bisexualwentworth's reviews
753 reviews

I’m so excited to run this in the sci-fi setting my players and I created.

Largely reading these as background for the new show, but I’m mostly having fun. Justice for Knives Chau.

The Faithless was not perfect to me in the way that the Unbroken was, but it was an excellent continuation of the story. There were things that I wanted more of--Pruett and the Fingers, mostly--and overall I felt like the book could have been longer, but I anticipate those aspects taking center stage more in book three. I kept expecting the French Revolution, which meant that I was not expecting most of the plot twists. I loved the relationships. I loved the ties between magic and religion. I loved Touraine's character arc, and Luca's as well. I loved the expanded cast and the expanded world. I loved the ongoing commentaries about colonialism and decolonization. I eagerly await book three.

Finally finished. Thoughts to come in upcoming podcast episode.

So good so useful will definitely be using a lot of these ideas! Shoutout to my partner for recommending this to me.

Will return to it when I’m not deep in the throes of drafting this novel.

I loved this book. I loved the whole series, but this one in particular hit really close to home and was definitely my favorite overall. I related to Iris in a lot of ways and to Stevie in a few ways too (especially the anxiety). I loved seeing Iris's friendship with Simon, which was set up wonderfully in the background of Astrid's book. Stevie reminded me a lot of my own partner, and aspects of the relationship felt really familiar to me in some very sweet and fun ways.

The sexy parts of this book are VERY sexy. Wow.

I had so much fun with all of the queer Shakespeare, though I do wonder why people always choose to genderbend Much Ado About Nothing when so much of that play is about gendered power dynamics. Like I would love to see this queer production and I'm sure it would bring me a lot of joy, but it also confuses the text and the themes A LOT to make Hero a man and Benedick a woman.

I wish, along with many other readers, that we'd gotten an additional Iris-and-Stevie-focused epilogue. The ending felt lacking in that way. The actual ending was VERY satisfying, though. I did cry.

Interesting but ultimately not worth finishing. Useful to the extent that it helped me understand certain relationships I've had with certain people, but it also definitely demonizes personality disorders in a way that I feel isn't helpful.

I quite enjoyed most of this book. It was cute and sweet and cozy. The conflicts were dealt with well in ways that challenged Viv to grow and to stay on the path that she had chosen for herself. The barely-a-subplot romance was sweet, if underdeveloped. I would happily read sequels focusing on the coffee shop, the community as a whole, or basically any of the individual characters from this book.

The pacing was definitely strange. I read most of the book quickly, but some sections dragged a lot, particularly the ones with more action and more challenges. 

I read another review that said that Legends and Lattes reads like fanfic of someone else's Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and I absolutely agree.

Now, this was originally a NaNoWriMo novel that was self-published and then picked up by Tor for traditional publication, and I totally understand why and how all of that happened. It's fun and charming and easy to read, and it got a LOT of hype, and there's nothing overtly wrong with it, so it went on to traditional publication virtually unchanged despite the occasionally weird pacing and what I am calling the coffee problem.

What is the coffee problem? It's that Viv, a person from outside the culture (gnomes, apparently, but only certain gnomes since the one in Viv's former adventuring party does not seem to have familiarity with it) that created coffee, brings it to a community far from its origins and marks it as an "exotic beverage." Now, I don't regard this as overt racism or anything like that. I just regard it as laziness. And laziness is fine in your NaNoWriMo novel, but I would love it if people publishing novels would think for about ten seconds about the potential real-world implications of what they're writing. I think if Legends and Lattes were less an overt coffee shop AU--if, say, it were focused on a fictional drink that Viv brings to this community, either from her travels or from her own place/culture of origin--this would be a total non-issue. But it still made me feel weird and made me wish that there had been more conscious thought put into the construction of this world beyond D&D coffee shop AU.

I really enjoyed this book overall, but it felt escapist to the point of laziness at times in its construction, and I'm not ultimately the target audience for that approach.

This is a classic for a reason. It's so layered and complex while also so efficient and straightforward.