A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Brigands & Breadknives
Travis Baldree
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here. Increasingly feral Kindle notes are saved here.
I don’t know if there’s something in the water, but I’ve been on a cozy fantasy tear lately and I don’t want it to end. The lift I get from these books is powerful, albeit brief, which is why I need another and another and another to keep that feeling going. The addiction is so real, but at least it’s not drugs. The point here is that I have now read The Spellshop and The Enchanted Garden (Sarah Beth Durst), Mockingbird Court (Juneau Black), and Brigands & Breadknives in quick succession, if not exactly in that order, and now I have run out of things to read because that literally was my entire cozy fantasy TBR. Up next: dipping my toes into the Tomes and Tea series (Rebecca Thorne), and I hope it delivers. It’s got some big teacups to fill.
Twenty years after the death of Varine the Pale, and following on the heels of her new correspondence with the middle-aged Viv, Fern the foul-mouthed rattkin bookseller – age 47, graying of fur, and suffering from a crippling midlife panic attack that seems to have no end – packs up her ancient gryphet, the tubby and aptly named Potroast, and moves to Thune. Along the way they have some trouble with hostile fish creatures called pescadines, but they are casually rescued by Astryx One-Ear Arboren, Blademistress and Oathmaiden, a 1,000-year-old elf who seems to step straight out of her own legends just in the nick of time before vanishing again just as quickly. In any case there’s no harm done, and Fern arrives in Thune without further incident. With substantial help from Viv, Tandri, Cal, and Thimble, Fern and Potroast settle into their new home and celebrate the triumphant opening of Thistleburr Booksellers (Thune Edition). The grand opening goes off without a hitch, though Fern suffers a mild shock at the sudden appearance of Amity (as much as at everyone else’s complete lack of reaction to her size), and it quickly becomes clear that Thistleburr is a natural addition to the coffee-loving community. Business is brisk, and everything is ready to be tied off with a neat little bow.
Fern hates it.
Rehoming the problem without addressing its root cause produces more or less the same effect as sticking a bandaid over an amputation, and this is exactly the problem that sends Fern drunk, stumbling, and mid-meltdown into the streets of Thune. She intends to follow the quiet wisdom of Cal, who advises her to talk to Viv about the all-consuming depression that didn’t disappear with the new Thistleburr’s fresh paint job, but chickens out at the door and decides to go for a sobering walk instead. She almost immediately runs into Astryx, who has some business in the city, and – despite a total lack of recognition or even acknowledgment on the elf’s part – hides in her cart, and falls asleep. Some time later she wakes several miles from Thune with a head-splitting hangover and finds herself in company with Astryx, Nigel (Astryx’s terrifically boring Elder Blade), Bucket (Astryx’s horse), and Zyll (a large-coated, many-pocketed goblin whose chief hobby is stealing silverware). Fern happened to stow away at the beginning of Astryx’s current project, which is to bring Zyll to the city of Amberlin, where she intends to turn her in for a hefty bounty. (Zyll is a literal chaos goblin and was last seen impersonating an official during a murder investigation, so it’s understandable that she might have some enemies.)
This seemingly straightforward mission is complicated by the fact that Zyll is impossible to contain, and a legion’s worth of brigands stand ready to snatch her away. An additional wrinkle: Zyll turns out to be in possession of her own Elder Blade, a breadknife named Breadlee, which she stole during her brief stint as an unofficial official. Originally a greatsword named Bradelys Tertius, Breadlee was reforged into his present form after a fight with his blacksmith, and he is now desperate to make a name for himself, preferably in the hands of Astryx, whom he worships madly. His attempts to introduce himself as the more dignified “Bradlee” go completely ignored, and the general horrors of his life increase manifold when Zyll won’t stop licking him. Anyway, none of this helps with Fern’s original problem, which is the crippling depression that seems to be building a house in her head, and it also doesn’t help with her new problem, which is the inescapable fact that she ran away from the original problem and is now in the middle of nowhere. She originally intends to hitch a ride back to Thune when they get to the next town, but en route she becomes intrigued by Astryx, who unexpectedly reveals a softness for stories.
