A delight to come back to Legends & Lattes's world and characters for this solid prequel of its first volume !
I really appreciated that Travis Baldree manages to write cosy fantasy with important stakes without loosing the cosy feeling - I am very comfortable with the genre and I really don't ask for much in terms of stakes to be happy, but a story needs a little conflict or challenge to be interesting to read - it doesn't need to be much, as the first book did perfectly.
Beware, though : this opus features significantly more stressful stakes than Legends and Lattes, especially in the latter third of the book. I think this was a good choice, because this is a prequel featuring a younger Viv, aching for action, and I wouldn't havbe want her story to begin as quietly as she settled in the next part of her life in Legends & Lattes. 

I really liked the characters, they felt lively and distinct, and the background cast was a delight.  

As for the first opus, romance is a rather minor subplot (it weaves nicely with the rest of the story and is present during the whole book, but little happens on page and it is definitely not the main topic). And I'm pleasantly surprised it touches on themes and reflexions I'm not used to see ! Especially the theme of

"we're not always meeting people at the right time in both our lives"

, that was quite strong and well done. 

I also really liked how the love for reading was presented : it was not performative or heavy-handed, and promoted a core belief of mine : everyone can and will read, you just have to find the right material for them. I thought that how people always reacted to Viv reading with surprise, as she looks like the "strong and stupid"  type was especially well done : Viv is not a reader beforehand, but she gets the right recommandation and gets into it, and she never really reacts to those remarks besides a little comment now and then, and that's the strong thoing to me. The book *shows* us how these are useless, annoying comments because at the point we read them, we've been in Viv's head since the beginning and we know how shallow this is. Not heavy-handed righteous explaination on how it is a bad idea to mock people for reading when they don't "look like it". Really liked the execution here. 

In the end, a sequel (so to speak) worthy of its predecessor, speaking to my book-loving and cosy-loving soul, that leaves me wanting to re-read the first volume with this insight on Viv's past !