https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-250-33489-6.html

Review: Brigands & Breadknives, by Travis Baldree

Brigands & Breadknives is a secondary-world sword-and-sorcery fantasy and a sequel to both Legends & Lattes and Bookshops & Bonedust. It takes place shortly after Legends & Lattes chronologically, but Fern, the protagonist, was introduced in the Bookshops & Bonedust prequel.

You may have noticed I didn't describe this as cozy fantasy. That is intentional.

When we left Fern at the end of Bookshops & Bonedust, the rattkin was running a bookshop in the town of Murk. As Brigands & Breadknives opens, Fern is moving, for complicated and hard-to-describe personal reasons, to Thune where Viv has her coffee shop. Her plan is to open a new bookstore next door to Legends and Lattes. This is exactly the sort of plot one might expect from this series, and the first few chapters feel like yet another version of the first two novels. Then Fern makes an impulsive and rather inexplicable (even to herself) decision and the plot goes delightfully sideways.

Brigands & Breadknives is not, as Baldree puts it in the afterword, a book about fantasy small-business ownership as the answer to all of life's woes. It is, instead, a sword and sorcery story about a possibly immortal elven bounty hunter, her utterly baffling goblin prisoner, and a rattkin bookseller who becomes their unexpected travel companion for reasons she can't explain. It's a story about a mid-life crisis in a world and with supporting characters that I can only describe as inspired by a T. Kingfisher novel.

Baldree is not Ursula Vernon, of course. This book does not contain paladins or a romance, possibly to the relief of some readers. It's slower, a bit more introspective, and doesn't have as sharp of edges or the casual eerie unsettlingness. But there is a religious order that worships a tentacled space horror for entirely unexpected reasons, pompous and oleaginous talking swords with verbose opinions about everything, a mischievously chaotic orange-haired goblin who quickly became one of my favorite fantasy characters and then kept getting better, and a whole lot of heart. You may see why Kingfisher was my first thought for a comparison point.

Unlike Baldree's previous novels, there is a lot of combat and injury. I think some people will still describe this book as cozy, and I'm not going to argue too strongly because the conflicts are a bit lighter than the sort of rape and murder one would see in a Mercedes Lackey novel. But to me this felt like sword and sorcery in a Dungeons and Dragons universe made more interesting by letting the world-building go feral and a little bit sarcastic. Most of the book is spent traveling, there are a lot of random encounters that build into a connected plot, and some scenes (particularly the defense of the forest village) felt like they could have sold to the Swords and Sorceress anthology series.

Also, this was really good! I liked both Legends & Lattes and Bookshops & Bonedust, maybe a bit more than the prevailing opinion among reviewers since the anachronisms never bothered me, but I wasn't sure whether to dive directly into this book because I was expecting more of the same. This is not more of the same. I think it's clearly better writing and world-building than either of the previous books. It helps that Fern is the protagonist; as much as I like Viv, I think Fern is a more interesting character, and I am glad she got a book of her own.

Baldree takes a big risk on the emotional arc of this book. Fern starts the story in a bad state and makes some decisions to kick off the plot that are difficult to defend. She beats herself up for those decisions for most of the book, deservedly, and parts of that emotional turmoil are difficult to read. Baldree resists the urge to smooth everything over and instead provides a rather raw sense of depression, avoidance, and social anxiety that some readers are going to have to brace themselves for.

I respect the decision to not write the easy series book people probably expected, but I'm not sure Fern's emotional arc quite worked. Baldree is hinting at something that's hard to describe logically, and I'm not sure he was able to draw a clear enough map of Fern's thought process for the reader to understand her catharsis. The "follow your passion" self-help mindset has formed a gravitational singularity in the vicinity of this book's theme, it takes some skillful piloting to avoid being sucked into its event horizon, and I don't think Baldree quite managed to escape it. He made a valiant attempt, though, and it created a far more interesting book than one about safer emotions.

I wanted more of an emotional payoff than I got, but the journey, even with the moments of guilt and anxiety, was so worth it. The world-building is funnier and more interesting than the previous books of the series, and the supporting cast is fantastic. If you bailed on the series but you like sword and sorcery and T. Kingfisher novels, consider returning. You do probably need to read Bookshops & Bonedust first, if you haven't already, since it helps to know the start of Fern's story.

Recommended, and shortcomings aside, much better than I had expected.

Content notes: Bloody sword fights, major injury, some very raw emotions about letting down friends and destroying friendships.

Rating: 8 out of 10

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