This mutual spark leads Fern down a long and winding road away from Thune as she accompanies Astryx on her mission. Their awkward relationship gradually blossoms into a more natural friendship as they alternate between corralling and protecting Zyll. To compensate for her now extended and seemingly unforgivable absence, Fern tries to write a letter of apology/explanation to Viv, but the one she sends is no more than a couple of lines confirming her continued existence, while the letter she actually wants to write turns into more of a novel as she begins to record every moment of her adventures. During the course of these adventures, Zyll abruptly adopts a toothy, venomous chicken called a hazferou, which she just as abruptly rehomes with a defeated brigand; Fern meets another rattkin named Quillin and goes on a date with him, but decides to leave him in the dust when she realizes she cannot trust him; and Zyll turns out to come with substantial baggage when Astryx and Fern learn that she is being actively pursued by Tullah, a young orc with an axe to grind. When a terrifying encounter with Tullah leaves Astryx almost mortally wounded, Zyll uses Breadlee to create enough of a distraction to let them escape, and they are taken in by the Tarimites, an order of rattkin penitents who worship a one-eyed tentacled god. Here they meet Staysha, an opportunistic dwarf bard who is dying to relate the tales of Astryx through song, and who insists on accompanying them.
After a brief sojourn with the Tarimites, a barely recovered Astryx determinedly shuffles her ragged crew out the gates. Fern has now achieved the status of “little squire,” a title bestowed with affection, but her friendship with Astryx is disrupted by increasingly heated fights over a range of topics including Zyll’s bounty and Astryx’s general lifestyle and priorities. Staysha learns about Zyll’s bounty during one of the worst of these arguments and attempts to claim it for herself, but Fern rides her down on Bucket, then distracts her long enough for Astryx to arrive. As a parting insult, she drops a serious diss on Staysha’s lyrics before they abandon her on the side of the road, commandeering her pony (Persimmon) on their way out. With Staysha out of the way, Astryx and Fern make up and almost immediately fall apart again, with Zyll as an invested and opinionated audience. However, both are given much food for thought: Fern tries to work through the source of her discontent, though she doesn’t yet know its cure, while Astryx struggles to reconcile her affection for Zyll with her almost compulsive need to finish her mission. As that mission draws to a close, Astryx tentatively invites Fern to travel with her indefinitely, but they then have another falling-out and the matter is left unresolved.
Meanwhile, Tullah tortures Quillin until he gives up Fern’s planned destination, and she and her crew show up in Amberlin sometime before Astryx’s arrival. Tullah kidnaps Fern and tries to use her to trap Astryx, but Astryx and Zyll lay a counter-trap and lead Tullah to an empty field outside of town. The battle that follows is brief but fierce, and Breadlee gets his moment at last when Astryx – seemingly disarmed – uses him to stab Tullah, killing her almost instantly. In the aftermath of the fight, Astryx expresses her solemn gratitude to an ecstatic Breadlee, then bequeaths him to Fern, who she claims is a worthier wielder. As the Gatewardens descend, Astryx frees Zyll and tells her to flee. Fortunately the questioning that follows isn’t too intense, and Astryx, Fern, and Quillin are released with no more than a strong hint that they should probably leave. Quillin invites Fern to travel with him, but she declines. Believing themselves alone, Astryx and Fern are shocked when Zyll rejoins them, telling them it isn’t time for her to go.
And after all that trouble, both are completely aghast when they turn Zyll in at the bounty office as planned and learn that she set the bounty on herself in order to buy herself an escort capable of protecting her from Tullah. With her safety now secured (at least as far as Tullah is concerned), Zyll joyfully reunites with her pony, Round Boy, and bids an affectionate farewell to Fern and Astryx before continuing on her merry and chaotic way. At loose ends and completely adrift after this revelation, but in possession of the bounty she was promised, Astryx again asks Fern to accompany her in her forthcoming adventures. Fern painfully refuses, knowing she cannot keep running away from her problems, and they part emotionally, as lifelong friends. Along with half of the bounty, Astryx gives Fern one of the bracelets she used to track Zyll, promising to show up if Fern is ever in need.
Back in Thune, several months after she left it, Fern walks into Legends & Lattes and reunites with Viv, Potroast, and the rest of the Legends crew, then departs once again to join Quillin on his travels. During a visit to Azimuth, the gnomish city in which Viv experienced her first latte, Fern finds her newly published book – The Straight Road in the Dark: Travels with the Oathmaiden – in a bookshop and secretly signs it on Quillin’s teasing advice. Having published the novel she wrote to Viv, Fern is now working on a manuscript that will later become Bookshops & Bonedust, though she currently is unsure whether it will be worth the effort. Elsewhere, she knows from gossip, Astryx has been continuing her own adventures, which have become smaller and softer in tone. Rather than crowing over mighty deeds done by a mythic warrior who instantly vanishes, people now speak of a woman who shows kindness and grace in the aftermath, who makes them feel seen and heard. They’re not the sweeping glories she would once have expected, but they matter, and that is enough.
