Rating: 4.5 cups of Gnomish Coffee out of 5

I am SO LATE to the reading of this! I have to say that I did enjoy it, though it took me longer than I would have liked to read it. I just couldn’t really get into it at the start. But I hate having unfinished books, unless I am TRULY DNF’ing, so I sat back down one day and completed it. I have to say, I was wrong about this book. Honestly, the half cup off is really just because it took me longer than I liked to get into it, as I said.

This is definitely a cozy fantasy, with a dash of romance, but it’s like, blink and you miss it. Viv the Orc is FINALLY retiring as what one would call a mercenary, and finds herself in Thune, where she decides to open a coffee shop. Only, no one has ever hear of this “coffee” in Thune. So she has a bit of an uphill battle here. She is also new, so she has no friends here. However, this was definitely a story that became a lot about found family and what that looks like. Cal and Thimble were probably my favorites, Amity is also up there. Tandri, Viv’s assistant, is super smart, but there just wasn’t a whole lot of character development there that made me believe in their romance. Viv definitely changed, and I guess that’s most of the story. It’s a very low stakes book so there isn’t a whole lot of action. A couple annoying characters, who get straightened out almost immediately. All in all, a good book but not one that I think I would pick up again, even as a cozy book. I have the second book, and I’ll try that, see if I like it more. It’s entirely possible that I like it more! That isn’t to say that I didn’t like this. I did! Truly. I just think it wasn’t my whole cup of tea (pardon the pun).