felix 's review for:

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

DID NOT FINISH

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It is so rare for me to DNF things but this book's complete unwillingness to interrogate any of the default assumptions it was making made me so mad. "Orc discovered coffee six months ago while traveling and is now going to introduce it to her country" is a wildly loaded premise. The story treats the concept of a "coffee shop" as if it's a self-evident predetermined default rather than the result of hundreds of years of imperialism + our capitalist society. Some of this book would make really great satire/comedy if it were written with that intention (lattes being named after a guy named Latte did make me laugh). I expect to have to suspend a lot of disbelief when I read anything "cozy" because anything that tries to put forth an idealized world probably has assumptions about what "ideal" is that I wildly disagree with but this book really stretched that too far.