Review: Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk

Coffee, Milk & Spider Silk by Coyote J.M. Edwards
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up for free on Amazon, and as free books go, it's better than average - but that's a very low average.

The setting is indistinguishable in any way from a city in the contemporary US; there are phones, computers, the internet and social media, a teenager wears jeans (sometimes ripped) and band tees and says "OK, boomer." Except all of the people (apart from maybe the colourless bureaucrat, who is just described as "a man") are D&D-style fantasy monsters. That difference could be completely removed with a very simple rewrite - it has no impact whatsoever on the course of events - but it provides a small amount of much-needed colour to an otherwise bland story.

The following includes what could, if you stretch the definition, be regarded as spoilers, though so little happens that I would question the term. I'll put most of it in spoiler tags just in case.

A retiring cop's dream is to own and run a cafe. (view spoiler)[She finds premises which are falling apart, and in a renovation montage, she and her former cop partner fix them up so they're fine. A barista who is much more proactive, savvy and all-around competent (and optimistic) than she is shows up out of nowhere and starts working for her. As a second barista, she hires her former partner's cousin, a sullen teenager, who is a problem until she has a conversation with the MC, after which she suddenly stops being sullen and starts helping. The cafe is doing little business, and the MC droops around feeling sorry for herself because she doesn't know what to do about it; the two baristas rescue her by setting up an event, which solves the problem completely. The MC is frustrated because she can't do latte art; after a lot of practice, she learns to do it. (hide spoiler)] When I tell you that her learning to do latte art is basically the climax, you will see how much of a high-octane roller coaster ride this isn't. The whole thing is a linear series of mundane events that needs to be taken aside, sat down, and gently disabused of the notion that it has what it takes to be a plot.

Sure, it's cosy fantasy; the stakes are supposed to be low, though important to the protagonist. But for that to work for me, the protagonist has to protagonise, has to solve her own problems through effort and intelligence and skill and determination and working to gain allies; the problems shouldn't just go away by themselves or be solved by other people while the protagonist is moping about them.

The low word count also means that none of the characters are developed beyond their stereotype and their role in the plot.

The editing is, at least, better than average, with a couple of exceptions. Most of the hyphenated phrases should only be hyphenated if they're functioning as compound adjectives, but that that's not what they're doing. And there's a (fairly subtle) dangling modifier.

Still, I was left with the feeling that, although the author clearly has a lot to learn, there's a good chance that she might learn it. A day may come when she writes a compelling story in an imaginative setting driven by the decisions and actions of a complex protagonist.

But this is not that day.

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