Sep 2026 Book Recommendation: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Intro

If you’re at all familiar with the online fantasy book community, you’ve almost certainly heard of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes. It’s the book that kicked off the 2020s cozy fantasy craze—and, once you’ve read it, it isn’t hard to see why. It takes all the magic and fun of fantasy and puts it into a laid-back, heartwarming journey of an orc trying to put the adventuring life behind her—no matter how determined that life is to hold onto her.

Even if you’re like me and don’t typically gravitate toward books that can be categorized as “cozy”, believe me when I say you’ve got to make an exception for this one. While it doesn’t have the action and adventure elements that are characteristic of most types of fantasy, it’s so good at everything else that you don’t even miss them. The obvious conflict is enough to keep you turning pages even without all the crazy sword fights, and the quirky cast of characters keeps you constantly entertained. So I enjoyed this book no less than I did the more action-based fantasy stories I usually read—in fact, I actually liked this book better than a lot of them.

With all that said, let’s get into the details!

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree Overview

Genre(s): Fantasy (Cozy)

Series: Book 1 of 3 of Legends & Lattes (Ongoing)

POV/Tense: Third-person past

Length: 304 pages

After years spent going on daring quests with her gang of mercenaries, Viv is ready to step away from the violence and bloodshed of the adventurer’s life. So, when she finds a Scalvert Stone—a magical relic that is said to bring good fortune to its owners—on one of her adventures, she decides to use it to build a new life for herself.

And that new life will be centered around opening the coffee shop of her dreams—though she quickly discovers that, even with the Stone’s help, it will be a task easier said than done. She has to find help and employees, and find ways to attract customers—customers who have never even heard of a beverage as exotic as coffee before. Despite the challenges, Viv’s determined to see her dreams come to fruition.

Those challenges get a little easier once she finds her first employee, a capable—albeit secretive—succubus named Tandri. As they work to get the business off the ground, it quickly becomes apparent that they make a great team. Viv starts to see Tandri as a friend—and perhaps something more.

But, if there’s one rule in Viv’s life, it’s that nothing can ever go smoothly. Enemies old and new seek to bring her hard work crumbling down around her, and will go to great lengths to do so. As conflict brews all around, Viv’s forced to ask herself: Can she really leave her life of violence behind? Or is she simply deluding herself?

Personal Thoughts

My personal favorite thing about this book is probably just the fact that, even though it’s not a classic fantasy adventure, it still has the vast majority of my favorite things about fantasy in it. A quirky cast of characters, a magical world, a driven protagonist with a dramatic backstory that keeps coming back to bite her…It’s just a very fun, feel-good read all around. And, since it’s cozy fantasy, you don’t even have to worry about your favorite character dying a horrible death! Or being captured or tortured or anything!

I also really liked the pacing of this book. As the 304 page count probably indicates, it’s not a very long book (especially for fantasy), so the pacing is pretty fast. And it feels even faster once you get going. This was one of those books that was hard for me to put down—which you might not expect, given the low stakes and minimal action scenes. Baldree is very successful at holding the reader’s interest and keeping you constantly wondering what’s going to happen next, even without the help of flashy sword fights. Which, to me, is a real testament to his skill as a writer.

Another thing I appreciated about this book was the modernized representations of orc and succubus characters. These are both fantasy creatures with some very troubled pasts and, while Baldree is hardly the first to portray them in a non-problematic way, his representations of them are among the best I’ve seen. This is especially true of the succubus. (In my experience, non-problematic orcs seem to be much more common than non-problematic succubai.) Instead of portraying Tandri as a seductive temptress, he made her a fully fleshed-out character who mostly just wants to be left alone. But, because she’s a succubus, people tend to oversexualize her and, when she turns them down, they decide she must be a vile temptress toying with their minds. (Which I like to think is probably the type of scenario that inspired the temptress archetype to begin with.) So, yeah, if you like seeing people turn harmful stereotypes on their heads, this is a great book for that too.

Outro

That’s all for this month’s reading recommendation. I hope I’ve gotten you interested in this book and that you’ll check it out! Or, if you’ve already read it and are looking for something similar, be sure to look into the other cozy fantasy books that I’ve listed below. Thanks for reading!