Prequels are dangerous things; for starters, they’re afterthoughts. All too often they don’t stand on their own, and their existence borrows from the original success, which tries to recapture the lightning in a bottle quality of the first book. I’ve read a lot of really weak but mildly enjoyable prequels. Bookshops & Bonedust isn’t one of them.
I have to admit that I had my doubts. Travis Baldree struck his lightning with his debut novel Legends & Lattes, which was billed as “a high fantasy and low stakes,” wherein Viv, a retired orc mercenary, starts a coffee shop and finds both love and a family. It shared many of the qualities that made Ted Lasso a popular and critical hit, but in literary form.
And it was a breath of wondrous air breathed into a genre where “dark” and “gritty” had been top of the heap for so long they were getting stale. On the surface, Viv opens a coffee shop, but in the subtext, it’s about leaving behind an old life that’s been outgrown, even when the temptation to use old proven methods of problem-solving are almost overwhelming. In Legends & Lattes, Viv has to come to see herself as worthy of being loved and to accept help even when she doesn’t want it. Her story has a lovely coda with heavy notes of “happily ever after.”
Bookshops & Bonedust is a bit of an inversion — Viv is at the start of her career as a mercenary in the company of the legendary Rackam’s Ravens, and hot on the trail of an evil necromancer Varine the Pale and her army of wights. A dumb beginner mistake leads to her being speared through the leg, badly enough that the company leaves her in a seaside backwater named Murk to recuperate.
This Viv is eager to prove herself as a warrior, and is both embarrassed at being wounded and resentful of having to cool her heels while her buddies are off killing the bad guys. Ah, if only it were that simple! Because in Murk, much is not what it seems. Meanwhile, during the weeks of her recuperation, we learn more about who Viv will eventually become and why, why she likes to read, how she met Gallina, and from where she acquired Blackblood.
Mostly, though, the questions of who and how and why fade as the charm of Baldree’s storytelling works its magic, because Bookshops & Bonedust is in part a book about falling in love with reading, and the spell that happens when a book and a reader connect. “She was transported. She was elsewhere.”
Fern, the owner of the shabby bookshop that Viv stumbles across, isn’t content with selling her a book. When Viv returns to report that she’s actually read a book, before giving a second recommendation, Fern says,
“First tell me about Ten Links. I want to know your thoughts.”
Viv frowned. She’d enjoyed the hells out of it, honestly, but . . . she wasn’t sure how to put that into words.”*
Fern helps her put “that” into words, teaching her how to love storytelling, and Viv is on her way to being an avid reader. When the doctor treating her leg calls the shop “a shabby little place,” Viv responds,
“Does that matter? It’s all words in the end, right?” Quite apart from her wound, she felt a mild sting of indignation on Fern’s behalf.
The elf stared at her quizzically, as though she’d suddenly been replaced with someone else entirely.
He releases her on the condition that she comes back to tell him what she thinks of the book she’s currently reading, because there are closeted readers everywhere.
The book is a lot more, of course, and since it won’t be released until tomorrow, I’m not going to spoil any of it. There’s adventure and menace and magic and friendship, adversaries becoming friends and other friends becoming something more than that. Reading Bookshops & Bonedust has made me reflect more on Legends & Lattes than I expected it would.
You see, in L&L, Viv uses the Scalvert Stone to gather together all the people who make the coffee shop succeed, and it’s quite a diverse group. And the violence of her past haunts her, and she’s determined to solve her problems ethically, honestly, and peacefully. In B&B, Viv is younger, but her sensitivity and insight into other people is already fully developed, and already she feels the tension between an adventurer’s life and the joys of building something wholesome and peaceful; there’s a beautifully-drawn and poignantly-rendered emotional fling, an overwhelmed and foul-mouthed bookseller, an orc who loves poetry (not Viv, but another orc, which has made me seriously consider what might have happened if Tolkien’s orcs had had education and maybe union representation), a skeleton who loves to tidy up, a few regal but surprisingly good-humored elves, and in the middle, an orc learning how to balance life, love and friendship.
There was something distant and sad in her [Maylee’s] eyes. “You know, there’s a lot of people out there. Lot of noise. I love what I do, love it every day, but none of us sees more than a tiny piece of all the world, like we’re lookin’ out a little-bitty window. And I saw you through mine, and somethin’ inside me said, ‘That’s somebody you oughta know.’
The way that the group coalesces around Viv and the results of her involvement with the bookstore feels reminiscent of L&L and the coffee shop. It makes me wonder what the Scalvert Stone actually did, and why it was so essential to her success in L&L. Unless it was to give Viv the confidence to make a fresh start and to remake her life. The allure of that cozy life is already tugging at her in B&B:
While he [the tavernkeeper] was gone, she centered Ten Links in the Chain before her and sighed deeply. It felt like giving in to even consider reading it. A tacit admission that she was not a different sort of person. Weak. Soft. Sleepy.
Someone who idled and studied, rather than fought and won.
She flipped to the first page. The chapter was titled “In Which I Dismember a Man.” Viv thought of Fern’s knowing gaze and huffed a laugh. With reluctant interest, she began to read.
In fact, throughout the novel, the homebody versus the adventurer fights it out in Viv’s soul and, while (we know already from L&L) the adventurer wins the first round, homebody Viv is waiting for the right circumstances to win in round two.
*I would like to give page references to these quotations, but the lovely folks at Tor sent me an electronic advance reader, and there aren’t any page numbers. The book is released tomorrow, November 7. If it’s not already at the top of your TBR pile, make room, because it belongs there.
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