hopeful" is one of my complaints, the author has at least understood the cozy genre. There is an unexamined tension, though, between the cozy values and the violence of a sword-and-sorcery setting, and I was never completely clear on what the fate of the antagonist actually was - which may have been another intentional skirting of an issue, or just the author not clearly conveying what was in his mind.

It lands in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, which is usually for solid work with no significant issues, but in this case reflects what would be a Gold-tier book (emotionally moving, strongly written) demoted by a tier for vocabulary errors, missing past perfect and not completely making sense all the time. Still a recommendation, and since most people don't notice these things and some of them may even be corrected before publication, I suspect that it has a strong future ahead of it, and possibly some awards.

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