Legends & Lattes
Travis Baldree
Legends & Lattes tells the story of Viv, an Orc who has spent her life as a badass blade-for-hire, but wants to get out of that business. She has the idea of starting a coffee shop. Coffee shops are few and far between in Viv's world, but she came across one in the remote city of Azimuth, and it was a revelation to her. She has savings from her long career and also a magical artifact, a Scalvert's Stone, which she believes will help her out. She decides on the city of Thune, in part because there are no coffee shops there, and in part for mystical reasons having to do with the Scalvert's Stone.
She is lucky enough to collect able friends who help her out -- Cal, a builder, Tandri, a server and artist, Thimble, a baker, and some others. These four, like Viv herself, are nonhuman -- Cal is a Hob, Tandri a Succubus, and Thimble a Rattkin.
That Legends & Lattes takes place in a fantasy world is of surprisingly little relevance. Viv, Cal, Tandri, and Thimble are not human, but that fact is essentially irrelevant to the story. What is relevant is that they have the knowledge and skills needed to make the coffeeshop work. As Viv says early on,
Live long enough, you realize some folks can be handed a problem and some tools, and they’ll sort it out.
That Viv, Cal, Tandri, and Thimble are people of that sort matters much more than their species. Honestly the only serious relevance of the fantasy world to the plot, in my opinion, is that Viv is setting up a coffee shop in a city where no one knows what coffee is. Thus at the beginning she and Tandri have the problem of educating her clients into wanting a drink that they don't know they want. Then they have the benefit of being the monopoly providers of that drink. In other words, because the story takes place in a fantasy world where almost no one knows what coffee is, Viv is in the position of opening a new market.
You will notice that the most important relevance of the fantasy world (at least according to me) is its mundane business/economic consequences. That in fact is the reason I'm giving the book only three stars. It's really just a story about starting a business -- all very ordinary. There are some more interesting complications later in the book, but they're the kinds of complications any new business might confront. Now, some people -- I know a bunch -- think that starting a new business is a fascinating thing. I am not one of them. In fact, I suspect even they would not be terribly fascinated by Legends & Lattes, because as a business story it is too straightforward.
You may notice that I'm evading the matter of the Scalvert's Stone. That's to avoid spoilers, but the spoiler is -- the Scalvert's Stone turns out in the end to be much less important than Viv believes it to be.