1.5 stars

I totally understand that this hit for people at a particular moment when they needed it, but it really did not land for me, and in fact, the more time I sit with this, the worse it gets in my feelings.

I also get that this is "cozy," and the point is for it to be lower stakes. To me, if something is going to be low stakes and little plot, the characters and/or writing really need to shine in order to hold the experience together as, you know, a book. Unfortunately, neither of those things was true here. All of the characters felt like empty archetypes. You'll often hear people compare this to a D&D campaign, and I think this book cared too little about being a good book and instead relied on you getting all the wink, wink, nudge, nudge references it made to tropes.

The world was a flimsy prop constructed to vaguely contain our empty characters. It drove me absolutely bonkers how inconsistent all of the details of the world were. Why did some bakery items have our real-world names, but others had to be fantasy named???? It's like Baldree gave this all half a second of thought, and we were all supposed to go along with it because something something cozy. Generally, the decisions made around what to focus on and what to hand-wave over were baffling.

During our live show, someone called this found coworkers instead of found family, and I think about that a lot.

Finally, the thing that sent me off the deep end from "this was aggressively mediocre" to "wow, I think I actually hate this" was the colonizer vibes of Viv being like, "I discovered this thing... COFFEE. I shall bring it to the masses. Gee, hope no gnomes from coffee land come here to step on the toes of my business!!!"

Whatever magic was here for other people? Missed me entirely. Would have to pay me to read more books from Baldree.