Fans of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (deliciously cozy fantasy) and Bookshops & Bonedust (also cozy fantasy, but with more zombies) will find a lot to like about Brigands & Breadknives, even though it’s the least cozy of the trilogy. On purpose!
Setting up a coffee shop or rescuing a struggling bookstore were fun ideas for a story (I loved Thimble’s delicious cinnamon rolls, and the new bedrooms over the coffee shop) but Baldree writes in the afterwards that he didn’t want to write the same book over and over, or “pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life’s woes.” In addition to the coziness, the first two books were about following (and finding) your dreams, and having friendships with people who support you. This book asks the question: what if you have all that and it’s still not good enough?
Fern the Rattkin’s biggest struggle in the book is with feelings of overwhelming guilt. She feels ungrateful for not being content with everything she has, selfish for walking away, thoughtless for how she treated her friends, and disrespectful for how she talks to the most famous person she’s ever met who’s probably wondering who the hell this middle-aged bookseller thinks she is.
But Fern can’t help it, because the idea of just doing what she’s been doing for the past couple decades makes her want to cry, or scream, or drink (the latter being the reason why she’s travelling with the most famous person she’s ever met). And I think the lesson of the book is that it’s okay to stop doing something if it’s not serving you, and if the only reason you’re still doing it is out of guilt, that’s not a nice way to treat yourself.
But if Fern hadn’t been so hard on herself and trusted her friends from the beginning, she wouldn’t have ended up travelling with the Oathmaiden Astryx, a thousand-year-old warrior elf who’s on her way to collect the bounty on an annoying (and sometimes hilarious) goblin. At certain times in the story, Fern definitely thinks it would’ve been a hell of a lot better to have stayed home and had the awkward conversation with her friends, because the trip is monumentally uncomfortable and people keep trying to kill her.
But I think that’s the other theme of the book: regret is understandable, but you can’t change the past. Sometimes you have to accept that you made a mistake, and own up to it, sure, but maybe that mistake needed to happen so you’d have new information about yourself.
Nobody in this book is perfect, and even the Oathmaiden learns something that a thousand years of adventuring hadn’t hammered into her stubborn, one-eared skull. Which definitely drives home the idea that no matter how long you’ve been doing something, it’s never too late to change gears.
All this makes it sound like a self-help book and wow it definitely isn’t. Out of all the books in the trilogy, this one has the most peril. The second book had zombies and a necromancer, but this one was even grittier. It’s got badass swordfights, strange alliances, Elder Gods (sort of), long recoveries, smartass cutlery, betrayals, heroics, flirting, magic, monsters, and wet socks.
It isn’t cozy, but it’s very satisfying, and sometimes there’s a nice dinner before bed.