And that wraps up Baldree’s hat trick of perfect five-star books, which just keep getting bigger and better every time he puts pen to paper. Each book is sweeter, funnier, and more emotionally resonant than the last, and I love it. Each illuminates more and more of this world, in a way that never feels shallow or forced. I appreciate that he has started explaining things, such as the hazferou, rather than leaving me to guess. Even if I kinda wish he would just stick with “paws” for the rattkins rather than switching between “hands” and “paws” at the drop of a hat, the world-building is so much better than it was in the first book. It isn’t the most intricate world, but it doesn’t have to be. We see just as much as we need, without the desire for either more or less detail. It’s beautiful. For the humor: every book in this series has been funny in a way that makes me think Baldree and I need to be friends, but this one had me shrieking with laughter at completely inappropriate times, such as at 11:03 at night, even as I reached for the Kindle highlights. Favorite moments included Zyll getting chosen by the hazferou distribution system (or the hazferou getting chosen by the Zyll distribution system); Fern screaming “I HOPE YOU FUCKING FREEZE!” at Tullah even though she knows there is a less than zero percent chance that Tullah will hear her, and I will follow my petty queen into battle; Nigel’s bitchy catfights with Breadlee; anything having to do with Zyll and the bizarre things that she sticks in her mouth; Fern putting Staysha in the ER with the sickest burn she’ll ever hear in her life; the exact moment Fern learns that the Tarimites built an entire religion and lifestyle around an emotionally unintelligent god who might or might not suddenly appear and destroy the entire world if he does not feel sufficiently admired, which now that I think about it is incredibly painful, in this day and age, to contemplate; and of course, in the end, the mild fury (for Astryx and Fern) of Zyll’s final revelation.
I love Fern, and I always will. BUT LET ME TELL YOU, I think Zyll might be my absolute favorite character in this entire fucking universe, and that’s just facts. I adore everything about her, from her coat of many pockets and colors to her violent orange pigtails to her mouthful of extremely sharp teeth to her habit of pinching the silverware and adopting stray venomous chickens and eating everything that moves. I loved her wildly from her very first appearance in the incomparable Goblins & Greatcoats, which I do dearly hope will make an appearance in print someday – I’m actually a little disappointed it wasn’t included in the Brigands & Breadknives hardcover, but at least it’s still available for free download – and I was not disappointed by anything she does in this book. If anything, I am even more impressed than I was at the end of G&G. She is amazing. She is funny without ever being downgraded to gratuitous comic relief: she is a vivid, heartfelt character who acts goofy but sees more sharply than either Astryx or Fern, who theoretically are in charge. Even before the other two realize she speaks Territories (the most common language of exchange), she can communicate clearly when she chooses to. When threatened with a brawny orc who hates her guts and wants her dead, she comes up with an unconventional but effective solution, and later she brings down a bridge with nothing more than a butter knife when that same angry orc almost kills her unwitting bodyguard. (Fern’s solution involved crying to Viv and asking her to kill Tullah for them.) During the final confrontation, she has absolutely no problem charging headlong at an axe-swinging Tullah (?!?!?! GIRL?!?!?! Please have some regard for your safety?!?!?!) and distracts her long enough for Astryx to get past her defenses. What a badass.
With that being said, I also love Fern and Astryx to an extreme degree. I love them singly and I love them together, and I fully believe that they will meet again in some distant future. I love Astryx’s previously undiscovered love of stories; it sent me into such a (happy) tizzy first when she was hanging spellbound on Fern’s every word during the recitation of the death of Varine the Pale, then when Fern started relating beloved classic Ten Links in the Chain, effectively becoming Astryx’s personal audio book for at least part of their journey, and then yet again when Fern brought the physical book to Astryx’s bedside and read to her during her convalescence. For a while I thought they were going to get partnered together, but I’m actually glad that they just stay friends. (I was hearing wedding bells all over this book, from Fern’s first meeting with Thimble to her fights with Astryx to her meet-cute with Quillin. We’ll blame The Spellshop for putting me in that frame of mind.)
