Tag: cozy fantasy

Fantasy, series

Fantasy Series: Legends and Lattes

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Happy Friday everyone. If you’re in the UK you may well be watching election results today – as people who’ve been around here for a while will know, I really love election results days so I will be spending my day watching the results come in. But for those of you who aren’t elections nerds, here’s a series post for you.

The Legends and Lattes series are low stakes cozy fantasy novels. Each novel does (sort of) standalone but has a connected set of characters. The first book that was published was Legends and Lattes which was a Book of the Week when I read it a little over a year ago, and that was followed by a prequel Bookshops and Bonedust and then a third book Brigands and Breadknives which was published in the autumn last year.

I think the peril levels are highest in the third book, but there’s still pretty low stakes – and if you’ve read anything about the series you’re pretty sure that it’s going to work out ok in the end because that’ what the promise is. There’s some chaos, there are some weird and wonderful creatures – including but not limited to a creature who lives in a bag and a talking sword – and there are lots of laughs and more than a few feels. They are very easy books to sit down and gobble up in a sitting. And for all that they are cozy and you might think you should read them in autumn, they’re also delightful when read on a sun lounger as I did with book three!

Now if you want to read these, it’s perfectly find to read them in publication order (that’s what I did after all) and the good news is that Legends and Lattes is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you’re a member there. And they’re pretty easy to get hold of – I’ve seen them in all sorts of bookstores.

Have a good weekend everyone

Book previews

Out This Week: The Geomagician

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The stats are coming up tomorrow as a Good Friday treat for you all, but before we get to that given that I’m on a run of cozy fantasy books I wanted to mention this one, which came out on Tuesday and which I’m already reading (but haven’t finished yet so this isn’t a review!). This is an alternative history type historical fantasy in a world where magic is real and Mary Anning (who was a real life fossil collector and palentologist) is a struggling fossil dealer who wants to be accepted into the Geomagical Society of London but is stymied by her gender and her lack of formal higher education. But one day she is out fossil hunting after a landslide when a pterodactyl egg hatches in her hand. Ajax could be the thing that makes her career – but the emissary from the society is her former fiancé and soon she is stuck between rival factions of the society with their own agendas. This is blurbed by Heather Fawcett (as in Emily Wilde and Agnes Aubert) which is why I requested it – so far (just over a third in) it’s a bit less cozy and has more religion than I was expecting, but I’m interested to see where it goes and how it all gets resolved.

book round-ups, Recommendsday, series

Recommendsday: First in series…

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Happy Wednesday everyone, this week I’ve got a mixed bag of first books in series that I have recently read – we’ve got one fantasy, one historical mystery and one cozy crime, which may not be entirely representative of my general reading over the year, but is actually fairly representative of where my reading is at at the moment, minus a romance but I’m mostly reading standalone romances rather than series at the moment so I didn’t have one I could include!

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

After having enjoyed Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter so much last month, I went out and bought the first in Heather Fawcett’s previous series (yes I know, I’m repeating an author, but hey I make and break my own rules) about a professor who studies faeries and folklore. Emily Wilde has gone to visit a village in the far north to study the Hidden Ones, their local fae. She doesn’t want to talk to the locals and she is less than pleased when one of her colleagues from Cambridge turns up to help her. I really loved the world building and the characters are great. I felt like Fawcett did a really good job of explaining how the world works without info dumping on you and the two main plot strands – what are the fairies up to and who is Wendell Bartlett – provided plenty of action without being too stressful. Cozy fantasy so good I have already acquired the rest of the trilogy…

Murder on the Eiffel Tower by Claud Izner

This is the first in a series of books featuring bookseller Victor Legris in late nineteenth century Paris. In this it’s 1889 and Paris is a buzz with the World Exposition. Victor witnesses a woman’s death on the viewing platform of the brand new Eiffel Tower and doesn’t think that the official explanation is the right one. Soon he’s ducking and weaving around Paris trying to work out what happened and who did it and more people start to die. The original French version of this won the Prix Michel-Lebrun in 2003, which is a prize for French crime novels, which I thought was a good sign, but I was obviously reading it in English and although the mystery is good I found the writing style quite hard going, but that could of course be the fault of the translator. I bought this on my trip to Paris about 18 months ago so it’s taken me a while to get to and I do have the second on the shelf already ahving spotted it cheap second hand. So I’ll give that a go at some point and see if it grows on me.

Jammed with Secrets by Selina Hill*

This is the first in a new series of small town cozy crimes and sees Sadie, a disgraced chef return to her home town to try and rebuild her life. She’s trying to do this by running food trailers at a local music festival when a member of a 90s boyband is found dead in one of them. Not satisfied with the police investigation, Sadie starts to investigate herself to try and save her business. The actual murder mystery plot was pretty good – but the problem here is Sadie. There are some issues with her backstory that make it hard for the reader to sympathise with her and entirely understandable why the people in town wouldn’t want to eat her food. This is a problem entirely of the author’s own creation – and made me wonder why it wasn’t set up differently. And that’s all I can say without spoilers, but this is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment if you want to go and find out what I’m talking about!

Happy Humpday!