This was a fun prequel to Legends & Lattes. It was a much stronger book for me with much more depth; Viv is stuck injured in a small seaside town and has to figure out what to do with herself while she's recovering. It's a cozy book about finding new directions, supporting friends who are stuck, and connections even when they're temporary. These are very different books, but it made me want to go reread Bujold's Memory, which is also a book centered on sorting out your life when its expected trajectory has been suddenly altered.

It's also a book about loving books and caring for a bookstore, which immediately endeared itself to me. Fern (the foul-mouthed rattkin who owns said bookstore) recommends Viv a series of books from different (in-world fantasy takes on) genres. The snippets from these books are entertaining but each one ties implicitly and explicitly into the themes and plot. Mystery! Action! Romance! Friendship! Local authors! Maybe it's a little too on the nose, but it worked really well for me.

(As a super minor aside here, it's also interesting to me about where the tension in this book comes from. Certainly, there's a larger necromancer in the background that creates the larger plot. Secondarily, money in the book is also a concern, but it's less that any of these characters will starve and it's more an emotional worry--Fern is concerned that her bookstore will fold and she will have failed her dad and her own dream. There's a lot of discussion of Viv paying for baked goods and her room and board, but despite being a young mercenary there's never any "how am I going to support this lifestyle of staying at this inn all summer" worries. It reminds me of the kind of cozy worldbuilding that Zandra Vandra does, where there's emotional tension but the normal grinding terribleness of the world has been softened at the edges.)

@screamsbeneath@bookwyrm.social

I didn’t appreciate how it impacted the feel of the story though, that it allowed tension with money while still being cozy, which feels so discordant.

This is such a good way to put it. I think I wrote some of this off while reading the story, in the vein of "money for survival is just not a concern that this book wants to think about", but the book wants to both be about money and not be about money at the same time. I think that's why all times where Viv talks about paying for things stuck out to me; it is discordant and I couldn't stop thinking about how Viv was affording all this.

I am mostly thinking about what might have made this better. One possibility could be a note about Rackam paying off more than just a few days at the inn (as a kindness? as a debt?) or alternatively some previous adventure paying off well such that Viv can convalesce in the short term, but still have this extra tension about the future and feelings about where the money came from. I guess a larger change would be a world where food and housing are not concerns for people, but I'm not sure how effectively that could be established in a second book with the already established coffee shop story from the first.