Hello friends, happy Monday! I hope you’re week is off to a good start. Today I’m posting my review of Travis Baldree’s prequel to Legends & Lattes, Bookshops & Bonedust.

You can read my review of book one: Legends & Lattes

Bookshops & Bonedust by: Travis Baldree: Viv has been injured in a battle while on the hunt for a powerful necromancer. Now the young orc finds herself holed up in the beach town of Murk, left to recuperate and worried she won’t be able to return to her old life. While there, she spends time in a bookshop and soon realizes that the town she thought of as sleepy, may have more to it than she had first expected. Taking place years before the events of Legends & Lattes, we see Viv as a young orc and the person she used to be, or well the person she grew out of. It was great to see that side of her because it gave the reader more to know about her, and just gave her more background and complexion. But this novel didn’t quite hit the mark for this reader. This was a good novel, it had a lot going for it, but this one just didn’t live up to the same hype as the first one. Yes, there was more of a plot, but because of that it felt like there was now too much going on. These stories went from basically no plot, to all the plot and that was a lot. The fact that this was doing too much, took away from the coziness we felt in the first novel; in that one, everything was lackadaisical and relaxing, this one was more in your face and just very busy with one thing after another happening. Because all of this was going on, we already knew that the stakes were very low and what would inevitably happen because we’d already read the first book, so that took out a lot of the surprise or twist when this came to an end. It left the reader going, ‘oh okay, we saw that coming’, rather than it being more shocking. If you were to read this one before the first, it would probably gain more of a reaction, but for this reader it was just okay, and at least it made sense. The reader did really like the tie in in the epilogue to the first book, that was cleverly done. The reader also thought they were going to get more of the bookshop, but it was mostly used as a backdrop. The characters were good, but sometimes lacked a bit of substance. They weren’t as memorable as the characters from the first, Viv is the only one who really stood out, and as a main character, that’s good, but everyone she met felt very forgettable. This reader wanted to love this one just as much, but unfortunately this one just didn’t deliver.