I have to admit I’m less enthused about Fern’s eventual relationship with Quillin: I don’t hate it, it just seems the teensiest bit forced when we actually spend very little time with Quillin. But I would not have objected if Fern had left Thune the second time to join up with Astryx again, because that is such stuff as relationships are made on. Let’s face it, “Oathmaiden & the Bookseller” is a much better name for a band than “Mercenary & the Bookseller.” For all of their arguments and philosophical differences, Fern and Astryx always come back to each other in the end. They fight a lot, but they don’t tear each other down for sport. Even if it takes them a while to resolve their differences, they do resolve them, and they do learn from each other, and they do always choose their friendship over their grievances. The moment Astryx accidentally reads some of Fern’s novel-to-be and sees herself through Fern’s eyes is genuinely moving, because it is part of the gentle force that ultimately convinces her to allow herself to be softer, more vulnerable. She is, objectively, incredibly cool. But she is also kind and fiercely protective of the people she cares about, frequently awkward but honest, capable of taking feedback and trying to improve; and, in the end, willing to throw away her carefully crafted persona in favor of something infinitely more humane.
As regards Tullah: I wish we could have had a little more detail here, because I was waiting for a villain monologue and she never delivered one, beyond a brief statement on Zyll’s alleged crimes against her. So I’m not really sure why Tullah needed an army or how Zyll obliterated it, though I acknowledge that she is chaos personified. I would have liked to have gotten her side of the story. I suppose we don’t technically need it; she wants Zyll dead and that’s that, and that’s a problem. Call it more of a nice-to-have, particularly in a book that is all about women supporting women. Even with the ice bridge attack and the almost-fatally-wounding-Astryx thing, I would have liked for there to have been some path to redemption. For me, this is the one place where the book sort of dropped the ball, because the villain origin story is weak and it just looks like Zyll maintains her customary level of chaos without any sort of reckoning or attempt to change. And maybe there isn’t a need for her to change. Maybe she was justified in wrecking Tullah’s army and the reputation that went with it. Maybe Tullah intended serious harm with that army, which Zyll prevented from coming to fruition. Maybe Tullah was overstating the impact of whatever Zyll actually did; maybe she misinterpreted Zyll’s actions. Maybe it was a chance encounter, seemingly insignificant at the time, that ended disastrously for only one of them while the other continued her life unimpeded. I don’t know, and I wish I did.
On the other hand, the rest of the book is so beautifully crafted that the Tullah question doesn’t bother me as much as it might otherwise have done. At its core, it is the story of two women, lost and unhappy in their own ways, who find each other by accident and help each other out of the ruts that they’ve unintentionally dug for themselves. Fern feels trapped by the legacy of her father’s bookshop; Astryx feels trapped by her own living legacy and the reputation that goes with it, and feels obligated to keep it going without really questioning the reason. And that is why this particular book hit me so hard in the feels, in a way that I wasn’t actually expecting when I first picked it up, because I am also lost and unhappy and currently in the midst of my second year of asking myself what the hell I want. I still don’t have any answer, but it was heartening to read a book whose protagonists do eventually find their ways to a satisfying resolution. Not that I haven’t already articulated some of Fern’s general emotions to myself as I have struggled to find my own resolution, but this book neatly distills the soul-searching into two very basic questions: what do you want, and why do you want it?
I wasn’t expecting such depths when I started the book, but I’m not mad. To be honest, I also would not have been mad if we had gotten nothing more than 325 pages of the Life of Fern Teverlin as she settles into her new bookshop and tries to find her place in this new city and new community, which is kind of what I thought we were getting in spite of the synopsis, which I did read. The shallowness of that premise would not have bothered me. I would have been delighted, and I would also have been so wrong, because the path Baldree chose is so much better. I cannot overstate how much I appreciate him for sending Fern on a journey of personal growth rather than giving her a reset button with a big bow and expecting it to solve all her problems, the way The Midnight Library (Matt Haig) sort of did. As with Mockingbird Court, Brigands & Breadknives is the uncontested best of its series, partly because it has an emotional weight that the other books don’t quite reach. This is not a mark against those books: they are wonderful, and I love revisiting them. But in the acknowledgments Baldree states that he does not intend to write the same book over and over again and I respect the hell out of that, (1) because he’s right and (2) because the results speak for themselves in his books. He has grown tremendously as a writer and a storyteller. The journey has been so different in each book, and so worth it.
As with the last two books, I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know if Baldree is planning to write more books in this series, though I will be first in line to preorder the next one if he does. But with each book better than the last and each story a genuine surprise, I have no doubt that he will surprise me again, in the best possible way. This series as a whole is so wholesome and loving and so kindly written, and I bless the day Legends & Lattes fell into my life.
